All literature is a conversation with earlier literature, sometimes explicitly:
"Everyone on a Roman naval ship was a free man and part of the military and would fight at need - Ben-Hur had gotten that drastically wrong.
"Pity. Both movies were great otherwise, though the 2016 one was better..."
-CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE, p. 310.
(I have found an on-line list of five Ben Hur films.)
"That was another gift of Martin Padway. Though for some reason he hadn't known the actual formula for gunpowder, odd in an archaeologist, even a fictional one.
"Or maybe not, that book was written a century ago...well, nearly, 1938. Damn, but the English language is not intended for time travel, and Latin's even worse."
-CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT, p. 399.
And that concluding sentence might be an indirect reference to the Temporal language of Poul Anderson's Time Patrol. (Although, unfortunately, we do not read a single word of Temporal.)
Four words of Latin in another Anderson time travel work:
"'Es tu peregrinator temporis?'"
-Poul Anderson, There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), VI, p. 62.
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