Survival demands guile and moral compromise - #HistoricalFiction #AncientRome #Giveaway

Blurb

"The blood of the bulls on Jupiter’s hill gave them liberty—the words graven unto these Twelve Tables made them equal."

ROME, 462 BC. To save his family’s failing farm, sixteen-year-old Marcus Atilius is sold into debt servitude by his own father. Plunged into the city’s underbelly, Marcus must endure a world of cutthroat trading stalls and gritty warehouses, all while navigating a forbidden entanglement with a woman far above his station. Survival demands sharp guile and moral compromise.

As a bitter class struggle pushes Rome toward the brink of civil war, Marcus vows to beat the elites at their own ruthless game to win his freedom and a fortune worthy of the woman he loves.

Yet his rise brings a fateful choice. A historic demand sweeps the city for the Twelve Tables—a revolutionary legal code to protect plebeians from patrician tyranny. With a corrupt aristocrat holding the tether to his trading empire, will Marcus protect his hard-won power, or risk everything for the soul of Rome?

Excerpt

Merchants, workers, and donkey-drawn carts trampled the winding streets of packed dirt. Shouting vendors sold nuts and fruit. Tinkers hammered. Donkeys brayed. Fishmongers hollered. Traders in sheds with awnings stood behind counters with meat and cheese calling out prices. Goats bleated. Cows bellowed. Sides of pork and beef hung on iron hooks, alongside bare-armed butchers in spattered tunics. Beggars and thieves lurked outside taverns, and scrawny boys emptied chamber pots into gutters. Flies buzzed, buyers haggled, and the ripe, pungent smells of manure, fish, roasted chickpeas, sweat, and animal musk clashed in the air.

It was a loud, brawling, stinking, clawing, thriving place, and Marcus had come to love it, though the thrill it gave him caused guilt over betraying the simple virtue of the Alban Hills. Many things were traded in the Boarium, but virtue was not one of them. Greed and guile and bronze were. All the same, he could not deny the jolt he got from the bustling energy and naked competition, every trade contested. A hard-eyed, lusty pursuit of wealth that not only didn’t exclude plebeians but favored them. Patricians didn’t dirty their hands in butcher stalls or slaughtering pens. They owned the law and most of the land, but in the Boarium, commoners ruled. Olives and goats and grain turned into bronze for plebs who were willing to jostle and work. Here they were less burdened by the ancient customs and traditions that priests and nobles too often turned against them. The laws of the market were clear—and applied to all. Buy or sell. Eat or be eaten. Gain or loss. These were laws Marcus understood.

About the Author

Richard Barager is the author of The Atheist and the Parrotfish and Altamont Augie, the latter a winner of the Silver Medal in Foreword Reviews 2011 Book of the Year Awards (Historical Fiction); a Gold Medal in the 2011 eLit Book Awards (Literary Fiction); and a Silver Medal in the Independent Publisher 2012 Regional Book Awards. The Wall Street Journal reviewed Altamont Augie in its Five Best column: “No other novel so crystallizes the themes, flavors and attitudes of an era [the 1960s].” The Atheist and the Parrotfish was featured on Book Talk Radio, with Kory French. Richard completed undergraduate studies and medical school at the University of Minnesota and was a nephrologist in private practice for many years. Long devoted to medicine and fiction, he now writes full time (and no longer at night!). He believes fiction explores meaning in ways science cannot. Sometimes only fiction can discover truth.

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https://www.amazon.com/Twelve-Tables-Novel-Ancient-Rome/dp/B0HF6TJPW2/ref=sr_1_1

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