Book review: Empire by Steven Saylor

The twenty-third book I read in 2018 was Empire: The Novel of Imperial Rome by Steven Saylor.  The sequel to his Roma, it picks up with the Pinarius family where the previous book left off, in the reign of Augustus.

Despite being a thicker book than its predecessor, Empire covers only 127 years, whereas Roma encompassed a millennium.  This is, in large part, due to the much wider historical basis for the early years of the empire versus the comparative lack of documentation for the founding, kings, and early republic.  It also necessarily narrows the focus on the Pinarius family to four generations.  In theory, this ought to allow for more characterization, but the Pinarii are a literary conceit: they exist as witnesses to history rather than as active participants.

Unfortunately, Saylor's perfunctory treatment of female characters persists, including one who turns out to be more literally a Woman in a Refrigerator than one would believe possible so many centuries before household appliances.  More common are women who simply drop out of the narrative, never to be mentioned again, or die off-screen.  A characteristic examples is the final Pinarius wife of the book, Apollodora, who is introduced as the object of the protagonist's desire, serves the matrimonial purpose of allying the fictional protagonist with a historical personage, gives birth to a son and heir (but no other children, despite the couple's sex life being presented as vigorous), pops into the plot again when her (historical) father is put to death, and then ... nothing.  Her last appearance in the book is to silently nod to a comment her husband makes and then go off to bed, unallowed by the author even to express an anodyne opinion on the events of the day.  

Empire suffers from the defect, common in quasi-educational fiction, of having one character explain to another events with which he should already be familiar for the benefit of the reader ("As you know, Marcus....").  There also seem to be more small errors in this book than in its predecessor: missing prepositions, "tale" in place of "tail," etc.  

My other complaint is that Saylor is perhaps too trusting of contemporary historical accounts; if Suetonius or Plutarch or someone said that this or that out-of-favor late emperor performed a particular feat of debauchery, by golly, it must be so (not to mention the novelist's benefit that it makes for racy purple prose).  In Roma, Saylor demytholigized the legend of Hercules and Cacus; it's disappointing that here he reports on Apollonius of Tyana at breathless face value.