Mário de Carvalho

Wonderful novel set in, I suspect, Roman Pax Julia in Lusitania (Beja in present-day Portugal) about a magistrate reflecting on his final tumultuous year in office as a dictator of a fortress town during the rule of Marcus Aurelius (AD 161-180).

It is a reflexive narrative in the first person, whereby the retired magistrate (duumvir, Lucius) looks back on his final year in office in Tarcisis, a reminiscence triggered by a visit of a former plaintiff in this city (Proserpinus, as a reader we suspect he has played a role in the dramatic events about to be unveiled, but we are not sure what role – an example of a the subtle suspense that de Carvalho spins). Lucius and his silent, but loyal, wife Mara are confronted by a whirlpool of events that inexorably amount to a crisis. An upstart baker cum tavern owner, a freedman, starts a populist campaign to become aedile; an obscure sect (Christians) wins the daughter of a respectable equestrian family for its cause; a horde of Moors invades southern Lusitania and emerges at the city’s gates; a disaffected, fatally ill, Roman equestrian citizen protests the demolition of his villa for the sake of strengthening the city’s defence by committing suicide in a public manner; a duplicitous senator moves behind the scenes to secure his legacy (in the end by adopting the populist baker as his heir), and a group of decemvirs absconds its responsibility by bombarding Lucius to sole dictator as only magistrate. Lucius tries to navigate all these pressures and power houses, taking unpopular measures that prove key in saving the city, at the expense of his own reputation and career.… (mehr)