Death on the Appian Way

by Kenneth Benton

1st edition NEL 1976 paperback, good In stock shipped from our UK warehouse

Genres: Historical Fiction, Mystery

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Kenneth Benton, CMG (1909-1999) was an English MI6 officer and diplomat from 1937-68. Following retirement, Benton began a second career as writer of spy and crime thrillers.

Reviews

[Tate · Rating 2 out of 5]

i'm actually surprised at how... indifferent i am to this book. it wasn't glaringly inaccurate! it was detailed! but it was also very dull. the characterisation that Was there wasn't Bad, but it was bland! the only characters that felt like they had actual personalities were clodia, cicero, and milo: clodia vanished from the narrative after the pro caelio, and we never really saw what was going on in her head; cicero acted in a consistently obnoxious way but it was unclear Why; milo's characterisation only made sense in the context of the one Big genealogical mistake, which was that benton didn't notice that while milo Was adopted, he was adopted out of gens papia, which is... an established family at the time! caelius was also not an interesting narrator. which says more about the book than it does about caelius because his extant letters are hilarious.
there was a lot of telling and not a lot of showing too. indirect speech and "oh i held a contio! i was nearly assassinated!" just being Said and not Described is Really Boring!
benton also managed to describe the entire catilinarian conspiracy without catilina himself ever showing up in the narrative, which is A Coward's Decision. especially since caelius' own death (only mentioned in passing in the note at the end) is so. similar. to catilina.
and honestly it's the lack of connections between characters and ideas which most contributed to the Blandness of this book. themes? motifs? character arcs? no, just lots of events being described as happening in succession. the characters didn't go anywhere. caelius and clodia got no resolution.
the most interesting part of the book was the occasional weird take on history, but most of those... just made me compare the book to Other historical fiction which covers the same events, but with better takes and better writing

[Mary Kay Kare · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good explication of some events around the end of the Republic. Explains things I wondered about Cicero in another historical set around this time. A pity the same author never wrote any more books about Rome. He had a feel for it. (Had an awfully slow start but it got better,)

[Esther · Rating 3 out of 5]

An historical novel.
An interesting read but nothing awe inspiring