The Course of Honour by Lindsey Davis

Before Lindsey Davis hit her stride with the Falco books, she had a go at historical romance in the form of this account of the love affair between Flavius Vespasianus (who would go on to become the Emperor Vepasian) and Antonia Caenis, an ex-slave from the royal palace. The book is very good in parts. For example, I particularly enjoyed the bits about Roman politics and palace intrigues and the demented, murderous antics of Caligula and Nero. Unfortunately, the bits about their actual relationship however, can strike me as a bit, “He was a victorious Roman general. She was a humble slavegirl. THEIR LOVE WOULD ROCK AN EMPIRE!” I would have preferred to find out more about the Year of Four Caesars and the civil war, which were dealt with very breifly.

If romance is not your thing (and to be honest, it isn't really mine, either) consider reading I, Claudius instead, of even The 12 Caesars by Suetonius. “The 12 Caesars” is particularly good fun; it's like finding a copy of Heat magazine which is 2000 years old.

The Dream of Scipio - Iain Pears

My God, this is one of those books that is just too bloody clever for its own good! One quote on the cover said it was “Illumined by a fizzing passion for the recondite”. What does that even mean?

My first disappointment was that the book is not about Scipio at all, nor is it even about the original “Dream of Scipio” written by Cicero. It interweaves 3 different stories of men from different periods in history. Each of them lives near Avignon at a time when it seems that civilisation itself is under threat and faces difficult moral dilemmas.

Manlius is a Roman of patrician class, living in Gaul at the time when it is falling to the Goths (insert your own joke about black nail varnish here). The empire can't protect its territories, the slaves needed to work in the fields keep running off to join the enemy and the Christian Church has started taking over a lot of the functions of the old state. Manlius's philosophy teacher Sophia persuades him to leave his estate, bribe his way to a Bishop's job and start using his expensive education in strategy and diplomacy to do what good he can, rather than sitting in his villa reading poetry as his world falls apart.

Olivier is a medieval poet whose patron is a cardinal at the court of Pope Clement. In between delivering the cardinals letters, he tracks down ancient manuscripts makes copies and tries to preserve them. He finds a piece called “The Dream of Scipio” written by Manlius. This interests him because he can scarcely understand it and those bits he can understand seem heretical, yet it was written by a bishop. He asks advice from a Jewish scholar and falls in love with his beautiful assistant – at a time when the black death comes to Avignon and the Jews are being used as scapegoats.

Julien Barneuve is a scholar who served in the trenches of the first world war. It was this experience which led him to his belief that civilisation is to be preserved at all costs. It also leads him to retreat from the world and channel his energies into academic studies. Both Manlius and Olivier are known to him. He puts years of work into attempting to unravel the meaning of Manlius's “Dream of Scipio” and he knows Olivier as a medieval poet famous for murdering his lover and having his hands and tongue removed as punishment. Julien's lover is a Jewish artist, and yet when France falls to the Germans he takes a job with the Vichy regime in order to prevent the country descending into chaos and barbarism.

One of my major complaints about the book is that it switches between stories far too frequently. I feel like I've barely found my feet in one time, when I'm whisked off to another. This makes reading hard work. The ending was very strong (though pretty depressing), but I would have edited out most of the middle of the book, were it up to me!

I enjoyed the reversals in the final act: Manlius is corrupted by power, betrays his friend and signs tracts of land over to the barbarians, allegedly to keep the peace. Olivier, whom the reader is led to despise as murderer and ignorant medieval clod, comes good. We finally see that he sacrificed his reputation as well as his life to save his girlfriend and tutor. Julien the Vichy official immolates himself, his house and his life's work and his funeral pyre serves as a beacon to warn his friend in the resistance. Julien goes a bit crazed in the end and starts to believe that while throughout his life he has striven to preserve “civilization” through academic studies and through collaborating, he was utterly wrong. He comes to think of the Holocaust as the end product of thousands of years of progress; it required administrators, industrialists, government, police and international co-operation to make it happen. It required philosophers and theologists to prepare the ground and set up justifications. Julien's last act is therefore to destroy as much knowledge and learning as he can.

The book gives us a sort of potted history of European anti-semitism, as well as telling the reader far more than he or she ever wanted to know about Neoplatonism. The central question of the book, however, is whether it is ever right to side with evil men, in order to ameliorate their actions. By the end, Iain Pears seems pretty clear that it isn't.

The argument which dupes Julien into working for the Vichy government is that someone else will do it if he doesn't, and they'd be harsher. For my money, this argument is completely fallacious and you've my permission to punch anyone who tries to use it on you. It is no more than the trick of rhetoric known as the false dichotomy. Consider: the only thing in the whole world you can really control is your own actions therefore you have a straightforward choice between agreeing to do evil and not. The consequences of not agreeing cannot be known in advance – maybe the next candidate will refuse too. My view also passes the simple ethical test passed down to me by my mum: “What if everybody behaved like that?”. If everybody behaved my way in these circumstances, evil jobs could only be done by completely amoral people, and though some exist, they are pretty rare. “The evil done by men of good will is worst of all”. If you don't believe me, go and see Watchmen when it comes out.

To my mind civilisation is not about arcane knowledge or a classical education. It's not necessarily even about the rule of law. The word literally means the habit of living in cities, and all we really need to carry on doing that is the ability to rub along with each other without violence. Politeness, consideration and cooperation are what makes us civilised not cultivated tastes for the high arts or spending our time in contemplation. The nice thing about my way of seeing this is that each and every one of us can either do our bit to keep civilisation going or hasten its demise through our own behaviour. It's up to you. Now go out there and save the world!

One Virgin Too Many - Lindsey Davis

What did the Romans ever do for us? Apart from the roads, the aqueducts and decreasing the population of ancient Britain they provided historical fodder for Lindsey Davis’s popular detective novels about Marcus Didius Falco. Falco scrapes a living as a private informer in Rome under the Emperor Vespasian. Vespasian is probably my favourite emperor because he was in charge of the 2nd Legion (stationed in Exeter, you know) and marched around the west country, um... killing my ancestors. I think this gives us a connection.

Like American detectives of the 1950s, Falco gives us a first person narrative of his investigations. He’s an ex-legionary whose tour of duty to Britain (cold, rainy and full of violent, woad-spattered ancestors of the bookclubofone) lurks in his backstory in much the same way that ‘Nam or WW2 do for tough-guy American detectives. This is where Falco’s macho credentials end though. As a good Italian boy, he has an extended family including a domineering mother, spirited girlfriend and slightly bullying sisters to keep him in line. This tends to be what keeps this series in the “cozy mysteries” category. Unlike more morally dubious detectives (like Aurelio Zen, for example ) there is never any doubt that Falco will do the right thing in the end; if he didn’t his female relatives would hound him to the ends of the earth.

In this the 11th book in the series, Falco gets a visit from a six year-old child from one of Rome's foremost families who insists that one of her relatives wants to kill her. Unfortunately, he's in no mood for precocious children, having just come back from telling his favourite sister that her ne'er-do-well husband has been thrown to the lions in Tripoli during the 10th book. Alas, he sends the kiddie packing, only for her to go missing a couple of days later. In the meantime, his girlfriend's layabout brother is trying to get into a religious cult called the Arval Brothers (who sound like Animal House for grown up Romans). He gets blackballed... and then trips over a murdered body while leaving the feast in a big strop, so Falco has two mysteries to solve.

If you are already a fan of the series, well read on as this is much the same as the last couple. If you've never read any of these books, my advice would be to start with The Silver Pigs. That is the first book and I found it much edgier and more suspenseful than most of the others. And Exeter features briefly!