Imaginative ... Thrilling ... A swift-paced romp through a few crucial decades of Roman history, breathing life into a figure who played a central role in the story of the late republic.
Has the strengths of most Harris novels: a strong sense of the story’s time, place, and culture, many historical insights, and sure-footed storytelling. Unfortunately for this reader, however, his protagonist turns out to be a bit dull.
It is a sign of Harris’s discipline as a novelist that he has Agrippa tell his tale in almost comically unambitious prose ... From all this elegantly drab stuff emerges a more subtle portrait of the man and the age than you might expect. You get a persuasive portrait of a Rome exhausted by civil strife, and of the serpentine manoeuvrings of its rulers.
