Falco's Life History
Falco was born on 20 or 21 March 41 AD to Marcus Didius Favonius and Junilla Tacita. His father is a somewhat shady auctioneer, and his family is of Plebeian rank. While still young, his father leaves his mother and the family home to live with another woman, changing his agnomen (a form of nickname) from Favonius to "Geminus". When his brother is killed, Falco is effectively head of the family and in the position of responsibility his father has abdicated.
Falco joins the Roman Army and serves in the Second Augusta legion in Britain during the Boudiccan Revolt. Some time after that he manages to get himself "invalided out" with a relatively minor wound in AD60. His elder brother, Festus, who served in the legio XV Apollinaris and was posthumously awarded the mural crown after he was killed in 68 AD on active service during the First Jewish-Roman War in Judaea.
Falco and his father are forced to an uneasy accommodation in the course of Poseidon's Gold and now see one another on occasions thereafter, but Falco's sympathies remain with his mother.
Falco met his wife, Helena Justina, the divorced and patrician daughter of a senator, while on an investigation in Britannia (The Silver Pigs), but their very different circumstances made their relationship difficult. After a series of successful missions for the emperor, Falco has risen to a certain level of respectability – he has achieved equestrian rank (One Virgin Too Many) – and he and Helena now live together with their two daughters, in an arrangement acceptable to his in-laws. In Nemesis, it is revealed that Helena Justina has been pregnant once again. Tragically the baby, Marcus Didius Justinianus, dies shortly after birth on the day that Geminus, Falco's father, also dies. At his father's wake Falco discovers that he is to become a brother yet again when Thalia, an old friend he met in Venus in Copper, Last Act in Palmyra and Alexandria, reveals that she is expecting a child – she claims by Geminus.
Read more about this topic: Marcus Didius Falco
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