Product Description

'Behind me I left my youth, my middle age, my wife and my happiness. I was a general now and I had only defeat or victory to look forward to. There was no middle way any longer, and I did not care.' In the year AD 406 Rome was on the defensive everywhere, and a single Roman legion stood desperate guard on the Empire's Rhine frontier. Maximus, the legion's commander, is urged to proclaim himself emperor, but he stands by his concept of duty and holds the frontier for longer than seems possible. Then chance plays a cruel trick...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #374493 in Books
• Published on: 2002-07-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

About the Author
Wallace Breem was born in 1926 and educated at Westminster School. In 1944 he entered the Indian Army Officers' Training School and later joined a crack regiment of the North West Frontier Force. After the war he took a number of temporary jobs, eventually joining the library staff of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple. By 1965 he had become the 11th Chief Librarian and Keeper of Manuscripts. He was a founder member of the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians. He served the organisation in a number of senior capacities from 1969 until his death in 1990, when the Association and the Inner Temple jointly set up a Memorial Award in his honour.

Customer Reviews

Gripping, moving tale of the fall of empires
His name is Maximus, the book's narrator and principled protagonist, and he may be the last of the old-style Romans whose virtues (and failings) built and maintained an empire for centuries. This exquisite book is the story of his struggle to remain true to the old values that he loves amid a world that has changed; a Roman world that is failing. He becomes the general of Legio XX after a hard apprenticeship in the backwater of imperial Britannia and is given the thankless task of holding the Rhine frontier against a sea of land-hungry barbarian tribes. His task seems hopeless, but Maximus holds to it with grim determination and through personal trials, not least of which is the temptation to proclaim himself Emperor and salvage what he can from the shifting alliances of the time. Using military strategems and cunning diplomacy, Maximus keeps Rome's foes at bay until the fates turn against him.

Wallace Breem, a veteran of the Indian Army, recreates a military world that is detailed and believeable. His novel is awash in the conflict of civilization against barbarism, pagan versus Christian; it is an unsentimental story, told directly and without elaborate flourishes, but one that is still rich and deeply moving. A perfect read in the chill of winter, when the final third of the book will hold a special resonance.

No one who has ever discovered this book seems to have forgotten it; what a thunderbolt from Jove, to see this book in print again! I have treasured my copy of the original US edition for years but have been unable to share it with distant friends as I would have liked. Now I know exactly what to buy for Christmas presents.

superb recreation of a crumbling empire
This is a tremendous novel of the last days of the Roman empire, set largely in AD 406 when everywhere Rome was on the defensive.

General Maximus is given the unenviable task of holding the Rhine Frontier with a single Legion against overwhelming odds - the Germanic tribes massing along the Rhine determined to cross, to find new lands for themselves and their people. Maximus, true to his duty, is equally determined to prevent it.

No longer the power that it was, the Roman Empire is governed by corrupt and apathetic bureaucrats in charge of decaying forts and roads and Maximus first has to fight these for arms and men for the Legion before he can fight his final, fateful, battle.

The dialogue is convincing, the sense of decay and futility overwhelming, the battle scenes brutal and compelling.

The last one hundred pages, set in a landscape of frozen forests and swirling snow grip like a vice, dragging the reader along at a relentless pace until the final, inevitable ending.

This is not a perfect novel but it is a tremendous one. I would have been proud to have written it.

Laurence J Brown (author of "Housecarl" and "Cold Heart, Cruel Hand: a novel of Hereward the Wake")

Outstanding
Written long before the current vogue for toga yarns, Breem's novel is wonderfully authentic, with place names and warring tribes given their Latin designation of the 400 AD era. So through the book you keep having to refer to the glossary at the back to find out what places Breem is writing about. But no matter. Breem's hero General Maximus is holding the line on the Rhine against the starving hordes who want to push west into Gaul, and you really get a sense of what it must have been like for both the defenders and the attackers. Underpinning the novel is the theme of upholding duty against a background of end of empire weariness.