Imperium: From the Sunday Times bestselling author (Cicero Trilogy, 4)

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When Tiro, the confidential secretary (and slave) of a Roman senator, opens the door to a terrified stranger on a cold November morning, he sets in motion a chain of events that will eventually propel his master into one of the most suspenseful courtroom dramas in history. The stranger is a Sicilian, a victim of the island's corrupt Roman governor, Verres. The senator is Marcus Cicero -- an ambitious young lawyer and spellbinding orator, who at the age of twenty-seven is determined to attain imperium -- supreme power in the state. Told through the eyes and memory of his servant, Tiro, supposedly the inventor of shorthand, the mechanism for perfect recording of the actual speeches, Cicero’s place in the history of oratory (Demosthenes taught that content was less important than delivery) and role in the growing conflict between the “plebes” and aristocracy (“the fish rots from the head down) is secured. A real person, Marcus Tullius Tiro, was Cicero’s slave then freedman, who wrote about Cicero, since lost, and collected many of Cicero’s works. The Marcus Didius Falco series by Lindsey Davis, starts with The Silver Pigs; set in the reign of Vespasian. Tarzan and the Lost Empire by Edgar Rice Burroughs, a surviving fragment of the Roman Empire is discovered hidden in a corner of 20th century Africa. If you want to explore the remains of that city, there is no better guide than this. Claridge knows the modern city and its most recent archaeology better than anyone writing in English. Her book is a lucid and compact guide to the most ruinous and built-over monuments. I carry it with me everywhere when in the city (and have worn out a couple of copies).

A Voice in the Wind (1994) by Francine Rivers; the story of Hadassah, a Christian slave taken from Jerusalem and taken to Rome in the time of Titus and his father Mark of the Lion Trilogy book 1Works inspired by Roman history, or by works of fiction and non-fiction about Rome [ edit ] Science fiction [ edit ]

Robert Harris writes another fantastic novel, his second Roman novel (after "Pompeii") and the first to feature Cicero as main character. He effortlessly creates the Roman world for the reader so that you can really see and feel what it's like to live in this time, detailing the numerous social structures and customs that are completely alien to 21st century people. He brilliantly chooses Cicero's slave Tiro to be the narrator of the story, a man who was Cicero's right hand man but also created short-hand so that it seems plausible that so much detail could be put into the book when someone who was there could conceivably have recorded it all. From his villa on the Esquiline hill, he observed with great wit the cesspool below in the city. He took on a risky case against Verres, the corrupt former governor of Sicily on behalf of the island's citizens. Against all odds, he wins and this propels him to greater battles with the criminal patrician senators and generals.Harris does not really change that perception of Cicero so much as provide the context for his opposition to Caesar and his fated alliance with the optimates, the group of aristocrats who formed the core of the faction that opposed Caesar in the senate and eventually, the civil war. This novel reads like a breeze, and if you are at all interested in Roman history, the details of life in centre of Rome before the Empire you are in for a treat. I kept thinking of how politics through the centuries has never changed, up to the present day and recent elections. Vote buying, self interest, fake news, vast wealth of the elite, deal making, corruption of established values; it just goes on.