Published on January 9, 2025 at 3:50 p.m.
2 mins. reading
There are four of them taking the road, a small troop on the run. We are at the dawn of the 1st century AD, under the reign of Augustus, somewhere on the border of the Roman Empire. At their head, a young girl, Junil. To escape a threatening suitor, she invented a ruse that led to the assassination of her tyrant father. She is in danger of death. And since she knows that Ovid, the banished poet, lives in Tomis, on the shores of the Black Sea, she has only one obsession: to join the author of The Art of Lovingoffer herself to him, a virgin.
The other three are slaves. They have heard of the Alans, a people who do not know servitude. They want to reach this country, located there, to the east and to the south, we don’t really know. Lafas is a scholar. Devoted to Minerva, he spent more than twenty years recluse in the library. The old copyist Trident worked for Junil’s father, a bookseller and plagiarist author. The third, Dirmini, is a returning gladiator. He knows how to use weapons. The fugitives may need him. They come from the world of books, they know censorship, the threat that words can conceal, but they know little of the dangers of the real world: the soldiers of the Empire, the barbarians, the wild beasts, the cold, the hunger.
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