In our last newsletter, we reenacted the conclusion of Part II of Pillar of Iron, Marcus Tullius Cicero's life story. TC, while she painted a Rome grown increasingly dissolute, she emphasized two points.

• Cicero's excellent training under the famous legal scholar Scaivola and his intent to recover the meaning of Roman law.
• His search for the possibility of the Unknown God, a surrogate for the Messiah.

"Pillar of Iron" is TC's only work with four (rather than 3) parts. Commensurately it is her longest work, and for an excellent reason.

In western civilization there is hardly any period that rivals it: A culminating time of pagan architecture and superstitious minds, with ambitious men still competing with Alexander the Great, just prior to the appearance of an ineffable personality who bestowed upon us an understanding of the commonality of mankind.

These personalities appear in the books of thousands of authors. Yet TC manages to make this enactment of overwhelming players memorable. Still it helps to know how she brought this off. Further, what was characteristic of her in doing so. These are the issues with which Part III (The Patriot and the Politician) concludes.

• An historically famous Roman triumvirate, of Julius Caesar, Gnaeus Pompey and Licinius Crassus (called the richest Roman) plan to oversee the dismantling of the Roman Republic;
• these triumvers must deal with what history records as a despicable accomplice, and Cicero's life-long enemy, Lucius Catiline; and
• Cicero's quest to understand how the end of the Republic and a hoped-for Messiah can possibly mesh.

TC has been building from Cicero's schooldays, where he first met the evil embodied in Catiline who now holds the criminal and rabble elements of Rome in thrall, to the Part IV heroics.

Of course it is TC. The greatest of the enemies is the rabble, the mob, the dregs of society that TC hates.

Taken with a grain of salt, this immense novel is one great agglomeration describing that age. TC has made it possible for her readers to assimilate these characters. She uses a rendition of events not in the historical record to drive us to the end of the Republic.

Others have tried to put these events together. For example, in the second volume titled "Caesar and Christ" of the Will and Ariel Durant series of 10 volumes these personages all appear. That includes Cicero's wife Terentia, and the tragic death of his daughter Tullia. There is the saga of Fabia, the Vestal Virgin, victim of Catiline, and sister of Terentia. They present in the Durant volume as a parade. In TC's novel unfolds a saga culminating in Part IV. You feel the squaler and magnificence of Rome in TCs version.

I will revisit this topic one more time soon, to draw these threads together in the final Part IV. Here I conclude by telling you the family signed the contract to produce a movie (or series) based on Pillar of Iron yesterday, if successful, a likely 3 year process.

Michael Fried, Grandson
For the Descendants of Taylor Caldwell
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