The year is 54 AD. In the marble halls of the Palatine, a mother with venom in her veins and a crown in her sights watches her son ascend to the throne of Rome. Agrippina has murdered, schemed, and sacrificed everything to place Nero on the seat of the Caesars, and now she must reckon with the monster she created. As the Emperor descends into madness, torching his own city to build his vanity, the earliest followers of a ragged Jewish carpenter gather in the shadows, preaching a radical faith that Rome has decreed to stamp out. Farrar, with Victorian moral certainty and operatic intensity, paints the imperial court as a throat of lions where Christians are torn apart for sport, where Tigellinus drinks blood, and where a poet-strangler sits on the throne of the world. This is historical fiction in the grand mode: a saga of ambition so vast it crashes through the page like a wave, asking what price the soul when empires fall and new gods rise.
