Rubicon, by Steven Saylor (warning: MASSIVE SPOILERS)

First, let me get the gushing squee out of the way.

Damn, that was good. 

I was not expecting to like this book so much, because I was already spoiled for the main plot twist, which is that the guilty party is...Gordianus himself.

So obviously I didn't have suspense concerning the culprit. But I did have suspense concerning motive. Gordianus isn't the sort of fellow to kill a guy in his own garden for the lulz. And his guilt was really pretty obvious if you knew all along that he was the one, since he was pretty guilt-stricken throughout the book. And the gods seemed to be torturing him with it, showing him all the people who were affected by the death of the guy he killed. And of course, he's forced to investigate his own murder. But what he's really doing is trying to find some documents in order to protect his son.

Anyway, the whole thing was very well done. It got me thinking about how important honor is in Roman society, and how that differs from more modern ideas of honor which also seems to come closest to Gordianus' idea of honor. Which is to say that Roman honor is basically like Klingon honor: it seems to be mainly about maintaining a certain image/avoiding embarrassment. Yes, I know I'm oversimplifying here but that's my take on it.

There's another kind of honor though; the kind that's not so much about worrying how other people will judge you, but how you will judge yourself; the whole question of whether or not you can face what you see in the mirror. It's classic shame vs. guilt.

Portraying Gordianus as someone with a freakishly modern viewpoint worked really well for this book, because it makes his whole moral dilemma completely believable. And there's a lot in here about how these are crazy times, the type of times that cause a man to act against his nature. He teams up with Tiro again (the two basically go on a road trip), and Tiro at a couple of points is quite willing to have a man killed and even does so at one point, which I think is supposed to mirror what Gordianus did in a sense, because before this book I never saw Tiro as a killer either.

This book also made me wish that Saylor went more beyond Gordianus' point of view sometimes, mainly because I'm finding Meto to be a very interesting character, and have since Catalina's Riddle. Eco has become sort of bland ever since he got his voice back, but Meto seems like one to watch. I think it would be cool if he switched POVs to Meto at some point, so he can take this series into the Augustan era. I don't think that's his plan, but it would have been interesting.

Anyway. *draws hearts*