I read the Centurion books, Damian Hunter’s series about a Roman soldier, when I was in my twenties. I found them in a secondhand shop and went through all of them over a long weekend. What stayed with me wasn’t the battles, which were good, but the detail around the battles: the cold of a frontier morning, the weight of equipment worn so long the body stops noticing it, the way men who have spent years in close quarters manage each other without any of the machinery civilian life gives you for it. I was already interested in Rome. Those books made me want the intimate version of it, the life inside the legion instead of the map of the campaign.
I was sixty-three when I started writing this one. I had been carrying that weekend around for forty years.
What led Richard Lowe to write about ancient Rome?
It came out of a lifetime of Roman inputs.
The Centurion books focused the appetite, but the forty years in between filled it. I watched the old BBC I, Claudius, adapted from Robert Graves, probably a dozen times, and I still think it’s among the best things ever made about Rome, even with British actors and English accents standing in for Romans. I loved HBO’s Rome, and I’m still sorry it lost its funding, because it was built for five seasons and would have been a wonderful thing at full length instead of the shortened run we got. I had an architecture book that walked through the building of all the ancient civilizations, the Roman aqueducts and the rest, and I traced them through and learned how the physical empire was put together.
Then there was the period itself. The Year of the Four Emperors, 69 AD, when four men held the throne in twelve months, is among the most revealing moments in Roman history, because the machinery that holds an empire together is briefly visible while it’s breaking down. And Vespasian, the man who came out of that year on top, was the general who commanded during the Judean revolt, which pulled in another whole body of material I’d already absorbed: I read Josephus, and the film Masada was in there too. All of it pooled together until the Year of the Four Emperors gave me the one place to put a man who had spent his life learning how things work.
Why is Marcus Antonius Primus the hero of A Treachery of Legions?
Because he’s a major figure who isn’t well understood, and the gap is the whole opportunity.
Primus is the man who, more than anyone, won the civil war for Vespasian. He commanded the Danubian legions, and he moved them and marched on Rome and delivered the victory.
Without him, Vespasian probably doesn’t take the throne, and I suspect Vespasian knew it. And this is what drew me: for doing the decisive thing, Primus got no triumph. He simply retired and disappeared from history. His early life is undocumented. His later life is undocumented. The man who made the emperor was set aside once he’d served his purpose, and the record goes silent around him at both ends.
That silence is exactly what a novelist wants. A real man at the hinge of the whole war, essential to the outcome, and then almost nothing on either side of the public career. I wanted to show a fictionalized version of what he may really have been like, to fill in the person the record left blank. And he turned into the perfect vehicle for the thing the book is really about. The official story of 69 AD is a story about emperors.
The actual mechanism, the thing that decided it, was a competent frontier general moving legions without orders and then being discarded, because a man who can do that is dangerous to keep close once the throne is secure. That part of the story makes me angry every time I think about it. Primus getting no reward is itself a lesson in how power works, and power is the book’s whole preoccupation.
The book on this: A Treachery of Legions is a historical novel about Marcus Antonius Primus, the real general who won the civil war of 69 AD for Vespasian and then vanished from history.
What choice did the general who won the war of 69 AD face?
Primus had a real decision to make. He could have backed Vitellius, who held the throne, or Vespasian, who was coming for it. He chose Vespasian, for reasons the book works through, and that choice was the hinge of history. If he goes the other way, there’s no Vespasian as emperor. A frontier general’s decision about which claimant to support decided who ruled Rome.
That’s the kind of moment I wanted at the core of the book, because it’s where the how-things-work theme becomes a single human decision. Not a battle, not a speech, a man on a frontier weighing which way to move and understanding that the empire will turn on it. The battles are in the book, First and Second Bedriacum, the sack of Cremona, the burning of the Capitoline temple, all documented, all rendered. But the spine is the choice, and the man making it.
Why does A Treachery of Legions invent Primus’s private life?
Because a documented public career isn’t a character, and I needed a character. Primus is the protagonist, the man the whole book follows, and a career isn’t a person. So I built the private life the novel needed. Julia, the wife, is a more political marriage. Brunhild, the woman across the river, is the love interest, because a novel wants one. The Danubian posting as I describe it, and the sword scene the book opens on, are invented too. The historical record gave me the war and the political figures and the movements of the legions. The interior man I made.
I want to be plain that the romance isn’t the focus. Julia and Brunhild are there to make Primus a person and to give the book some warmth.
This is a book about the man, the career, the choice, and the machinery of how Rome worked when the official version broke down. The private life is the equipment that turns a name in Tacitus into someone you can follow for four hundred pages.
That’s also just how I write. This is a character-driven book, more than a plot-driven one. That’s my preference. I’d rather follow a man closely through a life than run a plot at speed, and Primus, with his blank early years and his quiet disappearance, gave me a life worth following.
Why is an unfamiliar historical period hard to write?
The research. This took more of it than anything else I’ve written, and the reason is specific. This isn’t the Rome of I, Claudius. That’s the Julio-Claudian era, Augustus through Nero, and it’s the Rome most people carry in their heads. This book comes after. By 69 AD the empire had changed. The Republic was long dead, whatever nostalgia still clung to its forms, and the imperial system was fully in force. The relationship between the legions and the throne, the role of the Senate, the way a provincial general could become a claimant, all of it was different from the world I already knew from the earlier period.
So I couldn’t lean on what I knew about Claudius and his family and simply move it forward twenty years. I had to learn the later period on its own terms: the Flavian moment, the conditions that let four emperors rise and fall in a year, the political and military machinery of that exact window. Tacitus’s Histories, incomplete and biased and essential, was the spine of it. Where the record was clear I tried to honor it.
Where it was silent I invented what seemed true. That line, between honoring the documented and inventing the plausible, is the whole discipline of this kind of book, and getting it right is most of the work.
How does A Treachery of Legions fit with Richard Lowe’s other books?
It’s another character-driven book, where I’m most at home, and another exercise in living inside a mind that isn’t my own, this time a first-century Roman general reconstructed from a few lines in the record. Across these Behind the Book essays that’s been the through-line: a cat, a galaxy, an artificial mind, prehistoric people, a reaper. Primus is a quieter version of the same instinct, a real man history barely described, rebuilt from the inside until he reads as a person who could have done the documented things for reasons that feel true.
And it’s the one that asked the most of me before I could write a word, because you can’t reconstruct a man from a period you only half understand. I had to learn the Rome of 69 AD first, and then put Primus in it, and then find out who he was by writing him.
I’m proud of this one in a way I’m not of every book. Primus did the decisive thing and history paid him with silence, and I think giving him back a face and a set of reasons is the least a novelist owes a man like that.
I had to learn the Rome of 69 AD first, and then put Primus in it, and then find out who he was by writing him.Share on X
