Persons

Some of the people in The Silver Meridian are in the history books. Others are not, and are none the worse for it.

No spoilers beyond the opening chapters of Volume I. Nobody's fate is given here.

From history

Maurice: Augustus since 582: a soldier from Cappadocia who rose through the army and the palace. Careful, pious and famously close with money, he has fought the Persians to a favourable peace and turned the Empire's armies against the Avars and Slavs on the Danube. A military manual, the Strategikon, goes under his name.
Theodosius: Maurice's eldest son, born in 583 and crowned Augustus beside his father in 590.
Constantina: Augusta, Maurice's wife and the daughter of the emperor before him, Tiberius II. She has given him six sons and three daughters.
Bayan: Khagan of the Avars for nearly forty years, the most dangerous neighbour the Empire has in Europe.
Eusebius: Archbishop of Thessalonica, shepherd of a city that has learned to live with raiders at its gates. Pope Gregory wrote to him, and the Miracles of Saint Demetrius remember him.
Saint Demetrios: The soldier-martyr of Thessalonica and its protector, who, as every Thessalonian knows, walks its walls when the city is in danger.

Andreas: A Thessalonian of the twenty-first century, retired negotiator, polymath, and too tall for 599 by a head. Fluent in Greek and Latin of every period, which is not the same thing as fluent in 599.
Flavius Georgios, son of Stephanos, of Catina: The man Andreas pretends to be: a Sicilian landowner and man of letters, ruined by the Lombards, widowed by the plague, on pilgrimage to Saint Demetrios. Every detail of him must hold.
Aletta: Andreas's wife, an Afrikaner: sharp, warm and not easily impressed. She stays in the villa above the cave, keeps a pencil record of the world as it was, and checks it against the world as it is.
Probus: A young man from the hills of Beneventum, driven south by the Lombards, in debt, and good at sums. He counts in siliquae and writes on wax with a nail.
Severus: A deacon of the Roman Church at Syracuse, who keeps the register of the poor and notices more than he writes down.
Damianos of Rhodes: Shipmaster, who knows his coins and the Rhodian law, and will carry a gentleman's bag for a price.
Theodoros: The customs officer of Thessalonica, thin and grey, who has heard every story a traveller can tell about his pearls.
Paulos: Steward of the church of Saint Demetrios, a long-faced man with an inkstand, who drives a hard bargain on behalf of the saint.
Zenon: An old soldier with an Avar arrow-scar and no master, looking for work. He does not want to know what is in your boxes.