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The Little Emperors
Felix, treasurer of Britain, having served at the court of the Imperial court itself, struggles to maintain the same elaborate standards in provincial Britain. And, cut off from Rome by the barbarian invasion of Gaul, and needing every penny to pay the army, he soon finds it impossible. Preoccupied with status and finances, he barely notices that his wily father-in-law Gratianus, with the help of Felix's sadistic wife is engineering a coup - one which embroils Felix dangerously in politics. Forced to flee for his life, Felix finally understands that lax etiquette is the least of Britain's problems...
263 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1953
33 people are currently reading
147 people want to read
About the author
Alfred Duggan
45 books44 followers"There have been few historical imaginations better informed or more gifted than Alfred Duggan’s" (The New Criterion).
Historian, archaeologist and novelist Alfred Leo Duggan wrote historical fiction and non-fiction about a wide range of subjects, in places and times as diverse as Julius Caesar’s Rome and the Medieval Europe of Thomas Becket.
Although he was born in Argentina, Duggan grew up in England, and was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford. After Oxford, he travelled extensively through Greece and Turkey, visiting almost all the sites later mentioned in his books. In 1935 helped excavate Constantine’s palace in Istanbul.
Duggan came to writing fiction quite late in his life: his first novel about the First Crusade, Knight in Armour, was published in 1950, after which he published at least a book every year until his death in 1964. His fictional works were bestselling page-turners, but thoroughly grounded in meticulous research informed by Duggan’s experience as an archaeologist and historian.
Duggan has been favourably compared to Bernard Cornwell as well as being praised in his own right as "an extremely gifted writer who can move into an unknown period and give it life and immediacy" (New York Times).
Historian, archaeologist and novelist Alfred Leo Duggan wrote historical fiction and non-fiction about a wide range of subjects, in places and times as diverse as Julius Caesar’s Rome and the Medieval Europe of Thomas Becket.
Although he was born in Argentina, Duggan grew up in England, and was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford. After Oxford, he travelled extensively through Greece and Turkey, visiting almost all the sites later mentioned in his books. In 1935 helped excavate Constantine’s palace in Istanbul.
Duggan came to writing fiction quite late in his life: his first novel about the First Crusade, Knight in Armour, was published in 1950, after which he published at least a book every year until his death in 1964. His fictional works were bestselling page-turners, but thoroughly grounded in meticulous research informed by Duggan’s experience as an archaeologist and historian.
Duggan has been favourably compared to Bernard Cornwell as well as being praised in his own right as "an extremely gifted writer who can move into an unknown period and give it life and immediacy" (New York Times).
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
October 30, 2016
The Little Emperors is set in Britain at the beginning of the fifth century and tells the story of Felix, governor of Britannia Prima, an industrious but culturally blinkered civil servant, convinced that by screwing ever greater taxes out of the local people, he is extending the benefits of civilisation.
Though temperamentally loyal to Rome, Felix is caught up in a series of political machinations that end in the proclamation of the usurper Constantine III as emperor of Britain. Unfortunately for Felix, he is married to the daughter of one of Constantine's rivals and he ends up fleeing into the countryside. During the hardships of this journey he begins to understand how negative the effect of empire has been upon the people of the island he has governed so inflexibly. .
This is a novel about the futility of empire. Duggan's stepfather was Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, the epitome of imperial complacency; but Duggan saw his family fortune swept away in the Great Depression, served in the Second World War and then watched the British Empire disintegrate in its aftermath. It was an experience that clearly left its mark.
Essentially a political novel, The Little Emperors is a study in transformation: the metamorphosis that takes place in Britain as the grip of Rome begins to loosen is mirrored by the humiliation of Felix. Both the country and the man emerge smaller in stature but more human.
It is very good to see The Little Emperors, along with Duggan's other novels, rescued by Bello, an imprint founded in 201 by Pan Macmillan in order to bring lost classics back to life. Duggan is an excellent historical novelist who has a great deal to say to the contemporary reader. It would have been a tragedy if his voice had disappeared entirely in the great flood of out-of-print books.
August 7, 2021
Caius Sempronius is an officious, pompous, unimaginative, and absurdly proud civil servant in the waning day of Roman Britain, who does not see the end coming until it is far too late. Author Alfred Duggan seems to capture the mentality that explains the fall of the empire itself, all in this one petty official. A brilliantly conceived meditation and a convincing recreation of one little-known moment in time.
October 6, 2025
When it comes to historical fiction, I favour novels written mid-century. The authors typically had a classical education, and they're light on the anachronistic presentism of modern genre fiction. Since one of the qualities I look for in historical fiction is immersion into societies that hold different outlooks and values than our own, this suits me well.
The Little Emperors is a exemplar of the type. The narrator, the chief bureaucrat of a Roman Britain in its final decline, is a pompous champion of old-school Roman traditions. His wife must lower her eyes at table and not gabble in an unseemly manner; slaves are tools to be used the way you might use a rake or a wagon; farmers and labourers are necessary to grow food and pay taxes, and are otherwise contemptible; stoic dedication to civic duty is the noblest way a Roman of high birth can live.
This could make for an entirely unattractive protagonist. However, Duggan gives Felix a voice that's engaging, if not warmly sympathetic - he's intelligent, dutiful, and at times unknowingly funny. For all his knowledge of Britannia's finances and governance, it becomes clear that Felix is a pawn in the high-stakes political games of power-players in the province, chiefly his wife and father-in-law. In comparison with their utterly ruthless hunger for power, Felix's devotion to Roman ideals is more appealing than it would otherwise be. His old-fashioned patriarchal stance towards his young wife is a minor fault when held up against the monstrous sadism with which she treats her household slaves.
The story itself is rather thin - a series of double-crosses play out mostly off-screen, and an increasingly desperate Felix muses on what they mean for the province's (and his own) welfare. The narrative didn't exactly carry me along.
However, it seems Duggan is less interested in the particulars of the petty coups of Roman Britain than he is in casting a caustic and darkly comic eye on the Roman empire in its senescence. Felix is a champion of an empire that doesn't serve anyone besides bureaucrats like himself, and an army employed as much to fight civil wars as drive off barbarians. The blithe inhumanity the principal characters show for the welfare of slaves is played for sardonic humour, punctuated when
The final chapters give us a decayed Britannia, its towns depopulated and crumbling ruins, even as a handful of elites play at seizing the purple. Felix recognizes that from the perspective of the average peasant, the petty successor kingdoms are no worse than the fallen empire. While not a gripping page-turner, the Little Emperors is a memorable evocation of the decline and fall of Rome.
The Little Emperors is a exemplar of the type. The narrator, the chief bureaucrat of a Roman Britain in its final decline, is a pompous champion of old-school Roman traditions. His wife must lower her eyes at table and not gabble in an unseemly manner; slaves are tools to be used the way you might use a rake or a wagon; farmers and labourers are necessary to grow food and pay taxes, and are otherwise contemptible; stoic dedication to civic duty is the noblest way a Roman of high birth can live.
This could make for an entirely unattractive protagonist. However, Duggan gives Felix a voice that's engaging, if not warmly sympathetic - he's intelligent, dutiful, and at times unknowingly funny. For all his knowledge of Britannia's finances and governance, it becomes clear that Felix is a pawn in the high-stakes political games of power-players in the province, chiefly his wife and father-in-law. In comparison with their utterly ruthless hunger for power, Felix's devotion to Roman ideals is more appealing than it would otherwise be. His old-fashioned patriarchal stance towards his young wife is a minor fault when held up against the monstrous sadism with which she treats her household slaves.
The story itself is rather thin - a series of double-crosses play out mostly off-screen, and an increasingly desperate Felix muses on what they mean for the province's (and his own) welfare. The narrative didn't exactly carry me along.
However, it seems Duggan is less interested in the particulars of the petty coups of Roman Britain than he is in casting a caustic and darkly comic eye on the Roman empire in its senescence. Felix is a champion of an empire that doesn't serve anyone besides bureaucrats like himself, and an army employed as much to fight civil wars as drive off barbarians. The blithe inhumanity the principal characters show for the welfare of slaves is played for sardonic humour, punctuated when
The final chapters give us a decayed Britannia, its towns depopulated and crumbling ruins, even as a handful of elites play at seizing the purple. Felix recognizes that from the perspective of the average peasant, the petty successor kingdoms are no worse than the fallen empire. While not a gripping page-turner, the Little Emperors is a memorable evocation of the decline and fall of Rome.
December 5, 2017
Plot: 7 (starts slow, rushes to finish, some interesting twists along the way)
Characters: 6 (simplistic but distinctive)
Accuracy: 5 (outdated and somewhat polemical)
So the story of this book is the tale of the last days of Roman Britain. Ignored by the Empire, the inhabitants of Britannia appoint usurper after usurper in an effort to protect their island from the ravages of barbarian attacks. Eventually, they are forced to give up. The Romans are expelled and the British are left to deal with things on their own. The end. Telling the story through the POV of the last governor of Britannia Prima (south-east Britain, including Londinium) was a clever idea. It gives us a viewpoint high enough from the ground to be informed and involved in what’s happening, without necessarily being overthrown immediately and therefore costing us our viewpoint character. The prose is generally decent if somewhat melodramatic. The book is divided up into five chapters, one for each emperor (including Honorius, the initial emperor in Rome) and one for the period of chaos in Gaul. The period chosen is interesting, and best of all almost unrecorded, which means that the author is able to carefully insert his future usurpers into the narrative from an early point. Watching the various power bases ebb and flow is fun.
The account of late Roman Britain is... clumsy. Basically, it gets the major events right but the feel and function of late Roman society completely wrong. The book is hardly alone in this. Until the ‘70s, the study of the later Roman empire was ignored, or treated as a depressing appendix to the truly worthwhile matters of the high empire. Books written before this time are full of somewhat bizarre misconceptions. The basic assumptions of the book are these:
1. The autocratic state controlled and regulated everything, from where people could live to who they could interact with socially. Disobeying these rules could get you burned alive.
2. Romans had lost their civic mindedness and instead of defending themselves they paid various untrustworthy barbarian groups to defend them.
3. Tradition had been codified into a rigid set of rules that needed to be followed, even when they didn’t make sense.
4. In all other senses they were exactly the same culturally as in the early empire (except for religion), and anything that isn't the same is inherently inferior (occasionally including religion).
Obviously these are caricatures rather than an attempt to understand the Romans on their own terms. For example, the laws that make certain (but hardly all!) professions hereditary are less an example of increased autocracy than of the desperation of emperors who suddenly discover that certain necessary jobs are dying out. It's the same as price fixing to reduce inflation, a practice which he also views unfavorably and seems to treat (anachronistically) as if it was the then recent innovation of British socialism. The obligations were also tied not to the man but to the land (unless you’re a soldier), which makes the legal question raised about them here moot. Which ties into the question of civic mindedness. While it’s unclear exactly how civic-minded the average Romans ever were, even at this time they were clearly willing to defend their homes from barbarian incursions. Just look up the siege of Amida (any of them) to see accounts of citizens vigorously defending their homes. Sieges generally were very hard fought. They weren't just passive victims waiting to be robbed. In a fortified city like Londinium defending against a group with no experience of siege warfare (like the Irish) there is no question that the citizens could hold out. The Romans didn't exactly just give up one day. Nor did they blindly follow rules that made no sense. If you ever find a culture’s rules puzzling you need to sit back and try to work out exactly what problem they were trying to address and what their other options were. With the benefit of hindsight, we can often see where they were wrong, but you need to be able to see why they thought they were right as well. And it’s this failure to even try to comprehend the Romans on their own terms that leads to the idea of moral decline and high and low culture.
Really, it’s the feel of this world that's all wrong. The Roman state was not and never had been run like a modern state. The novel would posit that supply surpluses kept by the governor could be diverted into schools or road maintenance (even between provinces). In reality, neither of these was the governor’s job. That was the responsibility of the local elites (the curials) who fell under his command but were not actually subordinate officials. They did most of the government’s work in fact. There was no centralized system as portrayed here. Conversely, the army was much better organized. There were no allied barbarian kings manning the Wall and waiting for an opportunity to strike. Foederati forces existed, but they generally consisted of buffer states outside Roman territory or smaller units within the empire. The Wall was a regular Roman military institution and would have been manned as such, although some of the forts north of the wall may have been granted to allied kings. Military and civil officials could and did regularly interact with each other. Doing so was not regarded as treasonous. From the author’s viewpoint, if the generals in Britannia wished to communicate with the governors in the same province they needed to do so through the praetorian prefect in Gaul. Oddly, the counts were expected to go through the magister militum in Italy. This is probably the worst example of people blindly following irrational laws in this book. No government can be run this way, and it’s clear that it wasn't since Roman authors frequently mention civil and military officials dining together. But the level of fear and paranoia created is entirely in keeping with the assumptions of the moral decline of the Roman people. Because great empires are not conquered from without until they have crumbled from within, etc. etc.
Basically, I wouldn’t rely on this book for a history lesson. While it’s hardly the worst I’ve read for these errors, it consistently follows an outdated and polemical approach to the period that doesn’t do anyone any favors. It's not entirely to blame for this. The attitudes here were common at the time and the seminal work on late Roman studies came out about a decade after this book was published, at which point the author was already dead. But that doesn’t make it any easier to read. This is basically Ming the Merciless’s empire, or Zodanga from John Carter. Petty oriental tyrants. An old, uncomfortably racist trope dependent upon the idea that the pure European Rome was corrupted by unnatural Eastern despotism. The book may not dwell on that causal connection, but it’s steeped in a stereotype formed from it.
Now while historical inaccuracies may not bother most readers, the views expressed here dictate the style and focus of the novel. The entire story is told in a highly romanticized Victorian manner, where the events of GREAT HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE are overdramatized and characters are less personalities than moral reflections of one principle/vice or another. I don’t know if the sort of overblown melodramatic and moralizing tone will grate on other readers as much as it grates on me. I found Eagle in the Snow (written at around the same time) equally childish and lecturing, yet to my surprise it is still highly regarded today. I suppose people want some kind of grand spectacle when looking at events of great significance. The idea of political decline requiring a prior moral decline has never really died. People don’t really want to hear that the Roman state at the time of its fall was a little better than the earlier state in some areas, worse in others, and merely different in the rest. They want the state to be so morally corrupt that it deserved to fail, thus making the collapse an ethical imperative and reassuring them that as long as they can keep their society’s values intact the same fate cannot possibly meet them (or alternately, confirming their worst fears about the effects of moral laxness on society). I find that kind of moralistic explanation trite and ugly, but it still seems to draw people in.
I think that today, with our numerous social fissures and declining control over world affairs (not to mention populist uprisings aiming to elect a despot who’ll protect their “rights” by depriving others of theirs) we're in a position to be uniquely sympathetic to late Roman society with all its social fissures and declining control. I look forward to the day when we get a popular account of this fall emphasizing an increasing factionalism and an ineffectual government response that nobody seems able to correct, despite the best of intentions. A mildly allegorical account mixed with some Game of Thrones -style high politics (as seen in Throne of the Caesars for an earlier period). But that is not this book, despite a subject matter perfectly suited for it. You may occasionally feel pity for these characters, but due to their acceptance of an ineffectual and increasingly irrational government they are complicit in their own destruction. Thus you never really sympathize with them or their struggle, because the conclusion from the beginning has always been that their society is beyond help and needs to be burned to the ground.
All that aside, the book was good for its time. The characters may be simplistic and pulpy, but they’re not utterly alien or wrong. It takes half the book to get beyond the initial setup, but once the revolutions start happening the pros and cons and considerations about what to do are well-thought out. Indeed, at this point the pace picks up considerably as emperor after emperor rises and falls. And the effort to give each emperor his own power base and style pays off. The rises and falls feel natural and organic rather than foisted upon us by the necessities of plot, though sometimes it does feel rushed and even anticlimactic. It’s a bit of a slog to get that far, but the payoff is worth it and by the end I found myself a lot more pleased with the book than I had been at the beginning. Don’t go in expecting it to be timeless or even necessarily deep, but just enjoy the shifting flow of fortune and power as it washes over the shores of Britannia.
Characters: 6 (simplistic but distinctive)
Accuracy: 5 (outdated and somewhat polemical)
So the story of this book is the tale of the last days of Roman Britain. Ignored by the Empire, the inhabitants of Britannia appoint usurper after usurper in an effort to protect their island from the ravages of barbarian attacks. Eventually, they are forced to give up. The Romans are expelled and the British are left to deal with things on their own. The end. Telling the story through the POV of the last governor of Britannia Prima (south-east Britain, including Londinium) was a clever idea. It gives us a viewpoint high enough from the ground to be informed and involved in what’s happening, without necessarily being overthrown immediately and therefore costing us our viewpoint character. The prose is generally decent if somewhat melodramatic. The book is divided up into five chapters, one for each emperor (including Honorius, the initial emperor in Rome) and one for the period of chaos in Gaul. The period chosen is interesting, and best of all almost unrecorded, which means that the author is able to carefully insert his future usurpers into the narrative from an early point. Watching the various power bases ebb and flow is fun.
The account of late Roman Britain is... clumsy. Basically, it gets the major events right but the feel and function of late Roman society completely wrong. The book is hardly alone in this. Until the ‘70s, the study of the later Roman empire was ignored, or treated as a depressing appendix to the truly worthwhile matters of the high empire. Books written before this time are full of somewhat bizarre misconceptions. The basic assumptions of the book are these:
1. The autocratic state controlled and regulated everything, from where people could live to who they could interact with socially. Disobeying these rules could get you burned alive.
2. Romans had lost their civic mindedness and instead of defending themselves they paid various untrustworthy barbarian groups to defend them.
3. Tradition had been codified into a rigid set of rules that needed to be followed, even when they didn’t make sense.
4. In all other senses they were exactly the same culturally as in the early empire (except for religion), and anything that isn't the same is inherently inferior (occasionally including religion).
Obviously these are caricatures rather than an attempt to understand the Romans on their own terms. For example, the laws that make certain (but hardly all!) professions hereditary are less an example of increased autocracy than of the desperation of emperors who suddenly discover that certain necessary jobs are dying out. It's the same as price fixing to reduce inflation, a practice which he also views unfavorably and seems to treat (anachronistically) as if it was the then recent innovation of British socialism. The obligations were also tied not to the man but to the land (unless you’re a soldier), which makes the legal question raised about them here moot. Which ties into the question of civic mindedness. While it’s unclear exactly how civic-minded the average Romans ever were, even at this time they were clearly willing to defend their homes from barbarian incursions. Just look up the siege of Amida (any of them) to see accounts of citizens vigorously defending their homes. Sieges generally were very hard fought. They weren't just passive victims waiting to be robbed. In a fortified city like Londinium defending against a group with no experience of siege warfare (like the Irish) there is no question that the citizens could hold out. The Romans didn't exactly just give up one day. Nor did they blindly follow rules that made no sense. If you ever find a culture’s rules puzzling you need to sit back and try to work out exactly what problem they were trying to address and what their other options were. With the benefit of hindsight, we can often see where they were wrong, but you need to be able to see why they thought they were right as well. And it’s this failure to even try to comprehend the Romans on their own terms that leads to the idea of moral decline and high and low culture.
Really, it’s the feel of this world that's all wrong. The Roman state was not and never had been run like a modern state. The novel would posit that supply surpluses kept by the governor could be diverted into schools or road maintenance (even between provinces). In reality, neither of these was the governor’s job. That was the responsibility of the local elites (the curials) who fell under his command but were not actually subordinate officials. They did most of the government’s work in fact. There was no centralized system as portrayed here. Conversely, the army was much better organized. There were no allied barbarian kings manning the Wall and waiting for an opportunity to strike. Foederati forces existed, but they generally consisted of buffer states outside Roman territory or smaller units within the empire. The Wall was a regular Roman military institution and would have been manned as such, although some of the forts north of the wall may have been granted to allied kings. Military and civil officials could and did regularly interact with each other. Doing so was not regarded as treasonous. From the author’s viewpoint, if the generals in Britannia wished to communicate with the governors in the same province they needed to do so through the praetorian prefect in Gaul. Oddly, the counts were expected to go through the magister militum in Italy. This is probably the worst example of people blindly following irrational laws in this book. No government can be run this way, and it’s clear that it wasn't since Roman authors frequently mention civil and military officials dining together. But the level of fear and paranoia created is entirely in keeping with the assumptions of the moral decline of the Roman people. Because great empires are not conquered from without until they have crumbled from within, etc. etc.
Basically, I wouldn’t rely on this book for a history lesson. While it’s hardly the worst I’ve read for these errors, it consistently follows an outdated and polemical approach to the period that doesn’t do anyone any favors. It's not entirely to blame for this. The attitudes here were common at the time and the seminal work on late Roman studies came out about a decade after this book was published, at which point the author was already dead. But that doesn’t make it any easier to read. This is basically Ming the Merciless’s empire, or Zodanga from John Carter. Petty oriental tyrants. An old, uncomfortably racist trope dependent upon the idea that the pure European Rome was corrupted by unnatural Eastern despotism. The book may not dwell on that causal connection, but it’s steeped in a stereotype formed from it.
Now while historical inaccuracies may not bother most readers, the views expressed here dictate the style and focus of the novel. The entire story is told in a highly romanticized Victorian manner, where the events of GREAT HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE are overdramatized and characters are less personalities than moral reflections of one principle/vice or another. I don’t know if the sort of overblown melodramatic and moralizing tone will grate on other readers as much as it grates on me. I found Eagle in the Snow (written at around the same time) equally childish and lecturing, yet to my surprise it is still highly regarded today. I suppose people want some kind of grand spectacle when looking at events of great significance. The idea of political decline requiring a prior moral decline has never really died. People don’t really want to hear that the Roman state at the time of its fall was a little better than the earlier state in some areas, worse in others, and merely different in the rest. They want the state to be so morally corrupt that it deserved to fail, thus making the collapse an ethical imperative and reassuring them that as long as they can keep their society’s values intact the same fate cannot possibly meet them (or alternately, confirming their worst fears about the effects of moral laxness on society). I find that kind of moralistic explanation trite and ugly, but it still seems to draw people in.
I think that today, with our numerous social fissures and declining control over world affairs (not to mention populist uprisings aiming to elect a despot who’ll protect their “rights” by depriving others of theirs) we're in a position to be uniquely sympathetic to late Roman society with all its social fissures and declining control. I look forward to the day when we get a popular account of this fall emphasizing an increasing factionalism and an ineffectual government response that nobody seems able to correct, despite the best of intentions. A mildly allegorical account mixed with some Game of Thrones -style high politics (as seen in Throne of the Caesars for an earlier period). But that is not this book, despite a subject matter perfectly suited for it. You may occasionally feel pity for these characters, but due to their acceptance of an ineffectual and increasingly irrational government they are complicit in their own destruction. Thus you never really sympathize with them or their struggle, because the conclusion from the beginning has always been that their society is beyond help and needs to be burned to the ground.
All that aside, the book was good for its time. The characters may be simplistic and pulpy, but they’re not utterly alien or wrong. It takes half the book to get beyond the initial setup, but once the revolutions start happening the pros and cons and considerations about what to do are well-thought out. Indeed, at this point the pace picks up considerably as emperor after emperor rises and falls. And the effort to give each emperor his own power base and style pays off. The rises and falls feel natural and organic rather than foisted upon us by the necessities of plot, though sometimes it does feel rushed and even anticlimactic. It’s a bit of a slog to get that far, but the payoff is worth it and by the end I found myself a lot more pleased with the book than I had been at the beginning. Don’t go in expecting it to be timeless or even necessarily deep, but just enjoy the shifting flow of fortune and power as it washes over the shores of Britannia.
February 8, 2009
Enjoyable historical novel set in Britain at beginning of Fifth Century, as cut off from the rest of the Roman Empire, "the little emperors" of the title are appointed & vanish, and the hero,a pompous, ageing but conscientious civil servant, born to be played by Derek Jacobi, vainly carries on maintaining a Romanitas that is no longer viable or useful. A bit like Western Civilisation now, really.
April 16, 2015
The tribulations of Caius Sempronius Felix, the last Roman governor of Britain, as he tries to hold things together after the last Roman legions set sail for Gaul.
A tragi-comedy that illustrates how the bureaucracy of Rome finally strangled the life out of the Empire it was meant to support.
A tragi-comedy that illustrates how the bureaucracy of Rome finally strangled the life out of the Empire it was meant to support.
July 15, 2020
In The Little Emperors, Alfred Duggan is doing what he does best, writing a clever, stylish account of the final chaotic years of Roman rule in Britain as Imperial standards fall (in more ways than one), and the barbarians hammer at the gates.
Duggan is no great stylist. His characters don't so much "develop" as get mangled under the wheels of History. Dialogue is fairly wooden. He's much more interested in the minutiae -- how things and organizations worked, and how events might have happened, as seen from the point of view of the contemporaries, great and small. His speciality is taking relatively obscure people and events and bringing them to life through the perspective of an unlikely, unreliable observer. Duggan was a trained historian and archaeologist, and I imagine that his quirky histories were almost "thought experiments:" Duggan knows that, in one year, 405-406AD, three candidates to overthrow the Emperor in Italy arose in Britain, the Western Empire. Each lasted only a few months, each falling prey to the plotting and ambition of his successor. But little more is known about it, either the usurpers or the machinations that got them there. So, he asks, How did that happen? How would that have looked, as it was happening?
It's good fun. Duggan likes working with a perspective character who thinks that he or she is the smartest, most civilized, most worthy individual around ... and (SPOILER, sort of) isn't. Duggan can get lots of mileage from letting us watch the various plotters run rings around C. Sempronius Felix, the Senior Imperial administrator of the area of Roman Britain around Londinium (London), a lifelong civil servant who likes to think of himself (endlessly) as the Last Noble Roman, but is actually a bit of an idiot, and a crashing bore.
"... and it pleased him to overdo things a little, to remind his fellow-guests that he had learned his manners in Constantinople."
Duggan does irony really well, and the placement of one chapter heading made me laugh out loud. How often can you say that?
And, in spite of what I said about not being a stylist, or even terribly interested in the people in his little thought experiment, it's to Duggan's credit that, by the end, you really do care about C. Sempronius Felix, and care about his fate -- and come to believe that perhaps he was the Last Noble Roman.
Duggan is no great stylist. His characters don't so much "develop" as get mangled under the wheels of History. Dialogue is fairly wooden. He's much more interested in the minutiae -- how things and organizations worked, and how events might have happened, as seen from the point of view of the contemporaries, great and small. His speciality is taking relatively obscure people and events and bringing them to life through the perspective of an unlikely, unreliable observer. Duggan was a trained historian and archaeologist, and I imagine that his quirky histories were almost "thought experiments:" Duggan knows that, in one year, 405-406AD, three candidates to overthrow the Emperor in Italy arose in Britain, the Western Empire. Each lasted only a few months, each falling prey to the plotting and ambition of his successor. But little more is known about it, either the usurpers or the machinations that got them there. So, he asks, How did that happen? How would that have looked, as it was happening?
It's good fun. Duggan likes working with a perspective character who thinks that he or she is the smartest, most civilized, most worthy individual around ... and (SPOILER, sort of) isn't. Duggan can get lots of mileage from letting us watch the various plotters run rings around C. Sempronius Felix, the Senior Imperial administrator of the area of Roman Britain around Londinium (London), a lifelong civil servant who likes to think of himself (endlessly) as the Last Noble Roman, but is actually a bit of an idiot, and a crashing bore.
"... and it pleased him to overdo things a little, to remind his fellow-guests that he had learned his manners in Constantinople."
Duggan does irony really well, and the placement of one chapter heading made me laugh out loud. How often can you say that?
And, in spite of what I said about not being a stylist, or even terribly interested in the people in his little thought experiment, it's to Duggan's credit that, by the end, you really do care about C. Sempronius Felix, and care about his fate -- and come to believe that perhaps he was the Last Noble Roman.
December 1, 2020
The story of how a complacent civil servant is so taken up with economic and administrative minutiae that he almost completely misses all the intrigues and revolutions going on around him. It’s... about as thrilling as it sounds.
Duggan is an intelligent and literate writer, skilled in drawing stories out of the more obscure corners of history (several years ago, I read Family Favourites, his sympathetic take on adolescent oddity Elagabalus, and enjoyed it very much). His depiction of Roman Britain coming to an end, not with the apocalyptic bang of barbarian invasions, but with the whimper of a silently imploding bureaucracy, seems well-founded. It’s not Rosemary Sutcliff: it won’t tear your soul in two with the glorious desolation of Rutupiae Light burning one final time as the last galleys depart forever… but it’s very much not trying to. It’s a different kind of book entirely. But even then, the intended satire seemed to lack much of an edge, so I was just left with Felix being boring and dense, while all the interesting stuff happened offstage.
Characterisation is also pretty basic, which didn’t help. There are some figures (Paulinus!) who had the potential to be really interesting, but by and large, there’s not much to engage with. In this book, characters don’t really have conversations so much as trade bits of exposition about the economic ramifications of this course of action or that, which… zzZzZzzzzz. There is some pathos towards the end, as Felix realises he’s essentially wasted his life propping up an outdated and useless system whose passing has hardly been noticed by most of the population... but on the whole, it’s pretty dry.
Not my thing, but (paradoxically?) I'm now seeking out some of Duggan's other titles.
Duggan is an intelligent and literate writer, skilled in drawing stories out of the more obscure corners of history (several years ago, I read Family Favourites, his sympathetic take on adolescent oddity Elagabalus, and enjoyed it very much). His depiction of Roman Britain coming to an end, not with the apocalyptic bang of barbarian invasions, but with the whimper of a silently imploding bureaucracy, seems well-founded. It’s not Rosemary Sutcliff: it won’t tear your soul in two with the glorious desolation of Rutupiae Light burning one final time as the last galleys depart forever… but it’s very much not trying to. It’s a different kind of book entirely. But even then, the intended satire seemed to lack much of an edge, so I was just left with Felix being boring and dense, while all the interesting stuff happened offstage.
Characterisation is also pretty basic, which didn’t help. There are some figures (Paulinus!) who had the potential to be really interesting, but by and large, there’s not much to engage with. In this book, characters don’t really have conversations so much as trade bits of exposition about the economic ramifications of this course of action or that, which… zzZzZzzzzz. There is some pathos towards the end, as Felix realises he’s essentially wasted his life propping up an outdated and useless system whose passing has hardly been noticed by most of the population... but on the whole, it’s pretty dry.
Not my thing, but (paradoxically?) I'm now seeking out some of Duggan's other titles.
July 14, 2017
Couldn't get into this DNF.
April 9, 2018
A books that supports the adage that the best history is story... even when fiction. Was great education in the waning of the ancient world
January 22, 2023
[Review forthcoming!]
Read
September 27, 2009The end of Roman administration in Britain, as told by the rather pompous finance minister Felix. Review here (warning: review contains some plot spoilers, though if you're familiar with the history you'll already know them): http://www.carlanayland.org/reviews/l...
November 30, 2009
This book is about what happened in England in the early 400's when the Roman troops were being recalled to the continent. It's told from the POV of a minor British official as he witnesses different men trying to become Emperor in Britain.
September 24, 2013
Enjoy the way Duggan writes. His satirical comments. He writes about self satisfied people who are unable to see what is happening around them
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