Quintus Claudius.

The grandeur and the peril of imperial Rome have long tempted novelists, and this historical romance plunges the reader without hesitation into that world of cold marble and hot menace. Set amid the crowded life of the ancient city, it uses all the resources of fiction to make a distant era feel immediate and dangerous, peopling the streets, temples, and palaces of Rome with characters caught fast in its intrigues, splendours, and threats.

What it's about

The novel unfolds against the vividly rendered backdrop of Rome under the emperors, a glittering and treacherous setting of political intrigue, public spectacle, private ambition, and constant personal risk. In the tradition of the great classical historical romance, it weaves the fortunes of its characters through the tensions and dangers of the age, drawing steadily on the customs, conflicts, beliefs, and atmosphere of the period to build and sustain its drama. Public events of state and the private destinies of individuals are tightly intertwined as the story moves through the daily life and hidden currents of the imperial capital, where a wrong word or a hidden loyalty might cost a life.

Themes

Power and its many abuses, loyalty and betrayal, faith and persecution, and the recurring collision between individual conscience and the overwhelming demands of a dangerous state run all through the book. It reflects the enduring fascination with Rome as a stage grand enough for both magnificence and the severest moral trial, where the highest fortunes could be reversed in a single day.

Why it still matters

Historical fiction of this ambitious kind kept the ancient world alive and immediate for generations of general readers, and did much to shape popular ideas of what Rome looked and felt like. Its immersive, richly furnished picture of imperial society still offers the deep pleasures of a past made tangible, and a reminder of how powerfully the classical world has gripped the modern imagination.

Who it's for

For lovers of historical fiction and the classical world, for readers who relished the great Roman romances of the nineteenth century, and for anyone who likes to be carried bodily into another age and set down in the middle of its dangers.