Santiago Posteguillo

La traición de Roma (third volume of Posteguillo’s trilogy) is the story of Scipio’s son, who battles to be on par with his father, whom the Romans consider almost a God. But it’s also the story of Cornelia, a young woman who is the younger daughter of the conqueror of Hispania, who clashes with her distant father who is incapable of understanding the longing for freedom of an adolescent girl who is as intelligent as she is rebellious. The story of Marcus Portius Cato and his unlimited political persecution of the Scipios, and of Graco, his ally, inheritor of the power of the Sempronia family. It is also the story of Netikerty, a mother terrified by the war in Ancient Egypt; the story of Areté, a Greek prostitute too beautiful to pass unnoticed; the story of king Antioch III of Syria, blinded by the unlimited ambitions of his generals; the story of Leilo, always willing to stand beside his great friend Scipio, even beyond reason, or the story of Emilia Tertia, who doesn’t lose her dignity until the end, in midst of the greatest public and private disasters. With his usual electrifying prose, Posteguillo once more takes us to Ancient Rome and turns us into privileged witnesses of the decline of such an intense and unbounded life: the end of Publius Cornelius Scipio’s epic and of his world, in the incomparable framework of a Rome which emerges victorious over history, uncaring of the fact that in its unstoppable ascent it lays waste to all and sundry, including its heroes.