Ode to a Banker

By Lindsey Davis

Published Apr 2015

In the long, hot Roman summer of AD 74, Marcus Didius Falco, private informer and spare-time poet, gives a reading for his family and friends. Things get out of hand as usual. The event is taken over by Aurelius Chrysippus, a wealthy Greek banker and patron to a group of struggling writers, who offers to publish Falco’s work – a golden opportunity that rapidly palls. A visit to the Chrysippus scriptorium implicates him in a gruesome literary murder, so when Petronius Longus, the overworked enquiry chief, commissions him to investigate, Falco is forced to accept.

Lindsey Davis’ twelfth novel wittily explores Roman publishing and banking, taking us from the jealousies of authorship and the mire of patronage, to the darker financial world, where default can have fatal consequences…