Blood in the Forum

Blood in the Forum places Gaius Marius back in Rome after campaigning in Spain, just as the reform programme of Tiberius Gracchus turns land, poverty and military service into matters of public confrontation. Marius is drawn from military experience into a political world where principle, ambition and class anger are becoming harder to separate.

The novella is anchored in 133 BC, the year of Tiberius Gracchus’s tribunate and death. It works as an entry point into the late Republic because the violence surrounding the Gracchan reforms foreshadows the factional politics, emergency measures and civil conflict that later shape Marius, Sulla and Sertorius.