It is fitting that I acknowledge my various debts. My fictitious narrator sometimes muddles up, sometimes gets right, authorities we take for granted but he, presumably, cannot know. The major ones are Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus and the Acts of the Apostles. I thought it best to consult these in the original tongues and, for the last, I make special acknowledgement of the Graeco-Latin edition of the New Testament published in Graz and furnished with an apparatus criticus by Augustinus Merk S. J. My lesser authorities are numerous and include the exegesis of the Acts by F. F. Bruce, which forms a volume in The New International Commentary on the New Testament; Paul by M. Dibelius; St Paul the Traveller by A. M. Ramsay; Die Romfahrt des Apostels Paulus und die Seefahrtskunde in römischen Kaiseralter by H. Balmer; Jerusalem zur Zeit Jesu by Joachim Jeremias; the second volume of the New Testament Apocrypha in Edgar Hennecke’s edition; The Acts of the Christian Martyrs in the Oxford Early Christian Texts. I wish also to acknowledge the help of my friend Dr Vincenzo Labella, with whom I have worked on the scenarios for three television series, Moses the Lawgiver, Jesus of Nazareth and A.D. I prepared for the writing of all three by composing literary works first – the poem Moses and the novels Man of Nazareth and this present one. The amount of research that goes into a popular television series is not clearly to be seen in the finished product, which has to aim at great narrative simplicity and the conscious elimination of elements which would appeal only to the scholar or the reader of fiction. Thus, The Kingdom of the Wicked, which was partly written for its own sake, partly in anticipation of A.D., may be regarded both as an expansion of the latter and a literary diversion in its own right. The opinions, interpretations, errors, falsifications and ultimate pessimism of the supposed author (whom I supposedly translate from the supposed demotic Greek) are not always mine. The main thing we have in common is a location: he wrote in Helvetia, outside Lucanum, in the reign of Domitian; I write in Lugano in Switzerland under the democratic wings of I am not quite sure whom.