While I would totally give most authors a bit of a pass if they're not totally super up-to-date with whatever scholarly consensus is towards societal complexities etc., since not everyone has the time or interest to do that much delving, I feel like if you're going to go through all the trouble of writing historical fiction, you should at least make a genuine effort to make things as historically accurate as you can, especially if you're involving people who, you know, actually existed and/or are fairly documented. If you want to write fiction and take liberties, then write fiction with original characters and situations and go hog wild! The best example I can think of here is Dune, which has lots of aspects of Earth-like culture, but since it's not Earth, Herbert could do basically whatever he wanted with it and it works (or I remember thinking it worked; ymmv, of course). Or, I suppose, one could kind of meld the two, like what I remember from some instances in The Sandman and Books of Magic comics where historical figures were sometimes involved, generally in passing, but since the entire premise was not making any pretense towards being realistic, one didn't have the same expectations towards what said historical figures were supposed to be like.

I completely exclude romance novels from this, however. You can do your bookish smut however you want!

It would be interesting to see a YA novel that tackled an occupier mentality from that time period and from that specific social station. There are oodles with the whole Hewbrew/Egyptian conflict, natch, but it seems like Rome/Egypt is a viewpoint one doesn't hear too often. Or... now I dunno. Would that be interesting, or would it be a lot of political wrangling (which I know some people find interesting, but that seems a bit tediously cumbersome for a YA offering)?