The final installment of Robert Harris’s Cicero trilogy was impossible to leave waiting on the shelf so I started it immediately after finishing Lustrum.
It follows Cicero travails (and travels) as the Roman Republic falls and Caesar gradually wins out over Pompey and Crassus. As before it’s a fabulous way of learning about these amazing historical tales, especially for somebody such myself who knew fragments of the story but had never really pieced it all together.
It’s a brilliant merging of history, political thinking, action, philosophy, and society gossip, and a very worthy climax to the trilogy. Maybe I’d just fallen into Harris’s groove but I found this even more rewarding and enjoyable than the preceding pair.
And I especially enjoyed this quote:
There is a wonderful line in one of Cicero’s letters to Atticus in which he describes moving into a property and says: I have put out my books and now my house has a soul.
