Do you know who we need more historical fiction about (and preferably from the perspective of)? Octavia the Younger. Why are historical fiction authors sleeping on this amazing woman and her deeply interesting life? I mean aside from the fact that so many people have never heard about her…
Would work great for character/story inspo for a sci fi or fantasy novel, too. Check out this brief summary of her life. (And bear in mind for all of this that she was born into the middle of a decades-long period of civil war between various Roman factions.)
She's born to a rich, political family, but not too rich and not too powerful, but moderately well connected. Like, well-connected enough that her Uncle JC (no, not that JC, he comes later) wants to marry her to Pompey (later Pompey the Great, later Pompey the headless). But she doesn't want that, and frankly neither does the husband she already has, so Pompey's like, "nah, I'm good" and he marries someone else.
Meanwhile, she and her husband are hanging out with people like Cicero (very famous dude if you're an ancient Roman) and Uncle JC has decided, "You know who could use more power? Me!" So he gets on that.
She goes on with her life, gives her husband three kids, then he keels over. Very sad, but not at all unusual for the time. Life goes on.
For other people, too.
During this whole time in her life, Uncle JC has been grabbing more and more power, had a son with Queen Cleo of Those Icky Foreign Parts(tm), and was stabbed to death by a mob led by a guy who was thoroughly sick of hearing "Your Mom" jokes every time Uncle JC was mentioned. Oh, and remember Pompey who she almost ended up married to? Beheaded by Egyptians trying to get in good with Uncle JC the Unalive. Uncle JC the Unalive "dealt" with them before his own death.
And that might have been the end of it, and she might have gone on to lead an unexceptional life of the sort that makes historians struggle figure out exactly WHICH Octavia is being talked about in inscriptions and various documents about the men in her life.
Except during all this, her brother (his name and titles change so many times in this story we'll just keep it simple and call him Gus) had been going out of his way to prove himself to Uncle JC, who at some point secretly changes his will to make Gus his sole heir: the property is his, the money is his, the NAME is his, Rome being Rome even the loyalty of Uncle JC's soldiers is his.
Which makes Uncle JC's right-hand man Marcus I'll-Bang-Anything-That-Moves-and-Drink-the-Rest-and-Man-Are-You-Going-To-Regret-Siding-With-Me Antonius (hereafter called Tony for brevity's sake) really really angry. All that cool stuff and dignitas was supposed to be HIS!!! So he instantly gets in a pissing contest with Gus that involves quite a lot of arguing over money, and what should happen to Uncle JC's killers, and which one of them is more of a manly man (remember Cicero? he gets in on the action by writing some mad shit about what a loser Tony is).
But then one day Gus decides maybe he and Tony should be friends after all. Common enemies and the good of Rome and such. And, in time-honored Roman tradition, the best way to cement an alliance is via marriage (just not to each other because the hate-sex would have leveled Rome). So Tony gives Gus his teenage daughter (gross) and Gus gives Tony his recently-widowed sister Octavia. And Tony's a package deal, so now Octavia has way more than three kids to look after (including Tony who was an absolute manchild). But at least now there will be peace and those decades of civil war will be over.
And then Tony fucks off to the East because Parthia's being shady again or something. Price of being married to a Roman general, could be worse.
And Gus decides to marry Octavia's oldest child (Marcellus who we'll call Marc; now you see why i called Marc Anthony Tony… these two are completely unrelated) to Gus's only child Julia. So, yay, now Gus has an heir for reasons that have NOTHING to do with Gus wanting to start a dynasty or anything. Trust him on this. As a good Roman, the idea of a dynasty is anathema to him.
But for some reason, Octavia's husband Tony isn't declaring war on Parthia, he's just kinda hanging out in Egypt (dunno, maybe getting to know Uncle JC's son?) and things are pretty quiet in the East. At least until Tony married Queen Cleo (you know, despite already being married to Octavia) and handing out large portions of Rome's definitely-not-an-empire to his children with Queen Cleo and also to Queen Cleo's son with Uncle JC. Which is bad enough, but then Tony declares that Gus isn't Uncle JC's legitimate heir, Queen Cleo's son by him is.
And Gus can't stand that, so now it's time to declare war on Tony. On Queen Cleo, I mean! Definitely on that icky foreign queen and not another Roman. The Civil Wars are over, after all!!! It would be WRONG to declare war on a Roman, after all.
So her brother and husband are now nemeses, she is raising her children and her husband's children and doing her best to try to bring down the temperature so there won't be a civil war (Gus got married at some point after all this and within a few years people will be accusing her of being a crazed mass-poisoner, but that's almost certainly bullshit, so we don't need to go into that, especially when this is already so long).
Civil war of course breaks out eventually, and Tony's oldest son really wants to go fight on his dad's side. Octavia was probably not okay with this, but Gus insisted. So now Octavia is raising one of Tony's kids, and her own, and then Plague hits. And then, THEN!!!! She is also raising Tony's children with Queen Cleo because Gus can't go killing the children of a prominent Roman citizen (Tony's daughter with Cleo will eventually go on to be Queen of Numidia and quite famous in her own right. to history nerds at least).
Gus almost dies, and appoints his general/BFF his heir (he promised to make Marc his heir, but Marc is young after all so it kind of makes sense). Gus gets better. Young Marc does not.
Marc is dead, Gus's daughter and your daughter-in-law Julia is now a widow, and Gus wants to marry her to that general he tried to make his heir instead of Marc. Did we mention that said general was already married to one of Octavia's daughters (Marcella who we haven't needed to mention before)? Because he totally was. At least until he divorced Marcella and married Julia instead.
By then, Octavia wasn't doing so well, and she died of natural causes at 58 years of age. In so doing, she missed the part where Gus's family life got REALLY fucked up, so one could say she picked the right time to bow out. Her many children and step-children and foster-children will, however, go on to get us to some deeply crazy shit.
But, seriously, how are there no historical novels about this woman?!?!?
(She is a fairly prominent extra in I Am Livia, and Daughters of the Palatine Hill, but I want to hear all this tea from her perspective!)
