Open Road has an offering for $2.99 for Dynasty of Death. I've put the links to those below, with the Google link including the three books of the Bouchard Family Trilogy in one pack.

Taylor Caldwell has written many novels which fall into 3 parts. Here I do a brief reenactment of the conclusion of Part II of Pillar of Iron, the life story of Cicero. I recently did a newsletter on Cicero, alluding to his associations with all the powerful of Rome: Caesar, Cataline, Pompey, Mark Anthony, the much-feared tyrant Sulla, Augustus, and even the charismatic Cleopatra in Egypt. TC took it upon herself to do a dramatic retelling.

TC has emphasized two points during this time when as Rome grows increasingly dissolute: This Unknown God was a catchall for many mythologies that held a place in the temples in Rome. This was for a deity which was, well, unknown. There was only vague and confused references from Hebrew scholars, based on interpretation of Isaiah on what exactly he represented. Especially on how he would appear.

In TC's telling with words from a Jewish friend of Cicero, this was a designation for a Messiah:
"It is more likely we will not recognize him at all. he will be known by an act of faith only."
TC makes it clear that Sulla had a dark view of his own destruction of the Republic. At the end of the Second Part (of 4 rather than TC's usual 3) there is a dramatic court room scene. In this, Cicero has decided to defend a former captain under Sulla – Servius – from the Senate charge that a book that Servius authored was a blasphemy against Sulla. The charge was "Treason Against Rome."

There appears scant chance of a successful defense under the best of circumstances, and those weren't these. Sulla doesn't want Cicero to even try to make one. Yet, Cicero, with the help of friends, has come up with a plan.

This is so dramatic that I don't want to give away the story, the ultra-clever defense, and the interaction among all these famous Romans – here some 100 years before the death of Jesus. I will say one thing only.

Even at the reconciliation of Sulla and Servius, Servius still insists that Sulla is a merciless tyrant, and Sulla can only respond to wit:
Blame me not, Servius, for the people willed it so. On them the curse and the imprecations, and not on me. I am but their creature.
If Shakespeare can place his dramatic proclamations in the mouths of his famous personages, why can't TC, or is that blasphemy, too?

Indeed, *|FNAME|*, there and as Part III starts after the death of Sulla, we find ourselves wondering about TC's methods, and about TC herself. In the last half of Pillar of Iron, she takes us into the grand/brutal machinations along the Mediterranean that play out, for example, in two of Shakespeare's plays.

Especially she returns to Cicero's search for the "Unknown God." Others, including recent overtures to our family for the possibility of a movie based on this novel, see Cicero as a proto-Christian.

You might well think of him, as one of those rare intellects who would
not allow their investigation of God to be limited by what others could understand.

 


Michael Fried, Grandson
For the Descendants of Taylor Caldwell

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