Books: Not Built in a Day

CHILDREN OF THE WOLF (283 pp.)—Alfred Duggan — Coward-McCann($3.95).

If your luck is good, King Romulus keeps saying, you can get away with anything, from the murder of a twin brother (Remus) to the rape of the Sabine women. While his ragtag followers, mostly brigands and landless peasants, build the new city of Rome on the left bank of the Tiber, Romulus keeps on talking. He is, he assures them, the son of the war god Mars, and was suckled by a she-wolf as a baby. As presented by British Author Duggan, that veteran rewrite man of ancient history (Winter Quarters, King of Pontus), Rome’s founder is a born con man, but one who believes his own line of patter.

Concentrating on Rome’s first 40 years, about which virtually nothing is known beyond the legends handed down by Livy and Plutarch, Duggan sketches a fascinating if somewhat too breezily modern story. The Rome of 8th century B.C., as described by Duggan, sounds very much like a common European caricature of the 20th century U.S. Rome is slow to war. and quick to extend aid to an enemy once he has been beaten. Its conglomerate citizens—Latin farmers, Sabine hillmen, Etruscan renegades, Greek exiles—are swiftly shaped into a conforming whole; they dress and act alike and are fond of boasting of their superiority over their decadent and vicious neighbors. An Etruscan says, “It’s true that you Romans are generous and merciful. But you go about your deeds of kindness so ungraciously that you seem more brutal than savages.” In the end, the Roman senators grow tired of old Romulus’ tricks, and of his sanctimoniousness; they surround him in a fog and hack him to pieces (Duggan discards the legend that Romulus ascended to heaven in a cloud). The novel ends with the gentle Sabine Numa Pompilius taking over the vacant throne of the young city in 715 B.C. Prolific Author Duggan has a legion of books and some 1,200 years of Roman history still awaiting him.