Pushing responsibility down

[from the stabenow.com vaults, first posted February 16, 2004] The Captain scrubbed a boarding due to heavy seas. The bosun’s mate, the person who drives the boarding party over to the fishing vessel in the small boat, came to the bridge afterward, and the Captain explained the reasons why he’d scrubbed the launch. “Agreed,” said…

Read more Pushing responsibility down

About Seasickness

[from the stabenow.com vaults, first posted February 15, 2004] About seasickness, since almost every single non-Coastie person who has emailed me has asked if I’m seasick. Yes, once, the first full day of patrol. I woke up, sat up, and threw up. Later that same day I walked into the wardroom pantry and the seaman…

Read more About Seasickness

Poetry and pizza

[from the stabenow.com vaults, first posted February 14, 2004] Two poems I found posted by the mid-watch on yellow sticky notes on a bridge window. I added the titles. Night Watch Cold wind blowin’ On the sea tonight One screw turning’ One screw tight Box steaming In the lee tonight Cold wind blowin’ On the…

Read more Poetry and pizza

Fishermen and fire drills

[from the stabenow.com vaults, first posted February 13, 2004] We did a safety boarding on an opilio crabber. I tried to talk the boarding team into bringing back some crab but they wouldn’t go for it. Then I tried to talk Ops into swinging the boat hoist over to pick one of the pots as…

Read more Fishermen and fire drills

Underway and Alex Haley

[from the stabenow.com vaults, first posted February 12, 2004] Some word pictures of life underway: One of the bridge windows has been invaded by a mysterious dark green microbial growth. Members of the watch have been known to embellish it with a Marks-a-lot. This morning Seaman Oliver has replaced the previous dragon illustration with a…

Read more Underway and Alex Haley

SAR

[from the stabenow.com vaults, first posted February 11, 2004] So this is what we did last night. It’s about eleven-thirty, most of the ship has turned in for the night. I’m brushing my teeth and EO Tony Erickson knocks on the door to tell me we’ve caught a SAR case. I shoot up to the…

Read more SAR

Classroom

[from the stabenow.com vaults, first posted February 10, 2004] A boarding at first light, of 123-foot longliner fishing for Pacific cod. “This is the only place in the world you’d call that a small boat,” says XO Phil Thorne. “In any other fishery it would be illegal.” The swells were only five feet and the…

Read more Classroom

Flight Quarters

[from the stabenow.com vaults, first posted February 9, 2004] Man, I’m tired, and all I did was watch. More or less clear skies (what’s a little hail between friends?). We spent most of the day in the lee of St. George in the Pribilofs, waiting on weather. You should see the NOAA weather forecasts for…

Read more Flight Quarters

You must understand, whoever you are, that in those days Rome, mistress of half the world, was a place as savage as a village of Nile pygmies.

Thus providing employment for our narrator, one Decius Caecilius Metellus, young commander of what passes for local law enforcement in his district of the city of the seven hills, circa 70BC. As John Maddox Roberts’ The King’s Gambit begins, someone is committing arson and garroting manumitted gladiators and rich freedman in Rome. In a plot that moves from simple murder to outright treason and threatens his own life, Decius’ investigation takes him into a Senator’s sister’s bed, to a brushing acquaintance with pirates (those same pirates who betrayed Spartacus, and here we find out why) all the way up to the Senate, including its two Consuls, Marcus Licinius Crassus and Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus.

Yes, that Crassus and that Pompey. One of the most enjoyable things about this series (which now numbers thirteen) is the cameo appearances by characters right out of the history books, like Gaius Julius Caesar (yes, that Caesar), as in

The new calendar was one of Caesar’s better ideas. (At least, he called it his calendar. It was Cleopatra’s court astronomer, Sosigenes, who actually created it, and in truth it was Caesar’s own neglect of his duties when he was Pontifex Maximus that got the old calendar into such dreadful shape in the first place. That’s something you won’t find in the histories written later by his lackeys.)

Ouch. But Decius gives the devil his due, too, as here

Hortalus gave very florid speeches, in what was known as the Asiatic style. He wrote the same way...Such writing reads very strangely now, since Caesar’s bald and unornamented yet elegant style revolutionized Latin prose. Between them, Caesar’s books and Cicero’s speeches utterly changed the language as it was taught in my youth.

The period detail is great, too, as when Decius goes to Ostia to interview a witness

From each shop front and storehouse came the fragrances of the whole Mediterranean world. Incense and spices were stored here, and rare, fragrant woods. The odors of fresh-sawn cedar from the Levant and pulverized pepper from even farther east mingled with those of frankincense from Egypt and oranges from Spain. It smelled like Empire.

Decius is an engaging character, not the ambitious social climber you’d expect from a young Roman on his way up, but a good man whose motivation to solve these crimes, as he confesses to his vestal virgin aunt, comes from not wanting to see innocent slaves crucified in lieu of the actual murderer.

Yet another true detail of soon to be imperial Rome that will make you glad you’re enjoying this story in a comfortable chair in your living room two thousand years later, and not living through it yourself.

# Permanent link to The Senate and People of Rome