Manda Scott, The Emperor’s Spy, (Transworld Digital, 2010)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6940527-rome
Historical thriller with fabulous characters set in Nero’s Rome
Sebastos was twelve years old when he discovered his father was a traitor. The almonds were in bloom. He watched from a rock as his father the decurion led the three Hebrew women to the tomb. A rabbi and a Galilean Sicari followed.
‘He’s alive,’ the women reported to them. The Sicari produced silver from his purse.
‘The Galilean was everyone’s hero, even though he was an enemy.’
Pantera bears scars from his time in Britannia. Sent to battle Boudica, he instead joined the rebels.
A grubby urchin named Math watches the people off the ship in Coriallum and their belt-pouches. Math is apprenticed to Ajax the charioteer, and dreams of becoming a driver; he is mothered by Hannah the healer. He has been paid an entire sestertius to follow a man, oak-brown hair, eyes the green-brown colour of a river—Sebastos Abdes Pantera.
With an entire denarius, Pantera and the philosopher Seneca turn the boy to spy for them. There is a Sybilline prophecy, predicting that Rome will burn.
The entire Green chariot-racing team is taken to Alexandria, then Rome, to run for Nero.
The characters are from all corners of the empire. It was especially juicy to recognise some from Christian legend—the Galilean in the tomb, Saulos the Idumaean, Shimon the Zealot, the Sicari. They are twisted brilliantly and unexpectedly into the story of the Great Fire.
The writing is beautiful, subtle, with gorgeous metaphors like ‘Nero’s progress was that of a scythe through corn, leaving untidy rows felled in his wake’; ‘his hair…. was the white of old snow as it rots in spring, flat and greyly stained with the colours of his earlier life’. Scott demonstrates wonderful knowledge of the ancient Roman world; tantalising details are woven into the scenes, things I had not known before.
It’s hard to believe anyone ever dared write another novel about Nero’s Rome after this one.
Susie Helme 
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