I’ve been reading “A Mist of Prophesies” from Steven Saylor’s Roma Sub Rosa series and overall I really like it! (I’m a stone cold sucker for detective fiction, especially period detective fiction) BUT I find it really weird that he has several completely incorrect flora and fauna featured in the book (particularly in the scenes where Gordianus is resting in his garden) that really took me out of the story. In Chapter IV he stares at a sunflower—a plant endemic to the Americas (I gave him the benefit of the doubt here and assumed he meant heliotrope), and then in Chapter XVI he watches a humming bird flit from flower to flower—another Americas-only species. So much of the rest of the novel seems (at a glance, at least) to be well-researched that these blatant ecological errors really threw me for a loop. I know the author is from the USA, but it feels like if he was doing all that historiographical research to make the culture and the setting of late republican Rome sing so well, he could have at least done the bare minimum research about common garden plants and animals during that period (of which there is plenty of evidence, both in literature and in the archaeological record).
