List of The Roman Mysteries Characters - M

M

Marcus

Marcus Flavius Geminus is Flavia's father. He is a Roman citizen of the equestrian class. He is a sea-captain, captaining first his own ship the Myrtilla, later Lupus's ship Delphina. He is absent-minded and generally easy-going. Flavia is his only child. His wife Myrtilla died giving birth to stillborn twins when Flavia was three. He has an identical twin brother, Gaius.

Marcus appears in practically all the books in the series, including The Thieves of Ostia The Dolphins of Laurentum The Twelve Tasks of Flavia Gemina The Enemies of Jupiter The Gladiators from Capua The Colossus of Rhodes The Fugitive from Corinth The Sirens of Surrentum The Charioteer of Delphi The Slave-girl from Jerusalem The Beggar of Volubilis The Prophet from Ephesus The Man from Pomegranate Street

Megara

Megara appears in The Fugitive from Corinth, dressed like a beggar, and pretending to be a boy called Nikos. In fact, she is a young, shy and pretty girl who fell in love with Dion, Aristo's brother, even if he did not notice her. She is trying to help him. She does not like Aristo because he is more bright than Dion, and Dion is always abandoned, even if he is very bright too. At the end of the book, everything is cleared up, and Dion finally falls in love with Megara.

Miriam

Miriam bat Mordecai is Jonathan's older sister. She acts as assistant to her doctor father, and later is especially active in caring for pregnant women.

Miriam is extraordinarily beautiful and has many admirers. She is described as pale with long, curly black hair and violet eyes. In The Secrets of Vesuvius, when she is 14, she falls in love with Flavia's uncle Gaius, and they are married in The Twelve Tasks of Flavia Gemina. In The Slave-girl from Jerusalem she dies giving birth to twin boys, deliberately refusing to be saved at the cost of their lives after seeing a vision from an angel telling her that her sons will do great things.

Mnason

Mnason is an intelligent animal trainer, who befriends the children in The Twelve Tasks of Flavia Gemina after his star lion, Monobaz, gets loose and is recaptured by Nubia. Her lionskin cloak is a reward from him. He has been known to breed lions, ostriches, giraffes and elephants.

He next appears in The Gladiators from Capua, in which he is in charge of supplying and training the beasts for the amphitheatre shows. Alongside his fourteen-year old son, Bar, he assists Nubia and her friends in the finding of Jonathan. Monobaz is one of the star attractions in the show.

Monobaz

Monobaz is a tame and elderly lion with hardly any teeth, owned by animal-trainer, Mnason (see above) and his son, Bar Mnason.

During the Autumn of AD 79, Monobaz escapes into the woods of Ostia, where he is recaptured by Nubia. The skin of his father, who was presumably killed years earlier, is given to Nubia as a cloak, a trophy and a reward.

Monobaz becomes the main attraction in the Games in The Gladiators from Capua, when he fought against a vicious rabbit in the Amphitheatre. He is, however, used for comic relief, and the rabbit repeatedly jumps in and out of his mouth.

Mordecai

Mordecai ben Ezra, the father of Jonathan and Miriam, is a doctor. Jewish by birth, he is Christian by religion. He is a compassionate and peaceful man. During the Great Revolt he left Jerusalem with his children, believing his wife Susannah to be dead. Her return in The Enemies of Jupiter has not brought him much happiness, as she does not love him and behaves strangely, and the death of his daughter crushes him, as is seen in "Death by Vespasian".

Myrtilla

Myrtilla is the name of Flavia's deceased mother and the wife of Marcus Geminus. Not much is known about her, other than she died giving birth to stillborn twin boys prior to the books. Flavia was three when she lost her mother and cannot remember what she looked like. The only given description of Myrtilla is that she had dark hair. She either once lived in Pompeii or visited it as there is where she met her future husband Marcus. Her sister Cynthia is married to Aulus Cornix and lives in Rome.

The Myrtilla is also the name of the ship Marcus Flavius Geminus (her husband) owned, but it got shipwrecked and so Lupus (in The Dolphins of Laurentum) lent his new ship (previously Venalicius's Vespa but renamed Delphina) to him.