The horrifying ends of the two are foreshadowing. Gordianus and Cinna (and one of those who would plunge a dagger into him in the Senate the next day) were at Caesar’s last dinner, at which Cinna read his just completed, after a decade’s work, “Orpheus and Pentheus.” Both title characters were dismembered while still living and trying to sing or speak. The mystery(ies) center on the poet Cinna, whom Julius Caesar much admired as the greatest living Roman poet (Catullus had been dead a decade).
(cover with part of the 1864 painting byKarl von Ponti) Gordianus’s Egyptian wife, Bethesda (turned from slave to Roman matron), and daughter, Diana, play little part until after the assassination, which then focuses on women, including Fulvia, the brains of Marc Antony’s rise to great wealth and power. Though unhappy at his marginalization, Cicero is the last patrician still standing at the end. Cicero continues his prickly relationship with Gordianus. In a book that begins five days before the 44 BC, Saylor shows how Caesar loomed over the world (the West, that is), as well as frailties (there are no epileptic seizures, but some mania and some fatigue). I can understand Saylor’s reluctance to take on the assassination of Gaius Julius Caesar, including swerving back to writing three prequels to the series before proceeding to the famed “main event.” Unlike the historical figures, the reader knows whodunit, where, when, and their rationalizations of breaking their oaths to the dictator who had not only spared many of them but raised them to high offices. That Saylor could build a mystery around the most famous murder in history is amazing. I finished the 14 th and probably final Steven Saylor Roma Sub Rosa novel narrated by Gordianus, the Finder, Throne of Caesar, saddened (for myself, not for Gordianus) by his retirement after this (unpaid-for) case as a proto-privatee detective.
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