Review: "The Seven Wonders," Steven Saylor

By Paul Carrier

This may get a bit complicated, but only briefly. That's what happens when you try to describe a prequel to a prequel to a series.

Back in 1991, Steven Saylor released Roman Blood, the first of his Roma Sub Rosa novels. Set in in Rome in 80 B.C., the mystery stars as its protagonist Gordianus the Finder, a Roman who makes his living as a private investigator.

Several novels and short-story collections followed, mostly in chronological order as time marched on and Gordianus aged, until The Triumph of Caesar, set in 46 B.C., hit bookstores in 2008. Since then, two prequels have appeared that take us back to a time preceding Roman Blood, when Gordianus was still a very young man.

In The Seven Wonders, an 18-year-old Gordianus sets out on a coming-of-age voyage in 92 B.C. Four years later, Gordianus, by now all of 22, heads to the Nile Delta on a case in Raiders of the Nile.
 

The Seven Wonders is what is sometimes called a fix-up novel, meaning it is a collection of short stories that have been strung together. At the outset, the young Gordianus and his tutor, the real-life Greek poet Antipater of Sidon, sail from Rome to explore the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, or what's left of them. They do so after the aging but mischievous Antipater adopts a pseudonym, fakes his death in Rome and then manages to attend his own funeral.

Almost every chapter in the novel is tied to a specific site on the tour. As Gordianus and his mentor travel from location to location, Gordianus begins to hone the professional skills that will serve him well later in life. Looming ominously in the background throughout the trip is the growing ambition of Mithridates VI of Pontus, who soon proved to be one of the Roman Republic's greatest adversaries.

Gordianus and Antipater begin their adventures in Ephesus, a Greek-speaking city in what is now Turkey, where they stop to visit the Temple of Artemis. While there, the resourceful Gordianus manages to save the life of a teenage-age girl whom the murderous head priest planned to kill.

Following a stop in Halicarnasses, another city in present-day Turkey, they head to Olympia during the 172nd Olympiad, to see the massive Statue of Zeus. During their stay, Gordianus solves a murder and saves a star athlete who has been falsely accused. An interlude to view the ruins of Corinth paves the way for a trip to Rhodes, to see the remains of the earthquake-shattered Colossus. Other excursions follow.

Saylor is known for his expertise on the ancient world, and "The Seven Wonders" combines page-turning fiction with neatly integrated history lessons. In the course of instructing Gordianus, Antipater and various well-informed locals whom they meet along the way school the reader as well, explaining, for example, that the Temple of Artemis was four times the size of the Parthenon in Athens.

For his part, Gordianus is suitably awestruck by the marvels, as befits an 18-year-old who is visiting them for the first time. Surely, Gordianus notes upon seeing the massive Statue of Zeus at Olympia, "this was not a mere statue, but the god himself."

But Saylor offers up more than a series of mysteries folded into a travelogue. In the final pages, the ever-patriotic Gordianus seeks to protect the Roman Republic from the machinations of Mithridates' newly revealed operatives in Alexandria. Still more noteworthy for fans of the later novels is that Gordianus, while in Alexandria, meets and buys the young slave Bethesda, who figures so prominently in the Roma Sub Rosa series.

The educational aspect of The Seven Wonders is all the more interesting because I'd wager that most readers are familiar with only some of these marvels, and then only superficially. The Great Pyramid of Giza will ring a few bells. So will the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. But the aforementioned Temple of Artemis? The Mausoleum at Halicarnasses? I doubt it.

Review: "Raiders of the Nile," Steven Saylor

By Paul Carrier

Gordianus the Finder, the protagonist in Steven Saylor’s popular Roma Sub Rosa mystery series set in Ancient Rome, is a skilled but fictional detective whose work over a period of years brings him into contact with such real-life giants as Cicero, Pompey and Julius Caesar.

But even the famed Gordianus was naive and inexperienced at the outset of his career, and it is that somewhat callow youth whom readers meet in Raiders of the Nile, which is set in Egypt in 88 BC.

The book opens with the normally law-abiding Gordianus helping a criminal gang steal the golden sarcophagus of Alexander the Great from his tomb in Alexandria. Saylor then backtracks to explain how this event came about, before concluding with a look at the highly dramatic consequences of the theft.

Published in 2014, Raiders of the Nile is a prequel to Roman Blood (1991), the first novel in the Roma Sub Rosa series. In this entry, Gordianus and Bethesda, his Egyptian-born slave and lover, are celebrating his 22th birthday in Alexandria when bandits led by a man dubbed the Cuckoo’s Child mistake Bethesda for the supposed mistress of Tafhapy, a wealthy shipping magnate.

The culprits kidnap Bethesda; ransom notes follow. But the haughty Tafhapy feels no obligation to buy the release of a woman he doesn’t even know, especially because the intended kidnapping victim is safe and sound in his fortress-like home.

Tafhapy does tell Gordianus what has happened to Bethesda, however. The merchant lends Gordianus a young slave boy named Djet, who accompanies Gordianus into the Nile Delta, where Tafhapy believes the Cuckoo’s Child probably has Bethesda holed up.

So much for what had been Gordianus’ “aimless but amiable existence in the teeming city of Alexandria.”

As the travels and travails of Gordianus and Djet unfold in Gordianus’ quest to find and rescue Bethesda, the wisecracking and resourceful Djet provides a welcome dose of comic relief, putting Gordianus and everyone else he meets in their place with a cocky demeanor that belies his status as a child and a slave.

In fact, the cast of characters in Raiders of the Nile is appealingly varied. It includes two likable eunuchs, a theater troupe, a reptilian tavern keeper at the Inn of the Hungry Crocodile, a powerful sorceress and even a tame lion cleverly disguised as a fierce monster.

Their interwoven adventures play themselves out against a backdrop of clashing political ambitions. King Ptolemy’s hold on Egypt is disintegrating amid rumors of an invasion by his brother, Soter; and the Roman Republic has locked horns with the powerful empire of King Mithridates.

Although Raiders of the Nile is a prequel to the Roma Sub Rosa series, it’s also a sequel to The Seven Wonders (2013), in which the 18-year-old Gordianus encountered various mysteries while visiting the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
 

Anyone wishing to read the series in chronological order, rather than the order in which the books were published, should start with the two most recent books: The Seven Wonders, followed by Raiders of the Nile. Then you can jump to Roman Blood, and join Gordianus on his subsequent escapades.

Review: "Roman Blood," Steven Saylor

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."

Review: "Empire," Steven Saylor

 

By Paul Carrier

The subtitle of Steven Saylor’s Empire is telling; it describes this 584-page opus as "the novel of imperial Rome," not a novel set in that period. 

That's a bold claim because it implies a comprehensive approach to the long-lived Roman empire. To a great extent, Saylor delivers; he certainly has a broader reach than many writers whose works of fiction set in ancient Rome cover a far more limited period of time.

What Saylor has done, consistent with Roma, his earlier novel on Rome’s founding and the development of the Republic, is to examine an unusually large swath of Roman history in a single volume. In this case, his time machine carries us through a century of the empire's history, from 14 to 141 A.D. That's a long period of time, but only a fraction of the empire’s lifespan.

The broad sweep allows Saylor to touch upon the reigns of several emperors, starting with Augustus, the first ruler to hold that title; his adopted son and heir, Tiberius; the degenerate Caligula; the unlikely Claudius; the self-absorbed Nero; the paranoid, power-mad Domitian; and eventually on to the reigns of two of the so-called good emperors: Trajan, the empire's first foreign-born leader; and Hadrian, of Hadrian’s Wall fame.

The spine of the novel, the structure that carries it over such a long period of time, is the same one Saylor used in Roma: tracking succeeding generations of a noble Roman family, the Pinarii. On hand from the city’s founding through the development and decline of the Republic in Roma, the Pinarii carry on in Empire, witnessing, and sometimes participating in, the triumphs and tragedies of imperial Rome.

Thus, the novel opens with young Lucius Pinarius as he is about to become an augur, an official who predicts the future by reading omens. Thanks to his friendship with Claudius, a cousin and member of the imperial household, Lucius meets Augustus late in the aged emperor’s life.

When Tiberius succeeds Augustus, Lucius and his family, including twin sons Titus and Kaeso, are banished to Egypt. The twins return to Rome when Caligula is in power. Titus proudly serves as an augur, like his father before him, while Kaeso turns his back on official Rome by converting to Christianity.

And so it goes, with additional generations of Pinarii giving the reader a glimpse into both the annals of the family and the history of the empire. We are on hand when Praetorian Guards assassinate Caligula and Claudius becomes emperor; when much of Rome burns in 64 A.D. during Nero’s reign; and when the newly completed Colosseum (then known as the Flavian Amphitheatre) opens 16 years later.

As the author of a dozen mystery novels set in ancient Rome, Taylor is intimately familiar with the period, and he uses that knowledge to work history lessons, large and small, into the narrative. (Ever heard of a “scurra”? Me neither. He was a guy who livened up the elite’s dinner conversations by regaling guests with gossip and jokes.)

The plotting is, by necessity, episodic, because the extended time frame only allows us to spend a bit of time in any one period. But even with its long view, Empire has a narrower focus than Roma, which embraced about 1,000 years in the life of early Rome. Although the empire survived long after 141 A.D., Empire draws to a close at that point in time. 

Saylor does not so much provide a fresh view of the well-trodden ground of imperial Rome as humanize its key figures, be they admirable or horrific. Empire repeatedly reminds us that, beneath the grandeur and power of ancient Rome, there bubbled a cauldron of treachery, ambition and lust, for both power and sex.

No one, not even seemingly all-powerful emperors and self-important members of their families, was immune from the recurring violence that settled so many rivalries in that time and place. It would do Saylor an injustice to claim that Empire wrote itself, but there’s no denying that the author had a treasure trove of salaciousness, depravity, egomania and bloodletting to work with in crafting this captivating tale.

 

Review: "Roma," Steven Saylor

By Paul Carrier

Steven Saylor isn’t kidding when he bills Roma as a novel about “ancient” Rome. If you're conception of antiquity begins and ends with the assassination of Julius Caesar, Saylor's sweeping effort will expand your horizons.

Roma reaches so far back in time that Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of the city, don’t even make an appearance until the reader is more than 50 pages in. The tiny settlement along the Tiber River does not start calling itself Roma until the same point in the novel. And Julius Caesar doesn’t walk on stage until page 460 in this 549-page epic.

I mention none of this by way of complaint, because Saylor’s thoroughness is welcome when combined with his accessible writing style and careful plotting. In fact, his decision to take us back to the beginning is rewarding because we catch a glimpse of the formative years of Roman mythology and legend. 

Roma recreates 1,000 years of the city’s history, as seen through the eyes of the Potitius and Pinarius famillies. The reader first visits Rome when it is nothing more than a stop along a trade route and watches it grow into a small settlement that gradually expands into the ancient Rome with which we are all familiar.

Remus dies in a dispute with Romulus, who rules Rome with increasing autocracy and boosts the city’s population by kidnapping Sabine women. Following the death and deification of Romulus, Rome is ruled by a succession of kings until the formation of the republic in 509 B.C. or so.

Saylor explores the sacking of Rome by the Gauls in 390 B.C., the construction of the Appian Way and the first aqueduct, Hannibal’s invasion of Italy and Italy’s defeat of the Carthaginians.

Eventually, the dictator Sulla emerges triumphant during a civil war; Caesar defeats Pompey, only to be assassinated in 44 B.C.; and Octavius destroys the forces of Mark Antony and Cleopatra, inaugurating the age of empire and emperors.

Roma requires some concentration because the 1,000-year time frame of the novel involves an ever-changing cast of characters. The plethora of Latin names can become a bit confusing, especially in the case of obscure or fictitious people with whom 21st-century readers are not familiar.

Part of the novel’s appeal stems from the fact that Saylor explores intriguing themes, such as the transformation of the mundane into the mythological, the corrupting influence of power and the fickleness of the mob. The mutual suspicion between patricians and plebeians is a recurring source of tension. And because Roma spans a millennium, it offers repeated reminders that glory is fleeting.

Saylor is best known as the author of the deservedly popular Roma Sub Rosa mystery series set in ancient Rome. That fine collection of novels and short stories features a detective named Gordianus the Finder, who plies his trade in the time of Cicero, Pompey and Julius Caesar.

Saylor's passion for Roman history illuminates Roma, which educates and entertains with telling details about daily life (such as the complexity of wearing a toga properly), as well as descriptions of the city’s complex politics, evolving religious beliefs, critical military victories and chilling setbacks.

It makes for an engrossing read, and a thought-provoking one as well. The Roman republic survived for about 500 years before democratic rule collapsed under the authoritarian might of the emperors. That’s almost twice as long as the United States of America has been around - so far.