By Paul Carrier
For fans of Steven Saylor’s Roma Sub Rosa mysteries set in Ancient Rome, this is the novel that started it all, back in 1991.
I can’t explain why I read other books in the series before turning to the initial entry, but as the cliché advises, better late than never.
Roman Blood takes places in 80 B.C., primarily in Rome during the reign of the dictator Sulla. Cicero, a young and ambitious “advocate,” has agreed to defend Sextus Roscius a wealthy and irascible farmer who stands accused of murdering his father of the same name.
A bon vivant who lived in Rome and led a decadent life, the elder Roscius was known to be at odds with his sole surviving son, who faces a gruesome fate if convicted of patricide. With a finding of guilt, Roscius would be sealed in a waterproof sack with a dog, a rooster, a snake and a monkey and then tossed into the Tiber River, there to be torn asunder by the animals or drown when the seams of the sack pull free.
Enter Gordianus the Finder, the Roman equivalent of a private eye, whom Cicero hires to help him win an acquittal. Hard-nosed and insightful, Gordianus is a bachelor whose household includes a beloved cat and an Egyptian slave named Bethesda, a concubine who shares Gordianus’ bed as well as his home.
Although the case against the younger Roscius seems strong, he insists he is innocent. As the date of the trial draws near, Gordianus learns that the elder Roscius supposedly was killed on Sulla’s orders as an enemy of the state, after which the government seized his lands and sold them to two of his cousins. That left the younger Roscius with no place to live until a wealthy friend of his father agreed to shelter him, his wife and their two daughters while he awaits his trial.
As in any good mystery, however, initial appearances can be deceptive, leading to incorrect assumptions and erroneous conclusions. Only after the trial do all of the facts surrounding the murder come to light.
Gordianus is a product of Saylor’s imagination, but Sextus Roscius, father and son, are pulled from the pages of history, as is the murder charge against the younger Roscius. I won’t divulge the outcome of the trial or what follows it, but this was the first major case in the rea-life Cicero’s legal career.
Cicero (formally, Marcus Tullius Cicero) crops up periodically in novels set in Ancient Rome, but he is particularly memorable here because we meet him as a young man in his 20s who has yet to make his mark on the world.
Reference books describe Cicero as a lawyer and a republican (in the sense of someone who tried to preserve the republic when it was about to give way to the empire), as well as a writer, philosopher, politician and political theorist. Nowadays, he is regarded as the greatest of all Roman orators, but in Roman Blood he’s still a thin, prickly, little-known and untested advocate who is sometimes forced to his bed by intestinal problems.
Sulla, by contrast, is an aging but all-powerful dictator who sees his reign drawing to a close. Only serious students of Roman history recall him today, but before Pompey the Great, before Julius Caesar, before Mark Antony and Octavian (later known as Augustus) and the emperors who followed in their wake, Sulla held all of Rome in the palm of his hand.
As for Rome itself, Saylor conveys both its grandeur and its muck, as when Gordianus sets out for a walk at dusk. At that time of day, he muses, "Rome became a city of endless squalor, shrieking babies, the stench of raw onions and rotted meat, the grime of unwashed paving stones."
