(Literary Guild Dual Selection for November)įour men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions-as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer-and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives. And, again, gamey politics, bright talk, great scenery, and gore. Again, magnificent portraits of real beings.

There will be a march on an unarmed Rome, screaming grabs for ascendance from an unhinged, dying Marius, and a raving Sulla, plus bloody deaths.and deaths.and deaths. The inevitable conflict between Marius and Sulla explodes during an ongoing battle to dilute the power of the Senate elite. The very same.) Marius intends to fulfill an old prophecy-that he will be elected Consul for a seventh time. Surely he is now equal to the great general Marius, now crippled by a stroke and attended by the boy Gaius Julius Caesar Junior, his wife's nephew. It is the overwhelming victory over one of the Italian tribes that brings Sulla his highest honor (the Grass Crown). Meanwhile, in the Senate there is a movement to enfranchise the sophisticated neighboring Italians, a movement snapped off by an assassination and a polarizing of ruling powers-and, inevitably, there's war. The king will be faced down, and, some years later, Sulla, in a spectacular expedition over the Euphrates, will face him down again. By now (roughly 80's and 90's B.C.) Marius is in his 60s and escaping a ``dull'' Rome to scout Asia Minor and sniff out the purposes of the barbarian king Mithridates of Pontus.

Here, the calamitous last hurrah of one and the violent pinnacle acts of the other twist through years of Italian wars, expeditions into Asia Minor, domestic trials and brief happinesses, terrible cruelties, and politics, always politics, in which sectors, families, and the famous fight for power-by diplomacy, manipulation, alliances, or the simple art of murder. The First in Rome (1990) initiated the chronicle of the edgy partnership of new-man-in-Rome Gaius Marius and aristocrat Lucius Cornelius Sulla during the German wars. Volume two of McCullough's triumphant Roman series.

The grass crown by colleen mccullough