Bruce Macbain’s Roman Games launches an excellent new Roman mystery series. If you are a fan of Steven Saylor, Lindsey Davis, or Roman history in general, you’ll want to pick it up. His detective, Plinius Secundus (Pliny the Younger), a decent, straight-laced senator, teams up with Martial, a poet of racy and scurrilous verses, to untangle a delightfully twisted murder case.
Macbain’s teaching career as a classicist and ancient historian definitely shows in his lively and detailed depiction of Roman life—the unsanitized version. Wild orgiastic parties, exotic Egyptian cults, informers, torturers, whores, and the demented Emperor Domitian all make historically accurate appearances. Pliny faces a number of morally compromising situations from which he does not always come away unscathed, and yet this flawed but likeable man keeps us on his side, if sometimes only by the skin of his teeth. Macbain’s skill in character development extends to both major and minor characters throughout the book. Of Pliny he says at one point, “He worried his appearance lacked the gravitas of a Roman senator and so he frowned whenever he wanted to impress. He was frowning now.” Of Scortilla, concubine of the murder victim, he says, “The lady lay propped on her bed, bone thin and bone white, the tendons in her neck standing out like ropes, her towering red wig askew. But it was her eyes that held him. He thought back to this morning’s sacrifice on the Capitolium—the look in the ox’s eye when the victimarius stunned it with a blow of his hammer.”
Reading the scenes in which Domitian spirals into paranoia and gratuitous cruelty made me wonder if the book couldn’t be used as a guide to understanding the present day Gadhafi. Unfortunately, crazy tyrants are still with us, and Macbain’s portrayal is excellent: terrifying and creepy without going overboard.
Macbain combines imagined characters and events with those we know from primary sources of the period, and his author’s note tells you precisely where the boundaries are. If you remember Pliny and Martial fondly from your college days, you’ll feel at home with the characters he’s created for them. On the other hand, if you know little or nothing about Rome, this is a page-turning, fun place to solve that deficiency!
Judith, thank you for the kind review. I'm at work on the sequel now. In it Pliny is ten years older and the governor of Bithynia. His sidekick this time is Suetonius, author of The Twelve Caesars. They find themselves involved with another religious cult and another misunerstood disease. Should be out in about a year.
Regards,
Bruce Macbain
I found the depiction of the Isis cult fascinating in this book, so I look forward to more on the religious cults of the Roman world. I know that is an area of special interest to you. My own work focuses somewhat on medicine, such as it was, in the Late Bronze Age–far less documentation than the Roman period! It was fun to see bits of Pliny's letters reworked into a mystery novel.
Judith, I always enjoy you reviews which I think are excellent! I am a retired nurse and interested in medicine as well. Good luck on your work!
Thank you, Maude. Bruce MacBain has another one that should be coming out any day with Pliny the Second way over in Bithynia. Should be lots of fun!
Comments are closed.