The Triumph of Caesar

As Aaron Travis, Steven Saylor has enthralled gay readers with electric erotic prose, including his novel Slaves of the Empire, an early and amorous excursion into the world of ancient Rome.

Under his own name, Saylor has written books that are less frankly erotic, but that still carry an erotic charge, often with a queer sensibility... though "queer" is not a concept that the ancient Romans might be liable to understand. That's a crucial distinction, because the bulk of his writings under his own name have been books set in ancient Rome, and the greater part of those books, even taking into account Saylor's Michener-esque, non-Gordianus epic, Roma, have concerned a proto-private detective of the ancient world, a fellow called Gordianus the Finder.

Gordianus has narrated his own adventures in nine novels and two collections of short stories, all built around actual historic events tracing Rome's upheavals, conquests, and its pivotal civil war, a contest between two great leaders that brought the victor, Julius Caesar, to the brink of lifetime dictatorship, and then, with a sudden twist of fate, remade the world's greatest republic as an Empire--and marked the start of Rome's long decline.

Now, in the series' twelfth volume (and tenth novel), The Triumph of Caesar, Gordianus immerses himself once more into the "secret history" of Rome, the mysterious fictional events that Saylor tailors to wind and underlie historic fact.

Gordianus has just returned from Egypt (and the adventures recounted in the last book, The Judgment of Caesar), when the wife of Julius Caesar, Calpurnia, fearing that a plot is afoot to assassinate her husband, contacts Gordianus, asking for his help in uncovering who the assassins might be, and what their plans could entail. Giving Calpurnia's suspicions urgency--and giving Gordianus a personal stake in the investigation--is the murder of Gordianus' friend, Heironymus, a Massilian immigrant who has cultivated friends among Rome's nobility. But when Heironymus' investigation on behalf od Calpurnia took him too close, someone didn't like it, and knifed him by night.

Now, with voluminous reports on Heironymus' investigation, and his friend's personal journal, as keys, Gordianus examines the political undercurrents roiling the great city and its shattered, war-weary populace. To restore public confidence, Caesar has planned four grand ceremonies in quick succession, "Triumphs" to celebrate his victories around the world.

But all is not pomp and circumstance: there are dark mutterings about Caesar as a dictator from those who do not desire a de facto king, and while Roman nobles resent the elevation of leaders from the conquered Gauls to positions in the Roman senate, others among those very same Gauls may still resent Rome's victory and plot Caesar's undoing... along with certain Egyptian factions, possibly even including Cleopatra, in town with the child she claims is Caesar's son, though the great general refuses to lay claim to the child.

The mystery is propelled by the fact that the reader knows that plots are, or soon will be, hatched against Caesar; as clever a novelist as he is, Saylor plays by the rules and never writes contrary to history. But even as Gordianus sorts through clues and interviews likely suspects, the book is taken over by the Triumphs themselves, ecstatic exercises in evocation that summon Rome to the reader's imagination as it must have looked and sounded.

Saylor has a talent for re-creating daily life in the ancient world, and now he shows how skilled he is at showing life during extraordinary times, too: in addition to the great spectacle of the Triumphs, a new calendar is about to be initiated (the Julian calendar is the forebear of our own still-used Gregorian calendar); these almost literally earth-moving developments come upon a city recovering from civil war, where fear and uncertainty still rule; a city that has lost fully half its residents in the pitched struggle between factions.

In his last few Gordianus novels, Saylor has skirted elements that transcend either historical fiction or murder mystery conventions, and flirted with the supernatural. In A Mist of Prophecies, Gordianus encountered a young woman who claimed to have the ability to see the future; in The Judgment of Caesar, something very much like divine intervention seems to have saved the day; now, Gordianus finds himself haunted (literally, at one point) by the shade of his murdered friend. Sometimes this gives the book an alien, but compelling, tone; the world as we know it is not the world the Romans knew, because to them the world was a stranger and wilder place, overseen by erratically whimsical gods and other spirits.

At other times, the use of Heironymus' shade (or his manifestation in Gordianus' subconscious) approaches the more mundane realm of detective fiction where a mystery is unraveled and a killer identified in a detective's dreams.

But Saylor seems to be on to something here: as Gordianus, now sixty, grows older, Saylor has made an effort to portray his slowing reflexes and faded observational capacity; surely it's fitting that a man of sixty, in a world where that constitutes ripe old age, should be thinking of the world, in its material and spiritual aspects, differently than he used to.

Even as he allows Gordianus to age, Saylor seems to be preparing a successor: a younger, quicker Finder to take over.

But not yet. As things work out in The Triumph of Caesar, it seems that Saylor has got a natural trilogy going, and while the new book tells its story and resolves in a satisfying manner, the closing pages seem to tingle with the charge and the demand of history: what Saylor will do next with his highly imaginative, meticulously researched "secret history" is a matter of ongoing interest. Clearly, we need a Finder, or two, to look into it.