Here she is, Aurelia of the prophetic mystery, hiding the text codex under her cloak as she runs away from social oppression. This is my "official" portrait of her in my collection of illustrations. I think I've gone through most of them now.
I had a selection of possible endings for the story.
1. She gets captured and brought back to Rome where she is forced to marry the older man her parents set for her.
2. She makes it to Jerusalem where she becomes a member of Saint Jerome's group of scholarly women translating the Greek Bible into Latin.
3. She throws the mystical manuscript overboard and discovers that its prophetic powers have transferred to her own person.
4. She trades the mystical manuscript to Heliodorus and in return lives as a scholarly hermit under his protection on one of his land holdings.
I could have chosen any one of these, or written another one, but I ran out of time and interest and had to go to graduate school, which was a bad choice and a whole other line of misery in 1976-1979.
A close-up of Aurelia. She is wearing a rosary but that is anachronistic, rosaries weren't part of Catholic Christianity until the later Middle Ages.
Watercolor and ink on sketchbook page, 4" x 12", 1975.
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