"At least I'll have my enemies in front of me, on the battlefield, and I'll be surrounded by men I can trust. Here I never know what to think about the person in front of me," Julius Caesar confides as he anticipates a new military campaign far from Rome. In the week before the fateful Ides of March, he couldn't be more right about his precarious position in the capital of the empire he rules as dictator.
Although we are familiar with the story's bloody outcome from many sources, Valerio Massimo Manfredi (The Last Legion) makes it fresh by setting multiple fictional plot lines in motion. From distant Cisalpine Gaul, the trusted centurion Publius Sextius is charging at top speed to tell Caesar of a plot on his life. Publius has also dispatched back-up couriers to ensure the message gets through. All roads may lead to Rome, but Manfredi builds nail-biting suspense by having the messengers take roads in bad condition, battered by storms and infested with agents determined to stop them. The race against time to alert Caesar that "the Eagle is in danger" is tense and harrowing. Within Rome's walls, calm is not the order of the day either. Caesar suffers recurring seizures and senses "a certain tension in the air, there are... signs... clues that something is about to happen."
Caesar has loving support from his physician, his dutiful wife, Calpurnia, and others, but we know the real threat lies in the Roman Senate. Manfredi takes us inside the home of Brutus for meetings of the conspirators; he fictionalizes debates about ways to proceed and whom to invite into the plot. How was the conspiracy kept quiet in a city so rife with intrigue and betrayal? Ultimately it wasn't, Manfredi postulates, but the message with critical details was as difficult to deliver to Caesar within the city limits as from Gaul.
Purists demanding slavish adherence to the historical record are probably wise to skip this version, but fans of the intrigue of HBO's Rome and the heart-in-mouth chases of the Bourne trilogy will delight in Manfredi's imaginative melding of the conventions of historical novels and thrillers. In addition to all the nonstop action and heinous conspiracy, there are many memorable interludes, including one in which Cleopatra works Marc Antony's weakness for her with, "I'm alone in this city. There's no one I can count on." Like Caesar, Cleopatra was right there, both for herself and for everyone else.--John McFarland
Shelf Talker: A fast-paced thriller reimagines the tensions and conspiracies that climaxed in the assassination of Julius Caesar in the Roman Senate.