Romani ite domun

I really didn't want to get into the Romans. I think, actually, it isn't that I dislike Roman history -- no indeed, there's so much fun stuff there. Nor that I'm afraid of it per se -- although there is terrifyingly too much of it. No, it is that there are a lot of people out there who are really, really crazy about the Romans, and no matter how carefully you try to do your research one of them is going to pop up and say "Actually, the Hairy Nose Legion wasn't posted to Argylia until the reformations of Claudius the Indigestible, and their Campaign Knot was actually called a Bidireta Unuctava and was worn on the right shoulder of odd-numbered Dodecaturians..."

Anyhow I'm trying to get through the big scene in Germany now so I can get the actual plot started. But there's so much to deal with; the actual location, the history of that location, the archaeology of it...and figuring out what the Romans were actually up to in a specific part of Germany is not one of those things you can do a simple Google search for. Much less doing comparisons with Iron Age activity. Figuring out what kind of a dig this is...plus I really don't know my archaeology that well and I really want to do a little geeking out about soil horizons and baseline datum and whatever.

Oh, and the theories that caused this dig to happen. I spent the morning at the cafe working and by the time my laptop battery died I'd worked out that basically a classics scholar with some, let us say, non-mainstream views did a lot of close reading of Tacitus et al and decided he would find something interesting near this one town. He may or may not have dug, but if he did was 1960's style and not good. Decades later his protégé comes out there with fancy MGR equipment he isn't experienced enough to get good data out of, convinces himself and his backers he's got something, and after a few months of frustration salts the pit.

Which has left open the question of who funded this. Which opens up a whole new rabbit hole of ever-shifting organizations on several different (and, one would think, opposing) fringes.

Which, since I'm also in the middle of trying to build more plot and more action into the thing, opens up all sorts of questions about whether these various anti-social societies are going to play a larger part in the story.

Which is another whole issue. I'm not taking anything off the table yet...but does seem a wee bit too far to have terrorists planting a bomb on the Acropolis. But, heck, I have enough trouble believing in, say, my protagonist fleeing from German cops. So maybe there's a happy medium. Because having the high point of the action being a fake gun and an inconclusive slap-fight between two amateurs...