One of four rereads for me on David MacClaine's list of 50 Historical Fiction novels set in Ancient Rome, I read Roma a few years back when I was reading Saylor's mystery fiction following his character Gordianus the Finder.
Roma takes place over more than 1000 years, from the earliest days of what would become Rome but was simply a good place to find salt, through its time as a trading post, a city, a kingdom, and eventually the Republic. The novel is basically eleven interconnected short stories following the ups and downs of a family line while also showing how Rome as a city grew over time.
As a follow up to Alfred Duggan's Founding Fathers, it gives a nice overview of where the first half of this fifty book list is going to cover, and also does a nice job of giving a flavour to the setting, but shying away from one simple character we get to follow priests, leaders, warriors, slaves, vestal virgins, and more, giving a much more complex picture that one protagonist could have given us.
A great way to introduce yourself to both the subject matter and Saylor's work (of which I'm a pretty big fan), Roma is an excellent read and well worth your time.
Since the beginning of the year I've been working my way through the world of Ancient Greece by reading a historical novel each month (except the month I read Homer's lIiad), and so far I'm really enjoying this look at the ancient world through the eyes of seven different authors. In October, I read Christopher Cameron's Killer of Men, his first in a series on the Persian War, and I have to say it was pretty darn great.
The novel follows a young man through his formative years, beginning as the son of a blacksmith, then his apprenticeship under an old soldier and eventually his rise to becoming a soldier of great renown. As I found a few years ago with Steven Saylor's Gordianus the Finder, a compelling protagonist is key to understanding a new world (in Gordianus's case, that of Ancient Rome), and Arimnestos, the protagonist of Killer of Men, shows the reader how a young man can move from farmer/blacksmith, through to soldier, and eventually the titular Killer of Men.
The author, a former career officer in the US Navy, does a really great job of explaining how combat worked in the ancient world, and through the lens of an older Arimnestros looking back at his younger life, gives the reader context, as well as making the book a potentially interesting listen for those who prefer audio books.
This was a great read for me, and definitely has me interested in reading Cameron's follow up, Marathon.
Steven Saylor's fifteenth novel featuring the character of Gordianus the Finder, and the third of his Ancient World prequel series, finds 19-year-old Gordianus in Alexandria during the midst of the Mithridatic Wars (89-87 BCE).
A Big part of what I've always loved about these books is how well Saylor immerses the reader into these strangely familiar, but often alien settings. Gordianus works, in effect, as a private detective, and each of the novels works as a mystery on its own. His latest, Wrath of the Furies (2015), nearly splits the standard narrative in half, with the majority of the novel being narrated by Gordianus, and the rest being a reading of the secret diary of an old acquaintance of Gordianus'.
As with the previous two prequel novels, the mysteries are still quite good, but the action has been dialed up, as a 17 to 19-year-old Gordianus ends up running and jumping a lot more through the course of these stories.
For this novel specifically, I had almost no previous knowledges of King Mithridates, his wars, or the key historic event that happened during the novel, which, for me, dramatically increased the tension throughout, and has got me much more interested in reading historical fiction set in the Ancient World.
This week I read the latest of Steven Saylor's mysteries set in Ancient Rome, The Seven Wonders. In it, his detective character, Gordianus the Finder explores all seven of the wonders of the Ancient World and solves mysteries along the way.
The book, the 13th of his Roma Sub Rosa series, is actually set well before the rest of the series, when the main character was seventeen-years-old. Although my personal tastes run to Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction, this series, which I started when I was taking a class on Ancient Rome and Early Christianity for my Undergraduate degree, got me totally hooked.
Beautifully mixing together Mystery stories and Historical Fiction, I simply couldn't put this series down, and honestly, if I could find them in hardcover, I would be pretty tempted to add them to my own library.
The first in the series is Roman Blood, and if you are interested in checking out a new mystery series, I would strongly recommend this one.
