By Paul Carrier
Fresh from a stint as the head of one of ancient Rome’s police and fire brigades in The King’s Gambit, Decius Caecilius Metellus returns for a new round of sleuthing in The Catiline Conspiracy, this time as a low-level elected official on the trail of would-be despots.
Decius, whose duties at the treasury do not include investigating murders, does so anyway when a banker and a building contractor, both of them Roman citizens, are stabbed to death in the city.
Not only does he come to believe that those deaths, and others that follow, are connected, but he suspects they may be linked to a seditious plot by malcontents who hope to seize control of the republic.
As in the first volume in Maddox Roberts’ SPQR mystery series, the author again displays his encyclopedic knowledge of ancient Rome, and seamlessly weaves it into the narrative.
His expertise encompasses both the grand sweep of history and the telling details of daily life at a time - about 70 B.C - when the republic was crumbling but the empire had yet to be born. Where else are you likely to find references to such historical minutiae as subligaculum - Roman underpants?
Such tidbits abound. Decius explains that Roman streets are not named or numbered because Romans are “far too conservative for anything so sensible.” And we learn that the high-born women of that era generally were better-educated in history and the arts than men, for whom a firm grasp of those subjects was seen as a sign of “Greek decadence and probable effeminacy.”
The Catiline Conspiracy moves along at a swift pace as Decius, jaded but committed to the public good, introduces the reader to a cross section of Roman society that includes members of ancient patrician families, lowly slaves and every layer in between.
The orator Cicero, the up-and-coming politician Julius Caesar, Pompey the Great, gang leader Titus Annius Milo - all figure in the tale. Cato the Younger, a tiresome statesman known for his virtue, is introduced as “the most formidably boring man in Roman politics,” someone who refuses to wear shoes in public because the early Romans, whom he slavishly admires, went shoeless.
My only complaint is that Decius remains, as he was in The King’s Gambit, something less than a fully developed character. He is inquisitive, shrewd and conscientious, but we don’t come away with a clear sense of who he is as a man.
It is perversely entertaining, though, to see Decius constantly berated by his father, a self-important judge who has a penchant for telling his son to “go be a nuisance somewhere else.” Similarly, Asklepiodes, a brilliant, witty Greek physician and Decius’ friend, proves to be an endearing character whose ingenuity and skill are immeasurably helpful as the treasonous conspiracy builds to its final, bloody conclusion.
