In to the cut-throat, blood-soaked arena that is the world of so-called swords and sandals historical fiction comes Harry Sidebottom – gasp as he beheads an opposing novelist who was armed only with a trident and a net; swoon as he eviscerates a ravenous lion; marvel as he hacks his way through the throng. Fire in the East is the first of Sidebottom’s Warrior of Rome series, published in 2009, and with the third, Lion of the Sun, about to hit the bookshelves he is clearly doing something right. The secret of Sidebottom’s success starts with his day job: he is an Oxford don, specifically Fellow and Director of  Studies in Ancient History at St Benet’s Hall; he’s also Lecturer in Ancient History at Lincoln College. You’d say that makes him fairly well qualified to write this kind of a book.

The second clever trick is picking a period of Roman history about which very little is known: the ‘Great Crisis of the Third Century AD’. By avoiding the well-trodden ground of the Roman Republic and the early Emperors, Sidebottom introduces us to a genuinely surprising storyline, set in a Roman Empire which has been beset by civil wars, gets through Emperors at an appalling rate, is no longer invincible on the battlefield and which has assimilated barbarians from all corners of the Empire in to its military and its civilian administration. One such is our hero, Ballista, a former slave from the German tribe of the Angles who has risen to a position of trust in Rome’s military affairs; he has slaves of his own, including a Greek secretary, an irascible Celtic manservant strongly reminiscent of Patrick O’Brian’s Killick, and a Hibernian bodyguard (which, as another reviewer has pointed out, makes this a tale of an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman!).

At the opening of the story Ballista is bound for Syria, charged with organising the defence of the walled city of Arete against the expected invasion by a horde of Sassanid Persians. The journey is a chance to get to know him and his entourage, as well as the spies within his retinue, and encompasses some naval warfare and Roman religion, as well as Ballista’s back-story; once in Arete, he has his work cut out preparing for the siege, and then the Persians arrive for a bloody and protracted attempt to seize the city, which Ballista works hard to repel with the limited forces at his disposal. The military focus of the book is balanced nicely by Ballista’s need to maintain effective political control of the city, identify a traitor within the city and keep his libido in check.

Fire in the East takes a little while to get going (hardly unusual for the first book of a series), but once it does pick up pace it becomes a compelling and enjoyable read. In Ballista, Harry Sidebottom has created a character who, in his rise to success from obscurity and his status as a perpetual outsider will remind many readers of Bernard Cornwell’s great Richard Sharpe, and this book will appeal equally to fans of Simon Scarrow’s Eagle series and Conn Iggulden’s Emperor series. If there is a criticism to be made it’s the way that Sidebottom introduces Latin terms in to the text, following them the first time they are used with their English translation – it breaks up the flow of the narrative, especially when done within dialogue and especially at the beginning of the book when all such terms are new to the reader. That’s a relatively minor criticism however, offset by many commendable attributes (including an unusually scholarly bibliography at the back) that should mean this series will run and run. Next stop: King of Kings.

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