King of Kings: Book Two of Warrior of Rome

I am very glad that I cam e across this series of books. I find them very informative about warfare in this time and about the people of history. I have enjoyed this series imensly. I know I can't spell.

Great series.

This is a great book, and great series too. This book will have you on the edge of your seat. Recommend to anyone who is a fan of the era.

This is a wonderful book, but it rather suffers in comparison with the first one. The good points are still there, but they no longer fit together as well as they should. Specifically the plot keeps changing theme without going anywhere. Don't get me wrong, it gets to the right place in the end (hint: it has to do with Valerian and the king of Persia) but the path it takes to get there is convoluted. The book begins where the last one left off, with Ballista & Co escaping from the city of Arete. Which is a good place to start. Then they get to Antioch and it turns into a political drama. Then there's an assassination attempt on his life which goes nowhere. Then he goes back east with an army to defend another city. Then he goes back to Antioch. Then he goes to Ephesus to persecute Christians. And so on. What this book really needed was a basic goal. It's real nice that Sidebottom wants to take us on a tour of the Eastern Empire but he needs to find a way to make the story go their naturally. The first book had a clear goal from the beginning: protect the city! The trip there was a welcome addition to this goal. The book's unfocused nature makes it difficult to care. There are a few themes running through the novel (who hired the assassins?) but they don't really give any narrative cohesion.

I know what he's doing. He's thinking like a historian. The persecutions were a big deal in Valentinian's reign. He wanted to show the events in a detail he couldn't get from a straight history since the facts just aren't there. But writing a history book and writing a novel are two different things. You can't deal with everything in a novel, you have to pick and chose what to cover. If he wanted to show the persecutions AND the Persian wars then he should have split the book in two. Book one could deal with the persecution and feature a different climax while book two would lead up to the big confrontation between Shapur and Valerian. I get that he planned it as a trilogy, but I understand he's already gone and added a fourth book to his series so that doesn't matter.

Historical-wise it's more of the same. Extremely accurate and well drawn. One major oddity: He has set Macrianus and his son Quietus up as villains. This is kinda odd because historically they were his allies. He served as Praetorian Prefect under the younger Macrianus and basically helped them achieve what they did. It is in fact one of the few facts that we know about his career. So why Sidebottom changed it I don't know. I'm sure I'll have more to say about this in the next book. Another minor nuisance is his constant usage of the word "reptiles" to describe the Persians. I'm guessing that this is a translation of a common Roman epithet (which I've never heard of) because I don't know anyone who'd use that word in English. So I get it, you're adding some colorful local flair. But could you find a few synonyms please? Like, call them "beasts" or "creatures" or "animals." That one insult gets so overused as to be a positive nuisance. There is also one frumentarius left, and he is as pointless as ever. We know everything that the spy tells us. We even know that Valerian and Macrianus knows. So why bother repeating it?

As usual there are some nice little in-jokes and references. Ballista's judgement of the Christian Appian was rather amusing.
Ballista: You are a presbyter?
Appian: Yes, I am.
Ballista: You were.
This comes straight from an Ecclesiastical history. I believe it was Socrate's. It hasn't even been changed much from the Latin. Sum. Eras. I thought that was a nice touch, even though Socrates was covering events 50 years later. It's such a bad line that you know it must have happened multiple times. Another little touch that I liked was having the army cross a river called Marsyas as they went to meet Shapur. Marsyas was the name of a mythical satyr from Phrygia who was supposed to have had his skin removed by Apollo and placed on a tree. This is the same fate suffered by Valerian according to Lactantius and a few other church historians.

But as to the rest: it's all there. The well-drawn characters, the extreme accuracy, the exciting action... The pieces of the puzzle are perfect, they just don't fit together as well as they did the first time. So if you liked the first book check this one out. It's only worse in structure, not content. And it has a hell of a finale. So if you liked that book you'll probably like this one. If you're interested in this time period then check out the [[ASIN:1590202465 first book]].