To Turn the Tide

This is the story of five modern Americans who are unexpectedly and involuntarily thrown back in time to the Roman Empire in the year 165 AD, with no possibility of return, and decide to make it their mission to avert the decline and fall of the Roman Empire—partly in their own personal interests, and partly because they think that a thriving Roman Empire would be better for the world as a whole than the Dark Ages that followed the decline and fall in our history.

This objective would be absurdly over-ambitious, except that they arrive loaded down with advantages. They have a combined skill set that’s almost ideal; they've been sent back with a small fortune in Roman cash, plus books, seeds, medicines, and equipment; and the first person they meet after arriving is perfectly suited to helping them adapt to second-century life.

This is quite a long novel, but it doesn’t stand alone: it’s intended as the first of a series. However, it ends at a reasonable stopping point, not a cliff-hanger, and you can make up your own mind whether to read any further in the series.

It’s a well-researched book, giving details of many aspects of the Roman Empire: if you like reading about the Roman Empire, this one’s for you. It’s easy to read, although rather slow-moving in the first half, and rather preoccupied with warfare in the second half.

As a novel, it has the weakness that its heroes are never seriously challenged: they arrive with all they need to make progress, all the people they meet in the Roman Empire are remarkably cooperative, and their various technological projects encounter only minor difficulties. They have a major challenge hanging over them in the form of a barbarian invasion that could have wiped them out; but their introduction of gunpowder enables the barbarians to be defeated relatively easily.

If you’ve read Stirling’s Island in the Sea of Time, try to imagine it without William Walker, and you’ll have a fair idea of what this book is like. Walker was an exaggerated villain, a Voldemort, and I dislike reading about Voldemorts; but they are an easy way of providing setbacks and surprises to liven up the plot.

I’ll be interested to see whether the next novel in this series provides a more eventful plot and a rather more challenging experience for the heroes. As it stands, this one makes a rather bland novel. I learned from the story at least one interesting new thing about the Roman Empire. I decided years ago that the Romans never conquered Germany because it wasn’t worth the trouble; but I read here that it could have been well worth the trouble if the Romans had known about the silver deposits to be found in Germany.

I also learned a little about the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who had previously escaped my attention because my reading about Roman history has been haphazard.