Saylor uses Roman festivals like the Lupercalia and places like the Caci Stairs (Scalae Caci) and invents stories to explain their origins. They were very religious and superstitious.Īs I read Roma, one of the things that struck me was how small historical events can become legendary.
Like the best works of historical fiction, it shows how much like us our ancestors were.
If you read it that way, Roma is an amazing novel. Just like a Rutherfurd novel, you have to keep remembering that the main character isn’t really a person it’s the city. It also doesn’t help that some of the characters are jerks. Saylor follows the Pinarii and Potitii families from 1000 BC to 1 BC and we get to see Rome grow from a small trading post to the seat of an Empire.īecause the book is structure as a series of short stories, it’s hard to bond with any of the characters. It follows a pair of families down through the centuries, highlighting the turning points in their city’s history. Steven Saylor’s Roma is a book in the Edward Rutherfurd-mode: a generational story of a city.
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