Five men speak. Five men who stood at the center of the Roman Republic's death rattle, each bound to Pompey the Great by loyalty, betrayal, or blood. Stephen Vincent Benét resurrects their voices in these dramatic monologues, giving flesh and breath to the politicians, generals, and hangers-on who watched an empire eat itself alive. The collection crackles with the particular anguish of men who saw disaster coming and could not stop it who watched friends become enemies across the Ides and seasons. Benét writes with the muscular precision of a poet who understood that history is not dates and battles but the private agonies of people forced to choose between loyalty and survival. These are not textbook figures but living voices, bitter, nostalgic, defiant, and broken. If you have ever wondered what Crassus whispered in his last moments, or how a man sounds when he realizes his whole life has been a political miscalculation, this is the book for you.
