Gather initial thoughts and broad opinions about the book.

1. What scene or image stayed with you most clearly after finishing the book?

2. Did your sympathy for Cicero grow, fade, or sharpen as the novel progressed? Were you surprised by the bargain Cicero strikes at the end, or did the earlier chapters prepare you for it?

3. How did Tiro’s voice as narrator shape your sense of how reliable the account is?

Encourage readers to connect the book’s themes and characters with their personal experiences.

1. Have you ever watched someone you admire make a compromise that troubled you? How did it affect you? Alternatively, have you ever faced a situation where you struggled not to compromise your own principles?

2. Cicero resolves after Puteoli to live in constant public view. What would that kind of perpetual visibility cost you?

3. Quintus asks his brother, “But to win what, exactly?” (304). When in your own life has that question landed hardest?

4. Recall a time when the written or spoken word significantly moved or influenced you. In retrospect, do you think your response had more to do with the content or the form of the messaging?

Examine the book’s relevance to societal issues, historical events, or cultural themes.

1. The novel describes a series of “special commands” that each enlarge the precedent for the next. What modern parallels did the sequence bring to mind?

2. Crassus’s bribery network operates through layered agents who give each participant deniability. What does the structure suggest about how corruption survives reform? Where else has such corruption flourished historically?

3. Cicero campaigns on extending citizenship across the Po, and Tiro records the household’s enslaved people as part of Cicero’s working life. How does the novel portray the politics of who counts as a Roman, and at what cost?

Dive into the book’s structure, characters, themes, and symbolism.

1. How does Harris handle the gap between Tiro’s young-man experience of events and his old-man perspective on them?

2. The book divides into Senator and Praetorian rolls. What changes in Cicero’s voice or Tiro’s narration across that break?

3. Harris compresses the Verres trial, where Cicero’s published speeches run to seven volumes, into a few short chapters. What does that compression accomplish?

4. A scene at Cicero’s dinner table, not the consular election, closes the novel. How does that placement reframe what came before?

Encourage imaginative and creative connections to the book.

1. If Tiro had refused to take down the bribery conference at Crassus’s house, how would the rest of the book change?

2. Imagine the same story narrated by Quintus rather than Tiro. What would shift in emphasis or sympathy?

3. If you were writing the second volume’s opening chapter, what would you place on the morning after the closing toast?