Dominus by Steven Saylor

Dominus
By Steven Saylor
St. Martin’s Press, 2021

Back in 2007, author Steven Saylor departed from his wonderful series of “Gordianus the Finder” murder mysteries set in Ancient Rome in order to try something far more ambitious: Roma took nothing less than the whole history of Rome as its subject, following two families - the Pontitius clan and the Pinarius clan - through 1000 years of the city’s past. Then a few years later, Saylor came out with Empire, which took the same family and all their extended relations through the history of the early empire, from Augustus to the emperor Hadrian. 

That sprawling story continues in Saylor’s latest book Dominus, which spans 160 years and takes readers well past the era of Roman history Edward Gibbon off-handedly described as one of the most blessed in human history. Any student of Roman history will know that our two focus-families are now headed for some rocky times.

Even in his murder mysteries, Saylor always invested his narratives with a great deal of multilayered texture; there are scenes in his “Roma Sub Rosa” series that will stick with readers long, long after the raw mechanics of the plot have blurred and faded. The price he sometimes charges for this high-quality prose only comes due very occasionally, and he’s mastered such an absorbing prose line that the price might not even be all that noticeable: it’s a tendency to heavy-handedness. 

There are two core strengths of the family-saga fiction template: it puts a personal face on the march of history, and it provides a ready deliver-device for industrial-grade levels of exposition. And the core weakness of the template is obvious: those two strengths are inclined to undercut each other. Hence the heavy-handedness - as in this moment from Dominus when one of our characters reflects on Rome’s three-day festival of the Saecular Games:

For all the citizens to be out on a warm, starry summer night was strange enough; to see the city lit by thousands and thousands of torches was truly magical. Surely the gods, no matter how high they dwelt, could see the lights of Rome that night. Gaius felt a welling of religious fervor that he had not experienced in a long time. Rome was truly the center of the world, he thought, and the sacred rites and ceremonies of the Roman people, so numerous and complicated and ancient, practiced century after century, were the most pleasing of any on earth to the gods, who continued to bless the city, its people, and its empire. The spectacles, the feasts, plays, and races in the days ahead would be produced on a scale no other city in the world could match, but it was the religious rites that were the essential core of every Roman festival. These moments of animal sacrifice, observed with pious devotion and scrupulous attention to the minutest details, exemplified the everlasting bond between the people and the gods, between the living and their ancestors and the generations yet to come. 

It’s thorough, yes, and it’s evocative. But heavy-handed? A long passage in which a character reflects on the ancient religions at the heart of the Roman world in a book whose necessarily main plot thread will deal with the rise of the Christian faith that will completely supplant those old religions? Just a bit. Poor Gaius would have been better off musing on the weather.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.