The Dream of Scipio

Three stories set in Provence examine moments when an established civilisation appears to be collapsing. In the fifth century, the aristocrat Manlius Hippomanes tries to preserve Roman learning as imperial authority disintegrates in Gaul. During the fourteenth-century plague, the poet Olivier de Noyen studies a manuscript attributed to Manlius while communities respond to mortality with fear, opportunism and persecution. In the twentieth century, the scholar Julien Barneuve encounters the same text while serving the Vichy administration under German occupation.

The manuscript links men separated by centuries, but each must decide whether protecting culture can justify accommodation with violent power. Their intellectual ideals are tested through relationships with women threatened by the societies around them, including Jewish communities made vulnerable by plague accusations and state persecution. Pears uses the repeated crises to examine moral compromise, the transmission of knowledge and the damage caused when educated people persuade themselves that collaboration is a form of preservation.