The Sword of Pleasure by Peter Green, 285 pages

This novel is a reconstruction of the life of Lucius Cornelius Sulla, who ruled the dying Roman Republic forty years before the death of Julius Caesar, as he himself might have written it.
Sulla was born in an uneasy generation which had lost faith in the stern yet obsolete code of the old Republic, and his dilemma was one with which we are all too familiar today. Out of Peter Green's reconstruction of the historical scene Sulla emerges not as a figure in a history book but as an intensely human personality - full-blooded, hardened by disappointment, a tyrant despite himself. Through him and his friends and enemies - not to mention his four remarkable wives - the author brings the Roman Republic to life for us in all its splendor and cruelty.