-44 - The Goddesses of Rome

Rome is celebrating Caesar. Wine flows, wreaths dry in the heat, and beasts are led towards the altars. In the streets, the triumph smothers doubt beneath cries, dust, laurel and the blood of sacrifice. And yet, beneath the splendour, the city has already begun to change its face.

Cornelia finds Lucretia again after years of silence. In a house kept apart from the crowd, among shadow, coolness and chosen solitude, an old bond takes shape once more. What seemed to belong to the past returns differently: graver, freer, more necessary.

But Rome is coming undone. The streets grow less safe, protections fall away, loyalties shift. Around the two women, other presences appear, other bodies, other allegiances. What was at first only an intimate refuge gradually becomes a living circle, fragile, crossed by desire as much as by threat.

44 BC — The Goddesses of Rome is a sensual and political sapphic historical novel, where the fall of an old order is not played out only in the Senate, in triumphs or in conspiracies, but in houses, gestures, bodies, and the choices of women History too rarely sees.

Translated from French by Ysis