G'day, everyone!

I've come late to this game, being in my sixties when I self-published my first book. But being senile, I persuade myself that many years of experience and reflection go into what I write.

Reflection on what, you might ask.

My personal interests have long been History, Politics and Religion. Only recently have I come to recognise the common thread to all of these is that all three focus on people.

Humans and how they relate to one another, understand each other, and often how they abuse each other. Reflect on history in this light. Reflect on what politicians say and what this reveals about how they think humans should relate. And in religion perhaps more than any other realm you will be dealing with humans trying to understand themselves and their place in the Universe. Yes, even the most militant atheists engage in 'religion' to this extent!

Sounds profound? Not really! Everything ever written that deserves to be read has been based on this. But saying it, putting it out under the light of day, helps us understand what we are doing.

Tito's four books in the 'Other Rome' series notionally start with just one minor possible alternative outcome in History, the assassination of Marcus Livius Drusus the Younger in 91 B.C.

It plots what might have happened had he survived. The subsequent admission of the Italian Tribes to full Roman citizenship, and later the extension of formal legal rights to the citizens of Rome's provinces by the Italian Silo, establishes a trajectory of what we moderns would call 'Rule of Law'. This tended to form an inclusive Body Politic, in which each part would support the others. This would be a robust Body Politic, like my native Australia as a Federation of different states, instead of a fractious quasi-empire held together by force such as was the Soviet Union or the old Yugoslavia.

This contrasts with the actual history of exclusion, civil war and militarism that brought about the collapse of the Roman Republic and the institution of the Empire. From this point onwards Rome had locked itself into an attitude of arrogance and brutality that could last only so long as it could muster the military strength to enforce their rule. It was inherently fragile.

What could such a different attitude in the First Century B.C. have achieved? Tito's books play with that question.