collection of historical short stories

A variable collection of short detective stories set in the ancient world, roughly arranged by date of setting. I had always thought that apart from a couple of stories then genre of historical mysteries was really started by Ellis Peters but this volume has quite a few earlier ones.

The stories range in time from the Trojan War (a particularly ridiculous example with Aphrodite investigating a murder where the body had been left near her shrine) to the 7th century AD (Sister Fidelma from Ireland investigates a death by poisoned communion wine in Rome -- I shall definitely be looking out for more of her adventures).

Old reliables like Steven Saylor and John Maddox Roberts have some good stories. I might give Rosemary Rowe's Libertus another go after reading her story in this volume. I much enjoyed the story involving John the Eunuch, set in Justinian's Constantinople and will look out for the novels.

Other stories were less impressive. Socrates investigates as if he was in one of Plato's dialogues. Many classical characters talk in the sort of pseudo Jacobean English favoured by over-literal translations in the 19th and early 20th centuries. History is re-written to show us what really happened -- Brutus starts planning the Ides of March after Julius Caesar murders a prostitute! ( )

Collection of a LOT of short mysteries set in ancient Greece and Rome. Ashley typically includes a wide variety in his anthologies, and this one ranges from amusing to nightmare-inducing horror. A longer review is posted at http://www.reviews.mamasylvia.com/ ( )

For short stories, I found these HARD to get in to. A few were really great! Loved them and got excited about the rest. But didn't actually finish many of the stories. I found myself thinking about what I could be doing other than reading this book. Most of the stories were just so DRY! They gave me no reason to care about the people in the stories or what happened to them. So disappointed! I love historical fiction. These just seemed like the authors were not really that into writing them. ( )