![]() ![]() EXCERPT: from A Twist at the End by Steven Saylor Gordianus the Finder (Thrilling Detective) ![]() Saylor is always or often giving us the real Rome, moments like that powerfully convey what might otherwise be the fairly dispassionate stuff of ancient history. ![]() Gordianus witnesses a fire at which Crassus stands poised with his private fire brigade offering to buy the burning house for a fraction of its real worth and save it for himself or let it burn at a total loss to the owner. Saylor's novel that conveys a sense of the horror of the age in perhaps a way that only fiction can. As good as the non-fiction text is, there's one scene in Mr. I happen to have returned to this novel while reading Adrian Goldsworthy's excellent new biography, Caesar: Life of a Colossus. genre, as there is not just a brutal underlayer of society but a terrifyingly corrupt and arbitrarily violent overlayer, in these late years of the Republic. While Gordianus is a man of entirely too modern views-on such matters as slavery, homosexuality and the like-the setting works quite well for the p.i. It finds Gordianus in the employ of Cicero, before he became known as a great orator, who is defending one Sextus Roscius against a charge that Romans found especially appalling, patricide-a case which the real Cicero wrote about. Roman Blood is the first entry in Steven Saylor's Roma Sub Rosa series featuring Gordianus the Finder, a kind of Sam Spade for ancient Rome. ![]()
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