Excerpt from The Unwilling Vestal: A Tale of Rome Under the Caesars On the other hand, after having read it, almost any one will be likely to imagine that a novel with so startling a heroine and with incidents so bizarre can not possibly be based on any sound and genuine knowl edge of its background; that the author has conjured out of his fantasy not only his plot and chief charac ters, but also their world; that he has created out and out not merely his Vestal, but his, Vestals, their cir cumstances and the life which they are represented as leading; that be has manufactured his local color to suit as he went along. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.