Actium’s Wake is a stirring historical novel set in ancient Rome at the time of the rise to power of the ‘Emperor’ Augustus.

Told in crisp, sparse prose from the viewpoint of Marcus Rutilius Crispus, who is opposed to the new regime, the story follows his adventures in the wake of the battle of Actium in 31BC where the famed couple, Antony and Cleopatra suffered the catastrophic defeat which changed the political landscape of Rome forever.

Is Augustus to be admired or hated? In the wake of Actium, Marcus takes a stand, believing that murder, deceit and treachery are being used by Augustus to punish and humiliate him. Augustus emerges from these pages as a complicated and cunning politician who has foreseen the end of Republican government and ruthlessly works to bring it about.

But Marcus, although no idealist, longs for a return to the Republican past and so is set on a course of action that puts everything he holds dear at risk: his wife, his friends, his fortune and his life.

Ralph Jackman has evoked aspects of Roman life with an eye for details, painting vivid scenes which place us by turns in the tense atmosphere of the law-courts, the heat and dust of the slave market, the excitement of the chariot races in the Circus Maximus where the complicated system of cumulative betting, staggering losses and huge winnings are conveyed with great energy and force.

There are marvellously impressive decriptions of dining at friends’ houses, visiting the baths, trying to borrow money. Finance becomes an important theme: Romans, like us, have economic lives and no career can be sustained without money. Marcus constantly struggles against personal poverty at the same time as he plots to save Rome from the moral bankruptcy of Augustan rule.