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Rome, September AD 96. When the body of Sextus Verpa, a notorious senatorial informer and libertine, is found stabbed to death in his bedroom, his slaves are suspected. Pliny, a very respectable young senator and lawyer, is ordered by the emperor Domitian to investigate. However, the Ludi Romani, "the Roman Games," have just begun, and for the next fifteen days the law courts are in recess. If Pliny can't identify the murderer in that time, Verpa's entire slave household will be burned alive in the arena.

Pliny teams up with Martial, a starving author of bawdy verses and denizen of the Roman demimonde. Pooling their respective talents, they unravel a plot that involves Jewish and Christian "atheists," exotic Egyptian cultists, and a missing horoscope that forecasts the emperor's death. Their investigation leads them into the heart of the palace, where no one is safe from the paranoid Domitian. As the deadline approaches, Pliny struggles with the painful dilemma of a good man who is forced to serve a brutal regime--a situation familiar in our own age as well.

The novel provides an intimate glimpse into the palaces and tenements, bedrooms and brothels of imperial Rome's most opulent and decadent age.

Bruce Macbain holds a master's degree in classical studies from the University of Chicago and a doctorate in ancient history from the University of Pennsylvania. He has taught Greek and Roman history at Vanderbilt and Boston University. He enjoys traveling and was one of the first Peace Corps volunteers to serve in Borneo. He lives with his wife in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Bronson Pinchot, an Audie Award-winning narrator and Audible's Narrator of the Year for 2010, received his education at Yale University, which filled out what he had already received at his mother's knee in the all-important areas of Shakespeare, Greek art and architecture, and the Italian Renaissance. He restores Greek Revival buildings and appears in television, film, and on stage whenever the pilasters and entablatures overwhelm him.