| Allan Massie's Nero's Heirs | ||||||
| Reviewed by Irene Hahn | ||||||
Allan Massie Nero's Heirs Paperback - 248 pages new edition (14 July, 2000) Sceptre Australia; ISBN: 0340718773
Allan Massie
THUS BEGINS THE gripping story of Nero's Heirs and the Year of the Four Emperors. The person enlisted by Tacitus is the - fictional - M. Aemilius Scaurus, exact contemporary and former playmate of Domitian, and natural son of Narcissus, the secretary to the Emperor Claudius. Still in exile, by now self-imposed, he tries to compose his recollections of the fateful year for Tacitus, and is confronted with his personal memories of those months. The story alternates between letters to Tacitus and recollections, not fit for the eyes of Tacitus, often painfully relived. Living with his impoverished Claudian mother in Rome, the sometime lover of Titus and of Domitilla is in close contact with Domitian and Flavius Sabinus throughout the events, and a correspondent to Titus. As emissary of the Emperor Otho to Vespasian, he also meets the future historian Josephus. Aside from the Flavians, Allan Massie, the author of Augustus and other novels of the era, paints a vivid picture of the city of Rome and the other main actors in this drama: Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Mucianus - and in flashbacks, the poet Lucan. One can only too easily imagine the city of Rome of 68 CE and all the terrors it involved having to live through those days. But the book is more than that. In Scaurus, Massie has created a protagonist who transcends the immediate history of the era, a human being confronted with his past and still not certain of the validity of his own life and actions. To add to that, an uneasy confrontation with Christianity presages future internal conflicts. Of the historical novels by Allan Massie, beginning with Caesar, this is the one I liked best. It seems to me the most rounded one, maybe because Massie presents to the reader a person from within his own mind, not from history. Here, history is the prop to a personal journey. The language is elegant and compelling, with fewer use of today's vernacular than in Massie's earlier books. He also follows the sometime tradition of historical translators to substitute French for Greek terms. The book is not available in the U.S., but can be ordered online from Amazon.uk or similar stores.
See Irene Hahn's site. This resource page is copyright © 2001-2004 Irene Hahn.
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