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Referenced when discussing how in 1600, the antiquarian William Camden was forced to omit a section of Hadrian's Wall from his tour due to bandits - this refers to Camden's famous antiquarian survey of Britain

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Explicitly mentioned as a fantasy novel that Martin embarked on a decade after visiting Hadrian's Wall in 1981, which inspired the Wall in his fictional world of Westeros

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Referenced as Kipling's stories about Roman Britain published in 1906, described as casting Hadrian's Wall as a monument to civilisation - Kipling is called 'the great laureate of the British Empire'

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Explicitly referenced as Gibbon's 1776 work in which he defined the reigns of Hadrian and his predecessors/successors as 'the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous'

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Described as 'the last book of the New Testament' and 'the most vivid, the most coruscating, the most influential attack on imperialism ever written' - discusses John's apocalyptic vision of Rome as the whore of Babylon

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Referenced as Dante's 'great poem' in which he placed the Emperor Trajan in paradise, due to medieval Christian admiration for Trajan's virtue

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Described as 'one of the supreme works of history to have survived from antiquity' - a detailed narrative account of the Judean revolt written by a Judean who played a significant role in the conflict

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Referenced as Tacitus's narrative account focused on the civil war convulsing the Roman world during AD 69, the year of the four emperors - Tacitus is described as 'the greatest of all Roman historians'