2024/122: Render Unto Caesar — Gillian Bradshaw

This has never been about the money, Roman. This has been about whether Roman officials can rob, cheat and murder with impunity.

The setting is Rome, 16BC. Cleopatra was defeated fairly recently: many Romans still look down on the Greeks. Hermogenes is a Greek businessman from Alexandria who travels to Rome to seek justice from the man who ruined his family by defaulting on a debt. He's accompanied by two slaves, and he stays with a friend of his father's, Titus Crispus. His initial meeting with Tarius Rufus, who owes him over half a million sestertii, doesn't go well: Rufus spits on Hermogenes, calls him 'Greekling', and generally seems disinclined to pay. When Hermogenes -- who is a Roman citizen, with all the rights that entails -- pursues the matter, he finds himself in mortal peril. He's attacked in a dark alleyway, but rescued by a witness, an ex-gladiator who becomes his bodyguard.

There's a lot packed into this novel: anti-Greek sentiment, citizens' rights, Roman politics (Hermogenes is opposed by a trio of wealthy men, friends of the absent Emperor Augustus, who are manoeuvring for dominance), and the ethics of slavery -- in particular, of sexual relations between slaves and citizens. Hermogenes, whilst definitely a man of his time and perfectly comfortable with slavery as an institution, finds himself considering how to help one of Crispus' slaves, who is not happy at having to sleep with Crispus. And that leads him to recollections of his own youthful relationship with an enslaved woman...

Hermogenes is a delightful character: he is interested in people, and he likes to be liked, but there's an inner strength that not even Hermogenes himself realises is beneath the sunny exterior. His resolution and courage are in sharp contrast to the corrupt Romans he encounters. Render Unto Caesar would be interesting if it consisted solely of his quest for justice and his growing awareness of the inequities of slavery: that it's also an unusual and thoughtful romance, and a vivid evocation of Imperial Rome with its bedbugs and stenches and wealth and squalor, makes it a splendid read.