Bodies in the Tiber

Bodies in the Tiber brings Sertorius back to Rome in 100 BC after the northern wars have ended. The external danger has receded, but the city is unstable: Marius is at the height of his prestige, Saturninus and Glaucia are using popular politics aggressively, and senatorial opposition is ready to answer street pressure with force.

The book is built around the Saturninus Crisis, a violent episode that exposed the cost of Marius’s political alliances. It suits the wider Sertorius sequence because it shows the Republic sliding from battlefield emergency into urban coercion, factional loyalty and the kind of public bloodshed that later civil wars will make routine.