A Review by Keith Smith

When Tiro, the confidential secretary of a Roman senator, opens the door to a terrified stranger on a cold November morning, he sets in motion a chain of events which will eventually propel his master into one of the most famous courtroom dramas in history. The stranger is a Sicilian, a victim of the island’s corrupt Roman governor, Verres. The senator is Cicero, a brilliant young lawyer and spellbinding orator, determined to reach the highest levels of power in the state – Imperium. This is the starting-point of Robert Harris’ most accomplished novel to date.

Compellingly written in Tiro’s voice,the novel takes us inside the violent, treacherous world of Roman politics, to describe how one man – clever, compassionate, devious, vulnerable – fought to reach the top. Whilst at one level the dirty, back-stabbing politics of alliance and mis-alliance could be read as a simile for any era, and makes the plot of sustained interest, it is the detailed description of the way the Roman political system worked that proves absolutely compelling.

As with all of Harris’s books this is a page-turner of a far superior quality to let’s say Dan Brown, but it is the depth of research that is impressive. We instinctively feel that the events described are real, and may indeed have happened yesterday. I studied History and generally have no truck with the genre of historical novels which are sometimes mistake-ridden and nearly always feel like fiction writ large. This book is so different, I cannot wait to read the rest of the trilogy…