Some Miscellaneous Remarks

(i) If you had a Time Patrol timecycle and if you realized that you had left your wallet lying on a park bench yesterday afternoon, then you would be able to return instantly to that park and that afternoon and to retrieve your wallet a microsecond after your younger self had left it there. Suddenly all of space and time becomes like your backyard. The Time Patrol exists to prevent abuse of this unprecedented freedom of movement - or does it? Would the Patrol care about crimes that were committed with time machines but that did not violate causality?

(ii) "Nero felt no ambition to extend the Roman empire; he even considered withdrawing his forces from Britain, yet kept them there because such a decision might have reflected on the glory won by his adoptive father Claudius."

-Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars (London, 2007), p. 216.

Such a Neronic withdrawal from Britain would have altered the beginning of Poul and Karen Anderson's The King Of Ys Tetralogy which opens in Roman Britain centuries later.

(Augustus had a reason for curtailing imperial expansion, according to Neil Gaiman.)

(iii) Suetonius catalogues Nero's acts:

"...in order to segregate them from his follies and crimes, which I must now begin to list." (ibid.)

- as with Caligula.

Nero: a ruler who blustered when things went badly. Assassinations were common among early Roman Emperors.