Marius de Romanus was born in 30 BC in Rome. He was an illegitimate child of a
Roman patrician and a Celtic slave from the land of Gaul. In his mortal years,
he travelled the Empire and much of the known world compiling a
travelogue/history of the world. Contrary to his appearance in the movie Queen
of the Damned (in which he was portrayed by Vincent Perez), he has white-blonde
hair curled at the shoulders and cobalt blue eyes. Due to his age, his skin is
often described as being as pale and hard as white marble; to seem "normal" to
mortals, he often applies salves and oils to his skin as stated in Blood and
Gold.
When he was approximately 40 years old, he was abducted by druids who followed
the religion of the Gods of the Groves. Marius was taken to the Grove where he
was made into a vampire by the God of the Grove just before the yearly Feast of
Samhain. He was instructed by the god to go and try, by any means possible, to
find out why vampires all over the world (and the god himself) had been burned
or destroyed, even though they had not been exposed to fire or the sun. Marius
traveled to Egypt and became the caretaker of the original two vampires, Akasha
and Enkil, Those Who Must Be Kept.
Marius has lived in many different places in his two thousand years of life. He
lived in Antioch with Pandora for two centuries after becoming the caretaker of
Those Who Must Be Kept. After separating from Pandora, he moved to Rome where
he had the silent companionship of Avicus and Mael. He went into a coma-like
sleep for "far more than half a century" before he was awoken by Avicus and
Mael and the three set sail for Constantinople. It was there he came to know
Zenobia. They lived there for a very short while before Marius went off on his
own and visited many places while drifting through time before going into the
ground again in the year 1200 AD.
