There is a particular kind of silence that surrounds an ancient city. It is not the silence of emptiness. It is the silence of countless lives whose voices have disappeared while the stones around them remain.
Whenever I think about the ancient ruins of Jerash, I find myself returning to a question that no archaeological monument can answer completely: What did it mean to be an ordinary human being in a world that we now recognize primarily through its surviving architecture?
We can study the dimensions of a temple, identify the function of a public square, and reconstruct the political circumstances of an ancient province. Yet none of these achievements fully restores the fears, disappointments, affections, and private hopes of those who passed through such places.
Writing Venus’s Tears brought this distinction into sharper focus for me. What began as an attempt to bring two distant historical worlds into conversation gradually became an inquiry into the relationship between power and vulnerability, memory and oblivion, human suffering and the possibility of dignity.
It also changed the way I understood the responsibilities of a novelist. Historical fiction allows us to imagine lives beyond the surviving record, but it does not free us from the obligation to recognize where knowledge ends and invention begins.
The Ruins Were Never the Whole Story
Ancient Gerasa, the city now known as Jerash in Jordan, offers an extraordinary architectural inheritance. Its colonnaded streets, theaters, sanctuaries, and monumental public spaces reflect centuries of urban development, particularly under Roman rule. The city belonged to the regional network conventionally known as the Decapolis and later formed part of the Roman province of Arabia.
These are significant historical facts. They help us understand the city's institutions, commercial relationships, architectural ambitions, and place within a wider Mediterranean and Near Eastern world.
But standing before a monument produces a different kind of question from studying its history. Who maintained the buildings? Who carried the materials? Who was allowed to enter particular spaces, and who remained outside? How did wealth, gender, occupation, legal status, and family obligations shape everyday possibilities?
The surviving monumental landscape cannot answer all these questions. Archaeological evidence can illuminate aspects of ordinary life, but its distribution is uneven. The people who commissioned public inscriptions or financed grand buildings were not necessarily representative of everyone who inhabited the city.
That discrepancy became one of the intellectual starting points of my novel. I did not want ancient Gerasa to function merely as an attractive background for dramatic events. I wanted to imagine what it might feel like to inhabit a society whose institutions could inspire admiration while also limiting individual freedom.
This concern connects with my earlier reflections on why I chose Jerash as the heart of my novel. A place becomes artistically meaningful when its physical presence opens a path toward questions that geography alone cannot resolve.
History Preserves Power More Easily Than Private Pain
One of the most persistent difficulties in approaching the past is the inequality of its surviving evidence. Political authority often leaves behind official records, inscriptions, monuments, and material displays of legitimacy. Private experience may leave little that can be identified with equal confidence.
This does not mean that historians study only rulers. Modern historical scholarship has developed sophisticated methods for examining households, labor, women, religion, economic life, and social relationships. Material culture, burial evidence, inscriptions, and settlement archaeology can reveal experiences absent from conventional political narratives.
Nevertheless, the historical record is not an impartial collection of everything that happened. It was formed through unequal access to writing, resources, preservation, and institutional attention.
For a novelist, such gaps create both an opportunity and a danger.
The opportunity is to construct an imaginative life where evidence cannot provide a complete biography. The danger is to confuse emotional plausibility with historical certainty.
A character may feel convincing without having existed. An imagined conversation may express a recognizable conflict without reproducing an actual ancient belief. Responsible fiction must remain conscious of that difference, even when it does not constantly interrupt the narrative to explain itself.
My concern with these absences also informs the question of whether fiction can give a voice to the forgotten. Literature cannot literally recover the thoughts of an unidentified person from antiquity. What it can do is resist the assumption that historical anonymity means the absence of a meaningful life.
The Unexpected Difficulty of Historical Empathy
When writers imagine the past, they often begin with emotions that seem immediately recognizable: affection, grief, jealousy, loneliness, anxiety, and hope. These experiences offer a bridge between distant societies and contemporary readers.
Yet the bridge is less straightforward than it first appears.
The social meanings attached to love, marriage, duty, family, religious obligation, and personal freedom have changed considerably across different periods and communities. Even familiar words can conceal substantial differences in institutions and expectations.
A modern reader might interpret a character's choices through the language of personal autonomy. An ancient individual might have understood comparable choices through obligations involving kinship, civic standing, household authority, religious practice, or survival.
If a novelist ignores these differences, the historical setting risks becoming a theatrical costume placed over entirely contemporary personalities.
During the imaginative construction of Venus, the ancient-world character at the center of one narrative strand of Venus’s Tears, this challenge mattered to me. Her fictional experiences had to be understandable to contemporary readers without suggesting that she inhabited a society organized around contemporary assumptions.
Historical empathy, I came to believe, is not simply the ability to feel sorry for people in the past. It requires an effort to understand how their circumstances shaped what they could know, fear, desire, and choose.
It also requires intellectual humility. We should neither condemn an entire historical world through easy comparisons nor excuse cruelty merely because it belongs to an earlier period.
Empathy becomes useful when it deepens understanding rather than replacing judgment.
Power Is Not Only What Emperors Possess
Roman history is frequently told through emperors, military campaigns, administrative changes, and imperial expansion. Such subjects matter because political decisions could transform the lives of distant communities.
But power operates at many levels. It can exist in the household, the workplace, religious institutions, economic relationships, and the informal expectations of a community.
A person need not confront an emperor to encounter the effects of authority. A restriction on movement, an unequal social obligation, or the loss of a livelihood may make power painfully immediate.
That observation helped me connect the two temporal worlds of my novel. Ancient Gerasa and contemporary Jerash differ profoundly in their political institutions, social arrangements, technologies, and cultural assumptions. Their differences are essential to the integrity of both settings.
Nevertheless, the question of how individuals negotiate forces greater than themselves can be asked in either period.
In the ancient storyline, the relationship between Venus and Dorotio unfolds within an imagined world shaped by imperial structures and social constraints. In the contemporary storyline, Waheeb confronts questions involving suffering, social relationships, and the search for human dignity.
These fictional lives are not meant to demonstrate that Roman society and modern Jordan are fundamentally identical. They allow the novel to examine how the human consequences of unequal power may remain recognizable even when the forms of authority have changed.
In this sense, I discovered that literature can compare historical experiences without collapsing historical differences. The comparison should produce questions, not predetermined answers.
Human Dignity Cannot Be Measured by Historical Importance
A historian may legitimately devote attention to an emperor because his policies affected a vast population. A novelist, however, may find the central meaning of a story in someone whose name would never appear in an official chronicle.
These are not competing claims about whose life possesses greater value. They reflect different questions.
Historical importance generally concerns demonstrable influence on events and institutions. Human dignity concerns the worth of a person independently of fame, wealth, authority, or public recognition.
Confusing the two can distort both history and fiction.
One of the strongest lessons I drew from writing Venus’s Tears was that narrative attention should not automatically follow social prestige. A powerful figure may shape the plot, but the emotional and moral center may belong to someone who experiences the consequences of that power.
This principle also influences how I approach characters living with vulnerability, exclusion, or loss. Their suffering must not become a decorative instrument for demonstrating someone else's virtue.
Nor should they exist only as representatives of a social problem.
A convincing character requires contradictions, preferences, impatience, tenderness, mistakes, and personal desires. Dignity in fiction includes the freedom to be imperfect rather than being reduced to an exemplary victim.
The deeper challenge is to present unequal circumstances without denying the complexity of those who live within them.
The forgotten do not become important because a novelist invents their lives. Fiction becomes meaningful when it recognizes that their humanity was never dependent on being remembered.
Why Suffering Across Centuries Is Not the Same as Historical Repetition
Writing a novel that moves between widely separated historical periods invites a tempting conclusion: humanity has never changed.
It is an emotionally powerful statement, but it is also misleading.
Human institutions have changed. Knowledge has expanded. Legal protections, understandings of citizenship, medical treatment, communication, and social expectations have undergone enormous transformations, although progress has been uneven and frequently contested.
To deny these changes would be to overlook important achievements as well as the particular conditions that shaped different historical societies.
What may persist is not the exact structure of suffering but the capacity of human beings to experience injury, attachment, fear, bereavement, and the desire to be treated with respect.
Even these experiences must be interpreted carefully. Their expression and social meaning depend upon cultural and historical context.
This distinction became central to the construction of my parallel narratives. The two worlds do not mirror one another scene by scene. Their relationship is thematic rather than mechanically repetitive.
A separation in the ancient world and a loss in the modern world may generate related questions without being historically equivalent. Likewise, an individual's confrontation with authority can illuminate a broader human problem without implying that different institutions exercise power in identical ways.
For readers interested in this distinction, I have explored it in greater detail in Two Timelines, One Novel: The Challenge of Parallel Narratives.
The structure taught me that literary continuity does not require historical sameness. Sometimes the distance between two experiences is precisely what makes their comparison valuable.
Memory Is Both a Gift and a Responsibility
Memory is often described as a means of preserving the past. But neither personal nor collective memory operates like a complete recording.
Individuals remember selectively. Communities preserve certain events while allowing others to fade. Official commemorations may emphasize victories and celebrated figures while leaving more painful or complicated experiences insufficiently examined.
Literature enters this landscape not as an alternative archive of verified facts, but as a form of imaginative engagement with the meaning of remembrance.
A novel can ask why one event becomes central to a community's identity while another remains obscure. It can examine the difference between the visible evidence of history and the emotional consequences that survive through relationships, habits, and stories.
In Jerash, the presence of ancient ruins within the landscape of a living modern city gives these questions a particular force.
The ancient monuments and the contemporary community occupy connected geographical space, yet they do not belong to a single undifferentiated historical experience. The city has undergone transformations involving language, religion, government, settlement, and everyday life.
To write across these periods responsibly is to acknowledge discontinuity alongside continuity.
I began to understand memory not merely as an act of looking backward, but as an ethical decision about attention. What do we choose to preserve? Whose experience seems worthy of narration? Which silences do we question, and which do we accept too easily?
The novelist cannot resolve these questions once and for all. But fiction can keep them open.
Historical Fiction Requires the Courage to Admit Uncertainty
Readers sometimes expect a historical novel to offer a fully reconstructed world, complete with precise customs, beliefs, conversations, and private motivations.
Yet the apparent completeness of a fictional world should never be mistaken for complete historical knowledge.
Research can establish a framework: political chronology, urban geography, economic conditions, surviving religious practices, and documented institutions. Within that framework, the writer must still make countless creative decisions.
What did a fictional person say at a particular moment? What memories shaped an intimate conversation? How did an invented character interpret a public ceremony?
Unless supported by a specific historical source, such details are acts of imagination.
This does not make them illegitimate. Fiction depends on invention. The important distinction is between using research to make invention responsible and using the authority of history to disguise invention as fact.
There are also questions for which surviving scholarship provides competing interpretations or only fragmentary evidence. A responsible writer may need to simplify certain complexities for narrative coherence, but should resist presenting speculation as a universally established historical reality.
That discipline influenced my reflections on the relationship between historical truth and literary imagination.
Perhaps the greatest temptation in historical fiction is not deliberate falsification. It is the desire to make the past appear more certain, coherent, and comprehensible than the evidence allows.
Good fiction can create narrative coherence while retaining an awareness that history itself was more complicated than any single story.
What the Act of Writing Revealed About Myself
Writing Venus’s Tears also led me to reconsider the relationship between the storyteller and the material being narrated.
Every novelist makes choices about which experiences deserve attention. Even when those choices seem purely artistic, they reflect assumptions about society, memory, conflict, and human significance.
I found myself returning repeatedly to characters whose private needs confronted larger structures: the longing to love, the fear of loss, the demand to be respected, and the struggle to retain a sense of personal worth.
These interests were not created by writing the novel. But the writing process exposed them more clearly.
It showed me that my attraction to historical fiction was not based primarily on a desire to reconstruct the appearance of another century. I was drawn to the possibility of placing familiar human questions under unfamiliar historical conditions.
At the same time, the experience reminded me of the limitations of my own perspective. A novelist may write with conviction while still recognizing that characters must not become simple vehicles for the author's existing beliefs.
They need room to resist easy explanations. Their decisions should arise from the pressures and possibilities of their imagined lives, not merely from the argument the writer wishes to prove.
In that sense, writing became a form of intellectual self-examination. The characters compelled me to ask whether I was genuinely attending to their circumstances or simply using them to confirm what I already believed.
Why the Human Questions Matter More Than the Historical Spectacle
Historical fiction offers powerful visual possibilities. A writer can evoke ceremonies, military presence, architecture, clothing, and the movements of a city under imperial rule.
Such details are valuable when they establish a convincing environment. But spectacle alone rarely provides a durable literary experience.
A beautifully described temple does not automatically create an emotionally meaningful scene. A dramatic public ritual cannot substitute for a conflict that matters to the characters involved.
The historical setting must shape the human experience rather than merely surround it.
In my approach to ancient Gerasa, this meant treating public spaces as places through which unequal lives might intersect. A monumental structure could suggest collective ambition, while the circumstances of a fictional individual might reveal the limits of that grandeur.
The contrast between public achievement and private vulnerability interested me far more than architectural magnificence alone.
The same principle applies to the modern storyline. Contemporary settings become meaningful when they influence relationships, opportunities, fears, and decisions. They should never be reduced to scenery interchangeable with any other location.
I came to see the city itself as neither a neutral setting nor a mystical force determining human destiny. It is a changing environment shaped by people, institutions, memory, and material conditions.
The task of fiction is to show how individuals experience that environment differently.
What I Ultimately Learned About Humanity
I did not finish writing Venus’s Tears with a simple conclusion about human nature.
The experience made me more cautious about sweeping declarations that everyone throughout history has lived essentially the same life. It also made me skeptical of narratives in which historical progress guarantees that injustice has disappeared.
Instead, I became increasingly interested in the tension between change and persistence.
Societies transform themselves. Institutions emerge and decline. Ideas once considered unquestionable lose authority, while new possibilities become imaginable. Yet the capacity to injure others, to resist injustice, to form attachments, and to seek recognition remains part of our continuing human story.
Literature does not prove that humanity possesses a single timeless essence. It provides a space in which the similarities and differences between human experiences can be examined without demanding that they become identical.
For me, that is among the most valuable possibilities of historical fiction.
It allows the writer to encounter the past as something more demanding than an inventory of impressive ruins. It asks us to consider the lives that once unfolded within those structures, the limits of what we can know about them, and the responsibilities that accompany imagining what has been lost.
The stones of Gerasa remain visible. Most of the private voices that surrounded them do not. Writing cannot restore those voices as historical evidence, but it can challenge our indifference to their absence.
And perhaps this is what the novel taught me most clearly: the purpose of returning imaginatively to the past is not to make history resemble ourselves. It is to recognize the humanity of people whose worlds were profoundly different from our own.
The Connection to Venus’s Tears
Venus’s Tears brings ancient Gerasa and contemporary Jerash into a literary conversation through two principal characters, Venus and Waheeb. Their fictional worlds differ in social organization, historical conditions, and the forms of authority surrounding them. Yet both invite questions about loss, freedom, vulnerability, and human dignity. Writing these parallel narratives taught me that historical fiction is most meaningful when it respects the distance between eras rather than erasing it. The novel does not claim that history repeats itself in every human life. It asks whether attentive storytelling can help us recognize suffering and resilience across that distance.
Historical Sources and Further Reading
The literary reflections in this essay are the author's interpretations. The following resources provide historical context and methodological perspectives. Fictional characters and their private experiences are not presented as documented historical figures or events.
- Department of Antiquities of Jordan — Archaeological Sites in Jerash. Official overview of the ancient city and its monuments.
- The Chora of Gerasa/Jerash. Aarhus University, discussing research by Achim Lichtenberger and Rubina Raja on the ancient city's territory and development.
- Ancient City of Jerash — Jordan Tourism Board. Historical and architectural context for the archaeological site.
- Archival Intimacies: Empathy and Historical Practice in 2023. A scholarly discussion of historical empathy, interpretation, and the limits of evidence.
- Archival Shouting: Silence and Volume in Collections and Institutions. American Historical Association, 2024.
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