Mostly, the book was packed with well-researched, well-written, exciting history. There were a few allusions, but that was it. Pleasantly surprised, but still surprised.

In fact, I was surprised by how few there were. Just so you know, it does include swearing. Thomas told me to read it!” Then your moms will email me. When they confront you, I know what you will say. But, I don’t want you to run off an read a book that your parents would not approve of. There are a lot of teenagers hanging out on this blog. I know that much of my audience is young. Scribd taketh away.īut, I have to warn you. I started listening on Scribd, but then Scribd took it away. But it would be impossible to tell the story without the second half if Harris intends this novel to be the first of a pair, I can only imagine the second will sell in shed-loads even before publication.A few hours ago, I finished the book Imperium by Robert Harris. It could be argued that the first half of Cicero's life was not the most nail-biting, and certainly the politics of Rome became more heated in the dying days of the Republic as the shining lights of Crassus and Pompey faded and gave way to Julius Caesar, Mark Anthony and Octavian. Widely accredited with the invention of shorthand - he took down verbatim a substantial proportion of the great man's speeches - Tiro was Cicero's right-hand man until his death, not quite Alastair Campbell to his Blair (that role rather belongs to his younger brother Quintus), but a sympathetic pair of eyes through which to view a life lived on the knife-edge between a sincere love of democracy and outright corruption. Harris takes as his narrator the slave Tiro, borrowed by the young Cicero from his father and, 'like many a useful volume', never returned. And therein lies the problem: it is passion that fires a novel and whereas there is no doubt that Cicero was a Great Man, he was also ruthlessly ambitious. As a result, there is an enormous body of work by him and about him, from classical times until now.įor a novelist, the creation of a fictional biography is largely a question of sorting through the gigabytes of material and finding a way in which to present the resulting mass in a humane and engaging form. He was also a prolific speech-maker and had an ego large enough to ensure that the vast majority were written down for posterity. He was a gifted orator, an ambitious politician and a lawyer of exceptional skill who single-handedly changed the nature of Roman legal process, creating the system of adversarial advocacy that we still use today. Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43BC) was one of the intellectual and political giants of the ancient world.