Caesar's Shadow

Before the Rhine, before the Rubicon, there was an island in the Aegean, a slave block at Miletus, and a young Roman with no money and a great deal of nerve.

For two hundred years, a quiet house of Phoenician and Hebrew heritage has run its ships from the compound in Alexandria to the monsoon ports of India, reading the tides, keeping its ciphers, and outlasting kings. Then a routine voyage into the Aegean crosses paths with Cilician pirates off Pharmacusa-and with a young prisoner named Gaius Julius Caesar.

Sold on the harbor block at Miletus and bound by a bill of sale lodged in a temple vault, two men of the family are swept into the machinery of Rome's eastern wars:

• Hiram, an Alexandrian engineer trained to read water, stone, and load through the soles of his boots-from the walls of Nisibis and the fords of Pontus to the Atlantic tides of the Tagus.


• Malchus, the master accountant who turns logistics into a weapon, tracking grain, silver, and survival across the campaigns of Lucullus, Pompey, and Caesar.


• Callimachus, the irreverent Greek artilleryman and shipwright picked up in the East, who builds engines for whoever is paying and begins his private count of the men who carry his tools.


• Miriam, who establishes the family's foothold on the Sacred Way in Rome-building a network of patrician wives, temple incense contracts, and quiet financial leverage while preparing a daring midnight rescue from Pompey's stone room behind the Campus Martius.


• Elisheva and Tamar, who hold the Alexandria compound together, training a new generation of navigators so the Indian Ocean route never depends on one man's return.

From the pirate coves of Asia and the brutal sieges of the Mithridatic Wars to the false promises of Pompey's triumphal banquet and the high waters of Spain, The Tides launches the monumental Caesar's Shadow saga-a story of how freedom is lost on parchment, bought with indispensable skill, and measured one tide at a time.