The Cicero Trilogy

<b>______________________________</b><br> <b>'One of the great triumphs of contemporary historical literature.' <i>The Times</i></b><br> <b><br></b><b>______________________________</b><br> <b>WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR</b><br> <br> <b>'Laws are silent in times of war.' Cicero</b><br> <br> One of the great epics of political and historical fiction, <i>The Cicero Trilogy</i> charts the career of the Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero from his mid-twenties as an ambitious young lawyer to his dramatic death more than thirty years later, pursued by an assassination squad on a cliff-top path.<br> <br> The extraordinary life that unfolds between these two episodes is recounted by Cicero's private secretary, Tiro- the law cases and the speeches that made his master's name; the elections and conspiracies he fought; the rivals who contended for power around him - Pompey, Crassus, Cato, Clodius, Catalina, and, most menacingly, Caesar; and, at the heart of it all, the complex personality of Cicero himself - brilliant, cunning, duplicitous, anxious, brave, and always intensely humane.<br> <br> More than ten years in the writing, and now published in a single volume for the first time, <i>The Cicero Trilogy</i> brings the world of the Roman republic vividly to life. Here is its grandeur, ambition and corruption; and here is its tumultuous collapse into dictatorship and anarchy - a story of the fragility of democratic institutions that holds a warning for our own time.