French 10/18 publications have delivered last Dec. 2006 the 5th part of the inquiries of Publius Aurelius Statius, Italian Camila Comastri Montanari’s hero.

Statius the confirmed bachelor is senator, friend of emperor Claudius, and last alive member of the famous gens Aurelia. He is 42 years old and still quick to assert his youth, specially making love to every woman, and no matter she is virgin or married, even with a consul in office.

Flanked by two pillars of his domus, the incorruptible steward Pâris and the irritating Greek secretary, Castor the freed who promotes the looting of his dominus’s purse to a national sport level, Aurelius, contrary to Saylor’s Gordianus, is rich and more than ever.

This opulence makes his inquiries easier, when Aurelius has to make speak a informant, to corrupt a servant, or to buy a slave in order to offer him a better live under Aurelii’s roof.

For Statius, who adds to old patricians’s arrogance the contempt of money of the ones who have too much of it and the haughtiness of the ones who perfectly know that they are more clever than most of the mortals, Statius, whose position and emperor’s friendship allow him a non-conformism that creates him many enemies, Statius is a honest man.

As Decius Cecilius Metellus, Statius do not balk at fighting. But when Caecilius looks sometime as a young hairbrained, Aurelius gives the image, even deep in struggle, of roman gravitas.

In 46 AD occurs a new murder! The victim is a gens Antonia fallen off-spring. What intrigues and put on nerves Comastri Montanari’s hero is that this Antonius may have been slayed instead of him, Aurelius. Moreover, it seems that the murder is linked with a military episod that Aurelius lived himself 20 years ago, in the dark forests of Germany.

The title of the book takes its whole meaning in the last pages of a story whose threads are sometimes uneasy to unravel. But if the cause and effect relationships sometimes seem a bit forced and that luck seems striking well, the reader appreciates the description, richer and more precise but still light, of imperial Rome daily life, before the fire in 64 AD. And we enjoy also the sharpened psychology of the characters, or these scenes whose irony or burlesque will delight you.

Publius Memmius Albucius