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I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here.
-Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
At the turn of the third century CE, Rome was ruled by the emperor Septimius Severus; as a consequence, so too was a large part of Britain. Of Libyan origin, Severus's African accent was cause for remark in antiquity, but his African roots were no impediment to him rising right to the pinnacle of the imperial ranks (Scriptores Historiae Augustae 19.9; Evaristo 144). In the modern era, it can surprise us that ancient Rome was unhindered by racial prejudice, though it should not.1 Many have argued-the acclaimed Howard University Professor of Classics, Frank M. Snowden, Jr. most conclusively-that responses to "race" configured differently in the ancient world. What Snowden demonstrates, first in Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience and then in Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks, is that while the ancient Greeks and Romans noticed skin color and differing physical features, they did not attach prejudicial attitudes to them.2 Nor was it only darker-skinned peoples that excited their attention: the pale skin and red hair of the Gauls garner just as much comment as the dark skin of peoples from the area that they referred to as Ethiopia (but which covered a far larger and less-defined area than modern Ethiopia). This is notwithstanding the fact that the ancient Greeks and Romans did associate darkness with death and the underworld, and sometimes with ominous portents; nevertheless, there is no evidence that this black-white binary crossed over into people's thinking about skin color.
This article will explore Bernardine Evaristo's 2001 verse-novel, The Emperor's Babe, set in London at the time of Severus's reign. Examining the work's transnational themes, I will suggest that these sit alongside a transhistorical dimension that merges antiquity with modernity in order to reflect not only on British society under the Roman empire, but also on British society in the twenty-first century. Evaristo's novel crosses borders of three types: temporal, spatial, and generic. She is not alone in this maneuver: other contemporary literary figures such as Derek Walcott and Kate Tempest perform a similar kind of border-crossing, and as with Evaristo, each has done so by engaging with the myths, literature,...