Review: "I Am Rome," Santiago Posteguillo

 By Paul Carrier

The promotional blurb on the jacket of Santiago Posteguillo's novel I Am Rome tells readers the 565-page tome is "a novel of Julius Caesar." And so it is, to a degree, focusing as it does on the first 23-years of the future general and dictator.

But Posteguillo ranges far afield in the ancient world. He takes readers hither and yon in space and time, using flashbacks and introducing assorted heroes and villains who led the Roman Republic, or tried to do so. Caesar is part of a larger cast in I Am Rome, but the novel is such a thrill ride that I would be hard-pressed to complain about, well, much of anything.

This is page turning at its most addictive.

I Am Rome touches on the infancy and youth of Caesar, but the main plotline, which is frequently overshadowed by other developments, involves Caesar’s decision as a young man to prosecute Senator Gnaeus Cornelius Dolabella for corruption and other crimes he allegedly committed while serving as the Roman governor of Macedonia. There are references to the upcoming trial in the novel’s early going, but the case does not finally go to court until the second half of the book.

Dolabella is a historical figure, and the young Caesar did prosecute him in real life, with some of Dolabella’s cronies in the Senate sitting as a tribunal to hear the case. In the novel, the Senate turns down a competing bid to prosecute from famed lawyer and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero. The fictionalized Cicero speculates that he lost out because the tribunal, hoping for acquittal, feared Cicero would present a much stronger case against Dolabella than Caesar could ever do.

Caesar was a largely untested and little-known figure in the Roman world at the time. Posteguillo tells us Caesar faced an uphill battle because of Dolabella's personal relationship with members of the tribunal, and the fact that the defendant had hired the best lawyers in Rome.

The prosecution’s case was made all the more difficult, in Posteguillo’s account, because two key witnesses who planned to testify against Dolabella were stabbed to death before the trial even began. Other prosecution witnesses were discredited, however unfairly, by Dolabella’s lawyers.

The youthful Caesar portrayed in I Am Rome is, as a boy, eager to train as a soldier. As a young man, he is ambitious, highly intelligent, self-confident and reform-minded. But he lacks the arrogance and hubris of the older, domineering Caesar we know from the period preceding his assassination at 55 in 44 BC.

Much of Caesar’s young life plays out offstage in I Am Rome, as events far beyond his reach unfold on a large canvas that stretches across the Italian peninsula, other sections of Europe and portions of Asia. The two major political factions in Rome at the time are the “optimates,” wealthy, conservative members of the Senate intent on protecting their own interests, and the “populares,” reformers who backed a redistribution of land and expansion of Roman citizenship, among other changes.

We tend to think of the Roman Republic, which preceded the creation of the Roman Empire, as the more noble of the two time periods because of its ostensibly democratic practices. But Posteguillo reminds us that the Republic, during which I Am Rome is set, was plagued by slavery, sexism, elitism, horrific violence, brutal abuses of power, civil wars, rampant corruption and grotesque political misdeeds.

 

Posteguillo, who is Spanish, has written several Spanish-language historical novels set in ancient Rome. They include a trilogy about the Roman general Scipio Africanus who defeated Hannibal and helped destroy Carthage; a trilogy about the emperor Trajan; and two novels on the Roman empress Julia Domna, wife of the emperor Septimius Severus. I Am Rome is the first of Posteguillo’s books to be translated into English.

 

The terminology in I Am Rome can be a bit daunting, in part because Posteguillo uses many Latin terms. (Triclinia? They're divans on which the Romans reclined during dinnertime. Curia Hostilia? It's the building in which the Senate of Rome met. Reus? That's the name for a defendant in a trial.) The list goes on.

Fortunately, the author has included a 19-page glossary of terms, to help the reader stay on top of things in this action-packed look at the early life of one of the most accomplished and significant figures in the ancient world. As the tension builds, you might want to grab your pugio (a Roman knife or dagger). To calm your nerves.