Roman Blood

I occasionally grow excessively tired of historical fiction about ancient Rome; it's all shining columns and glorious empire. What feeds the empire, one never seems to ask, but Steven Saylor breaks the trend. His Rome is dirty, not in a gritty grimdark way, but in the naturalistic bent that claims all cities, modern and pre-modern. His Rome is the center of an empire that knows something is rotten at its heart, but cannot keep itself from consuming the weak, the poor, the enslaved, the displaced. This is a Rome worth reading about, even if, at times, it's a little too neat.

There are certain ‘off' historical details, as in any historical fiction; all of them were, I believe, included to further the point of the novel: the vices of imperialism, the way corruption erodes every corner of the world.

I honestly wasn't quite sure what to think when I'd acquired Saylor's Roma Sub Rosa series. It was something of a blind acquisition, really, given that I was looking for something to tide me over after I'd gotten something of a “Roman high” from watching Spartacus: Blood and Sand and was waiting for the arrival of my copy of Gods of the Arena. This seemed like a decent-enough series to start out with, so I decimated an entire shelf at the local thrift bookstore (miracle of miracles, it turned out they had the entire series up to the most recent book), and brought the whole lot home.

Thankfully, I was not disappointed. Roman Blood was an interesting ride, a look at late Republican Rome that was of a different flavor from the one I was used to - then again, the Rome of this period that I was used to was based mostly on history books, and there are just some days when those aren't nearly as fun as fiction. The language reads very well, and while I don't know how close it is to the colloquial Latin that was spoken during the period, I think Saylor has done enough research to at least give it that feel (as any good writer should, I think).

Part of the novel's charm is its cast, both fictional and non-fictional. I'm not sure if Saylor's depiction of Cicero is accurate, but it is interesting nevertheless. His slave, Tiro, is a sympathetic character as well. But what I truly appreciated was that, come the ending, no one is truly guilty or innocent - which is all I'm going to say, because to say more would be to spoil the ending totally. Either way, I appreciate the “gray” morality more than if it was clearly black-and-white.

As to the plot, it's nothing new - the mystery fan will find similar (likely better) in other novels. But the milieu is exotic and distracting enough that maybe its faults can be ignored.