Fortune's Favorites

Fortune's Favorites - Colleen McCullough This is the third book in the Masters of Rome series--each book is a doorstopper, but each is also wonderful in immersing you in Ancient Rome, giving you a feel for the late Republic and the men that shaped those times. In the first two books that primarily consisted of following two brothers-in-law and uncles of Julius Caesar--Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla. In the last book we watched Marius decline and Sulla's rise. Now in this book we see Sulla at the peak of his power, and a new generation begin their rise to power--including the young Julius Caesar and Pompey. Sulla is one of the most fascinating figures in this series. McCullough manages to make a man that was arguably a sociopath sympathetic without minimizing his monstrous acts. I really felt in this book how dangerous and scary it was under his dictatorship, especially for aristocrats--reminiscent of the Terror of the French Revolution--and how that chaotic period fed into the death of the Republic. I feel a bit mixed about McCullough's Caesar. He's definitely a fascinating and admirable character here. A bit too admirable. I got the feeling McCullough was more than a bit in love with her Caesar--just as I thought Mary Renault was a bit too in love with her Alexander the Great. The degree of a character's virtue seems to tie in with whether he was for, or against Caesar, and I feel that only gets worse with successive books. They're still I think though worth the read. Like the best of historical fiction I've read, it gives you a sense not just of the everyday life of a long past era, but the very different mindset. When a classicist friend of mine told me she only wanted to have dignitas in her field, I understood what she meant because of reading this series. It made me feel I understood Ancient Rome better because of reading these books, and made me want to read more about the period.