01
The Consular Candidate
The summons came at the third hour. Lucius Valerius Catullus, junior consular secretary, received it from a Praetorian who didn't meet his eyes.
Stories rooted in real people and real events. The history is the foundation; the fiction is what the record could not tell.
The summons came at the third hour. Lucius Valerius Catullus, junior consular secretary, received it from a Praetorian who didn't meet his eyes.
Marcus found the creek by following the deer trail downslope. The dogs were ranging ahead—Kara and Bell, his tracking pair—and they'd stopped at the water's edge, ears forward, tails low.
Niccolò Polo learned the war had reached the Volga from a spice merchant who would not meet his eyes.
Marco Lombardi had been working the Genoa docks for twelve years when the galleys came back from Caffa.
The delegation arrived at the sixth hour, when Sulla was reviewing execution lists.
Paolo unloaded the ships that came into Genoa in October of 1347, and he remembered, later, that the gulls would not land on the masts.
They brought the old man into the room at noon and sat him across from Tribune Casca, who had been asking questions about Cicero's death for three days and had not yet received an answer that satisfied anyone.
Marcus Junius Brutus faces the impossible choice between personal loyalty to Caesar and ancestral duty to the Republic in the days before the Ides of March assassination.
Cicero faces his final confrontation with Mark Antony, choosing martyrdom over exile as he delivers one last defense of the dying Roman Republic.
King Priam risks everything in a midnight journey to enemy camp to ransom his son Hector's body from Achilles, discovering that shared grief transcends hatred.
Tribune Cassius Chaerea endures months of humiliation from Emperor Caligula through deliberately effeminate passwords. His professional patience and accumulated evidence lead to the assassination that ended the reign of a mad god.
In 82 BCE, the dictator Sulla faces a decision that will reshape Roman history: whether to execute the young Julius Caesar or spare the one person he knows will undo his life's work.
Alcibiades swore by the gods to help the Spartan ambassadors. By evening, he had destroyed them with their own words. In Athens, oaths were just another weapon of war.
In 30 BCE Alexandria, Augustus faces the brutal arithmetic of empire: which of Antony's children live and which die, and why mercy sometimes defies all political logic.
When forensic archaeologist Dr. Elena Vasquez discovers evidence that could rewrite human history, she faces a choice between truth and the peace that comes from not knowing.
When the Ninth Legion Hispana vanished beyond Hadrian's Wall in 120 CE, Tribune Marcus Flavius Tertius was tasked with investigating their fate. The testimonies he collected reveal a choice between conquest and guardianship that echoes across the centuries.
Young Julius Caesar, captured by pirates who demand twenty talents for his freedom, laughs in their faces and insists he's worth at least fifty. They think it's arrogance. They don't understand it's a promise.
When Washington asked for a volunteer to spy on the British, the old French sergeant knew better. 'I do not feel willing to go among them to be hung up like a dog.' But Nathan Hale was twenty-one, and twenty-one has never understood the wisdom of staying alive.
He had mapped three continents, survived two shipwrecks, and catalogued the ruins of empires no one else believed had existed. What he could not map was the silence that followed him home.
An elderly baker whose bread won't rise discovers that the secret ingredient is community when a traveling musician and regular customers help him rediscover the joy of his craft.
Thank you. Matthias reads every message and will reply when he can.