It only hit me that this was Cicero's actual first trial in real life, and not just a little gimmick the author threw in. This oozed atmosphere, every description added an extra level of realism to the time, the main character (Gordianus) I believe to be fictitious but the surrounding cast are all real historical figures. It caught me off guard because of this I was thrown straight into Ancient Rome with all these historical figures and their way of life and instantly donned my toga and joined in. This is one of those where I wasn't expecting to read it but it was a group read for this month, it was on my (very large) wish list, and it cost the princely sum of £0.84 on the Kindle. To rate the book on one of these levels solely would do a disservice, the mystery is playing somewhat second fiddle to the ambience for a large part of the book but then becomes the main driving force at the end. To even begin to imagine that the Gaulish boy maters as much as Caesar is to presume that some mystical quality resides in every man and makes his life equal to that of any other, and surely the lesson life teaches us is quite the opposite! In stength and intellect, men are anything but equal, and the gods lavish their attention on some more than on others.A great start to this Roman series which attacks on two levels, one being the atmosphere and culture of Ancient Rome and the other being a good old mystery.
Some men are great, others are insignificant, and it behooves those of us who are in-between to ally ourselves with the greatest and to despise the smallest. “But sometimes.sometimes I wake with a mad thought in my head: What if that boy's life mattered as much as anyone else's, even Caesar's? What if I were offered a choice: to doom that boy to the misery of his fate, or to spare him, and by doing so, to wreck all Caesar's ambitions? I'm haunted by that thought - which is ridiculous! It's self-evident that Caesar matters infinitely more than that Gaulish boy one stands poised to rule the world, and the other is a miserable slae, if he even still lives.
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