Once a Sicilian aristocrat, the man was robbed by the corrupt Roman governor, Verres, who is now trying to convict him under false pretenses and sentence him to a violent death. On a cold November morning, Tiro opens the door to find a terrified, bedraggled stranger begging for help. The re-creation of a vanished biography written by his household slave and righthand man, Tiro, Imperium follows Cicero’s extraordinary struggle to attain supreme power in Rome. In his “most accomplished work to date” ( Los Angeles Times), master of historical fiction Robert Harris lures readers back in time to the compelling life of Roman Senator Marcus Cicero. O'Billovich lessįrom the bestselling author of Fatherland and Pompeii, comes the first novel of a trilogy about the struggle for power in ancient Rome.
161-180) as well as the basic tenets of stoicism, is accessible and jaunty. Hays's introduction, which sketches the life of Marcus Aurelius (emperor of Rome A.D. Whether these, and other entries ("Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life.") sound life-changing or like entries in a teenager's diary is up to the individual reader, as it should be. Now take what's left and live it properly.") and rhetorically ("What is it in ourselves that we should prize?"). The book, which Hays calls, fondly, a "haphazard set of notes," is indicative of the role of philosophy among the ancients in that it is "expected to provide a 'design for living.'" And it does, both aphoristically ("Think of yourself as dead. Hays suggests that its most recent incarnation-as a self-help book-is not only valid, but may be close to the author's intent. One measure, perhaps, of a book's worth, is its intergenerational pliancy: do new readers acquire it and interpret it afresh down through the ages? The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, translated and introduced by Gregory Hays, by that standard, is very worthwhile, indeed.
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