Collegium

Shortlisted for the 2022 Chaucer Historical Fiction awards - Based around historically factual events.
31 BCE, Egypt has fallen, Cleopatra and Antonius are dead by their own hands and Octavius Caesar is now the most powerful man on earth. But Caesar’s position is far from secure, with enemies in the Senate plotting against him and renegade legionaries still loyal to Antonius fermenting rebellion, among them, the renegade legate of the Third Aegyptus, Titus Eximius, who, sworn to topple the young tyrant, escapes from Egypt and turns to the Barbarians of Moesia to raise a Celtic army to invade Italy, financed by a vast treasure hidden by Marcus Antonius years ago. Titus has no idea that Caesar’s legions are secretly poised to conquer Moesia to secure the empire’s frontiers along the mighty Danube.
In Rome, an insidious group of senators and political enemies led by Fannius Caepio are plotting Caesar’s assassination, but they know they’re powerless without military assistance, and so, an alliance is made between the plotters and the Antonians, who are set on rekindling the civil war.
Our hero, Sabinus, the ennobled blood son of the infamous and villainous Grassator (gangster) First Centurion of the Fifth Macedonica, Nepos Maximo, the Bastard of the Aventine commands the “Speculatorii Irregularis,” a small band of elite behind enemy lines (special forces)., hot on the tail of the retreating legate of the Third Aegyptus, Titus Eximius with orders to hunt down and destroy his renegade legion.
Soon after, Rome’s Greek and Macedonian legions begin the conquest of Moesia, to secure the Danubius (Danube) River.
Sabinus with his Irregulars pursues Titus Eximius into war-torn Moesia, battling their way through a formidable enemy to rendezvous with the Fifth Macedonica, where Sabinus id reunited with his blood father, Nepos Maximo, the Bastard of the Aventine.
Titus Eximius, with his officers has joined King Budorix of the Triballi, a warlike Moesian Celtic people who lay between the Fifth Macedonica and its prize – the fortified city of Ratiaria on the Danubius River.
King Budorix has amassed a huge army of barbarian allies and intends to stop the Romans and drive them back to Macedonia and the two armies come face to face in a bloody and violent battle, upon which hangs the success or failure of the conquest and Sabinus’s prize, Titus Eximius and the eventual fight to the death between the two bitter enemies … only one will survive…