In his extensive series featuring the detecting feats of Decius Caecilius Metellus the younger, set in the ancient Roman Empire, Roberts achieves a very believable modern feeling with his well-researched description of the stories' background. This seventh episode, however, combines a familiar view of the demands office-seeking makes on a candidate with a situation that is impossibly bizarre to us today. An entire city, versed in literature, music, and the other arts, ruled democratically, for its time, is thrown into panic by an enraged man's curse...
Decius Caecilius Metellus is happy. The weather is beautiful and he is standing for office (literally; standing, in the Roman Forum soliciting votes) with a sure chance of winning. And Caesar's ongoing dreary war is far off in Gaul. Decius is confident that another war looming over Rome, instigated by one Crassus against the Parthians (for no reason but possible worldly gain), will be voted down in the Senate. But the vote does not stop Crassus. On the day he and his troops set out from Rome, the Tribune Ateius Capitus, leader of the opposition, shrieks an ancient and terrible curse over the huge crowd assembled -- a curse that frightens not only the man in the street but the highest Romans. When Ateius is murdered soon after, Decius, solver of past mysteries, has the ugly task of finding the killer. Fascinating details of Rome's mixed attitudes about the power of magic and the practice of rational politics illuminate this latest of Roberts's strong historical mysteries.You Might Also Enjoy
Customer Reviews
Rated 4 starsMore merry murders and mores
This is another installment in the classical Roman mystery series that is closest to laugh-out-loud funny (cf. Lindsey Davis for the Brits). This episode finds our hero, Decius Caecilius Metellus, running for his first political office, that of aedile, the scut-workers at the bottom of the political ladder, but also responsible for exhausting his wealth to put on the humongously expensive public plays and gladiator games that...
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Rated 5 starsLove this series and recommending it to famly/friends.
This is a wonderfully intelligent mystery/history series. As a history buff the detail is accurate and intersting without being a dry rendition of a textbook. The characters are believable and human. I truly enjoy the sardonic humor of the main character and the author's honesty regarding how a person of that time would have viewed issues such as slavery, mass executions and imperialism. I am recommending this series to...
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Rated 5 starsSeventh in the SPQR Series
John Maddox Roberts is the pseudonym of Mark Ramsay, author of numerous works of science fiction and fantasy, in addition to his successful historical SPQR mystery series. He lives in New Mexico with his wife. This is the seventh book in the SPQR series of books about Ancient Rome in the late Republican era. They all feature Decius Caecilius Metellus the Younger as a solver of mysteries. All of the books have been consistently...
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Rated 5 starsDecius solves a very Roman mystery
The year is AUC 700, or 56 BC by our calendar. Decius Caecilius Metellus the Younger, back from several years in Gaul and happily married to his longtime love, the niece of Julius Caesar himself, is plunged into a whirlpool of intrigue when a tribune attempts to derail a powerful politician by invoking a curse on him, using religious elements he had no business using. Reading this, the reader gets a sense of how alien the...
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Rated 5 starsLong may Decius continue
I must confess I eagerly awaited the publication of John Maddox Roberts latest SPQR, and other than the fact that the hardback leaf jacket would have us believe the events within happen in 80.BC, when they occur (as the author accurate places them) in 56, the seventh installment of Decius Caecilius Metellus the Younger leaves me glad he decided to continue the SPQR series after such a long absence.Decius is back in Rome after...
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