Betrayal: A Novel of Rome

Gaius Julius Caesar is dead. His has made his grandnephew and adoptive son, the nineteen-year-old Gaius Octavius, his sole heir. Octavian has come to Rome to claim his dangerous inheritance. He and Mark Antony have come to terms, and together with Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, have formed the Second Triumvirate. Their proscriptions are in full flow. Cicero has been murdered, to satisfy Antony’s desire for bloody revenge.

Across the city in the Subura, a disreputable and down-at-heel district, and the location of Caesar’s ancestral mansion, Servius Curius has inherited the estate of his late grandfather, Lucius Curius, one of Cicero’s spies. After a visit from a stranger, and the delivery of an old document case, his slave attendant Demetrius, who has his own cryptic past, guides his young master to the revelation of a tragic family secret, interwoven with his reminiscences of witnessing the zenith of Cicero’s consulship, as he breaks the deadly conspiracy of Lucius Sergius Catilina.

The consequences of the rivalry and feuding between the vengeful and bloodthirsty dictator Lucky Sulla, the quarrelsome and devious patrician Lucius Cornelius Cinna, and Caesar’s uncle, the murderous consul and general Gaius Marius, twenty years earlier, play out in the last generation of the Roman Republic. Crassus and Catiline, enthusiastic participants in Lucky Sulla’s proscriptions, have to choose sides, while Caesar tries to negotiate a rapprochement between Crassus and Pompeius.

The ambitious and malevolent praetor-elect Caesar charms and manipulates friend and enemy alike, without consideration for their rank or eminence. His candidacy for the office of Pontifex Maximus is financed by an avaricious and grasping Marcus Licinius Crassus, the wealthy businessman and city landowner. Publius Claudius Pulcher, Caesar’s friend and client, wreaks havoc in the Senate, while his gang rampages through the streets of Rome, providing cover for his patron’s subversive ambitions.

The novel is set the last years of the Roman Republic, against the backdrop of the tumultuous events in the city, from the Second Catilinarian Conspiracy, to the formation of the Second Triumvirate.