Empire steven saylor5/13/2023 ![]() Saylor is an excellent guide through this fascinating underworld. through 141 C.E., including the Great Fire, the persecutions of Christians, numerous military campaigns, and, of course, insanity and perversion among the emperors. ![]() The Pinarii characters afford an excellent lens through which to view both imperial and daily life, and the great events of the span from 14 C.E. Yet from Lucius the Augur, who begins the book, through Marcus the Sculptor, during the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian, the family has been rocked, as all Romans were, by the upheavals and whims of the emperors. The Pinarius family is aristocratic, so they afford readers an insider’s view into imperial palaces and gladiator games. Saylor’s brilliant approach to bringing alive the period of the Roman Empire from the reign of Augustus to the burial of Hadrian is to focus on generations of one family, the Pinarii (introduced in Roma, 2007). ![]() ![]() That leaves, as Saylor puts it, “survivors and seekers,” those living at the edge of the emperors’ bidding. How to deliver historical fiction about the Roman Empire at its height? Saylor, Latin scholar and author of the acclaimed Roma Sub Rosa mystery series, identifies one huge problem in his author’s note: “emperor-centricism.” The emperors command center stage in most accounts of Rome, as they did in life. ![]()
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