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Arrius #1
ARRIUS VOLUME I: SACRAMENTUM
PROCLAIMED A HERO OF ROME, CENTURION MARCUS ARRIUS IS OFFERED COMMAND OF THE PRAETORIAN GUARD IN ROME BUT INSTEAD CHOOSES DUTY ON HADRIAN’S WALL AS FAR FROM ROME AS HE CAN GET.
“By the gods, I had no idea there would be this many.” Arrius looked at General Gallius. “Did you know anything about this before we came here?”
“Commander Turbo told me to expect some resistance as we approached Beth Thera, but I did not expect the entire Jewish Army. We will need Jupiter’s help this day for certain. What do you estimate their strength to be?”
“Possibly 20-25 thousand, perhaps more behind those hills.” Arrius now understood the intense expression on Turbo’s face when he said farewell three days ago. “General, I believe it was not intended for you to know more than you were told. We are the sacrificial goat staked out as Turbo’s bait.”
Marcus Arrius is the senior centurion of the ill-fated XXII Legion, Deiotariana, serving in Judaea during the second century Roman Empire. Focused on duty and his men to the exclusion of all else, Arrius is a loyal, battle-tested soldier. Following Hadrian’s brutal suppression of the second Jewish revolt in Judaea in 135 CE, his core belief in Rome begins to erode without fully understanding why. For his exploits in Judaea, he is decorated and given his choice of assignments in Rome including command of the Praetorian Guard. His request for duty on Hadrian’s Wall instead surprises both the generals and Arrius himself. It will be Ilya, a beautiful native woman in Britannia, who will become the catalyst for understanding why he chose command of an obscure frontier fort instead of fame and fortune in Rome.
"Preston Holtry sets a new standard for the historical novel with Arrius–Sacramentum, which takes place in the second century Roman Empire. Mr. Holtry masterfully weaves a fictional tapestry rich in authenticity and detail and places within a set of characters that fit perfectly into the context and manage to transcend it. As a result, readers will fully share the characters' experiences and emotions, while being transported to another place and time. A stunning piece of historical fiction."—Hank Luce, author of A Darkness in the Pines.
“Holtry shows a deep knowledge of both the Roman Army and the campaigns they fought. It follows Centurion Arrius from Britannia to Judea and then back to Britannia where he leaves the life of the legion to command a mixed cohort of auxilia. The style reminds me of Simon Scarrow. The first in a trilogy, I can see this book addicting readers.”—Griff Hosker, author of the Norman Genesis series, The Anarchy series and Sword of Cartimandua series.
“Arrius-Sacramentum is an intense and beautifully written story. Holtry skillfully transports readers to the outer reaches of the Roman Empire through a warrior facing dangerous enemies, even within his own ranks. Meticulously researched, the strength of this novel lies in the depth of the characters and the vivid imagery of ancient times. Holtry established himself as a master storyteller in his first series, and he hits a homerun in the first installment of the Arrius trilogy.”—Steve Brigman, author of The Orphan Train.
“With Preston Holtry's Morgan Westphal mystery series, we find through extensive research the creation of well-crafted plots, realistic characters, and detailed scenes, creating fast paced stories. Jumping back in time, Preston has done it again with Arrius-Sacramentum. A man on his way up the ranks in the Roman Legion shows he's more than a blind follower but uses his brains and initiative, sometimes to his own detriment.
“By the gods, I had no idea there would be this many.” Arrius looked at General Gallius. “Did you know anything about this before we came here?”
“Commander Turbo told me to expect some resistance as we approached Beth Thera, but I did not expect the entire Jewish Army. We will need Jupiter’s help this day for certain. What do you estimate their strength to be?”
“Possibly 20-25 thousand, perhaps more behind those hills.” Arrius now understood the intense expression on Turbo’s face when he said farewell three days ago. “General, I believe it was not intended for you to know more than you were told. We are the sacrificial goat staked out as Turbo’s bait.”
Marcus Arrius is the senior centurion of the ill-fated XXII Legion, Deiotariana, serving in Judaea during the second century Roman Empire. Focused on duty and his men to the exclusion of all else, Arrius is a loyal, battle-tested soldier. Following Hadrian’s brutal suppression of the second Jewish revolt in Judaea in 135 CE, his core belief in Rome begins to erode without fully understanding why. For his exploits in Judaea, he is decorated and given his choice of assignments in Rome including command of the Praetorian Guard. His request for duty on Hadrian’s Wall instead surprises both the generals and Arrius himself. It will be Ilya, a beautiful native woman in Britannia, who will become the catalyst for understanding why he chose command of an obscure frontier fort instead of fame and fortune in Rome.
"Preston Holtry sets a new standard for the historical novel with Arrius–Sacramentum, which takes place in the second century Roman Empire. Mr. Holtry masterfully weaves a fictional tapestry rich in authenticity and detail and places within a set of characters that fit perfectly into the context and manage to transcend it. As a result, readers will fully share the characters' experiences and emotions, while being transported to another place and time. A stunning piece of historical fiction."—Hank Luce, author of A Darkness in the Pines.
“Holtry shows a deep knowledge of both the Roman Army and the campaigns they fought. It follows Centurion Arrius from Britannia to Judea and then back to Britannia where he leaves the life of the legion to command a mixed cohort of auxilia. The style reminds me of Simon Scarrow. The first in a trilogy, I can see this book addicting readers.”—Griff Hosker, author of the Norman Genesis series, The Anarchy series and Sword of Cartimandua series.
“Arrius-Sacramentum is an intense and beautifully written story. Holtry skillfully transports readers to the outer reaches of the Roman Empire through a warrior facing dangerous enemies, even within his own ranks. Meticulously researched, the strength of this novel lies in the depth of the characters and the vivid imagery of ancient times. Holtry established himself as a master storyteller in his first series, and he hits a homerun in the first installment of the Arrius trilogy.”—Steve Brigman, author of The Orphan Train.
“With Preston Holtry's Morgan Westphal mystery series, we find through extensive research the creation of well-crafted plots, realistic characters, and detailed scenes, creating fast paced stories. Jumping back in time, Preston has done it again with Arrius-Sacramentum. A man on his way up the ranks in the Roman Legion shows he's more than a blind follower but uses his brains and initiative, sometimes to his own detriment.
- GenresHistorical Fiction
301 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 5, 2017
72 people are currently reading
257 people want to read
About the author
Preston Holtry
13 books20 followersPreston Holtry is the author of the Morgan Westphal period mystery series and the ARRIUS trilogy. He has a BA degree in English from the Virginia Military Institute and a graduate degree from Boston University. A career army officer, he served twice in Vietnam in addition to a variety of other infantry and intelligence-related assignments in Germany, England, and the United States. Retired from the army with the rank of colonel, he lives with his wife, Judith, in Oro Valley, Arizona. He is also published under the pen name Wayne Preston.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
February 22, 2020
An Unexpected Pleasure
This book took me rather by surprise. It’s a little known, on demand (a low-budget independent publisher with no in-house editors) effort that attracted no real attention and has no buzz attached. But it should. It really should.
The hero of the story is the primus pilus (basically chief centurion) Arrius, an older career soldier who’s been in the army most of his life and has grown rather tired of war. Nonetheless, he is a good soldier and cares for the men under his command too much to stop fighting. And what else could he do for a living? Most of the story is a narrative of life in the Roman army, the constant campaigning and the methods of subjugation used. It’s not overly welcoming. Life seems particularly empty, with nothing to do during brief periods of relaxation apart from drinking or whoring. You can see why Arrius would be depressed.
I applaud the book for its setting. Judea, sorry, Palastina rarely features in historical fiction after the First Jewish Revolt. The second and arguably more consequential one (Jerusalem and the Temple are taken from them) has never been shown in historical fiction before, to my knowledge. The time of Hadrian in general is underexplored in fiction and getting to visit Hadrian’s Wall shortly after its construction is a delight. Even more unexplored is the Antonine Wall in Scotland, and that seems to be the direction the series is taking us. It’s wonderful to visit such unexplored places!
One of the things I really liked about the book was that, even though it was one in a long line of stories of burnt-out soldiers seeking peace, the context never felt anything but Roman. It would have been far too easy to turn Arrius into yet another Vietnam vet surrogate (you get something like this in Blood Forest), but the tales of organized rapine and genocide bear little resemblance to experiences of that conflict. There is, it’s true, a hint of Afghanistan in the accounts of soldiers hiding in desert caves and making hit-and-run assaults on the centralized armies, but anyone who’s seen the surviving caverns in Israel knows that it’s not unjustified. And even superficial similarities cannot hide that Arrius is not feeling particularly guilt-ridden for conducting genocide. What empathy he feels is more an evasion of personal involvement in atrocity and an occasional sense of mercy.
The book’s accuracy is very impressive. At every stage we feel embedded in the Roman Empire of Hadrian. The locations are particularly strongly drawn. I was particularly pleased to recognize Birdoswald from the description alone. The most distinctive element of Rutupiae (prior to its muralification) was its huge arch and that gets incorporated into the setting well. Especially the description of its visibility from the sea, something that can no longer be seen since the shoreline has receded markedly since Roman times. There are only two major issues I could spot. One, the author mixes up nomina, praenomina, and cognomina. The other issue is that the pronunciation guide at the end is nonsense and bears no resemblance to Latin pronunciation. I don’t get the point of telling readers how you pronounce words unless they’re terms of your own invention.
The book’s biggest issue lies in its on-demand nature. The book absolutely aches for a good editing as it’s filled with grammatical errors, run-on sentences, misspellings, and awkward sentence construction. Typical examples:
A good editor would have spotted these. They would also have reduced some of the bulky monologuing where shorter and snappier dialogue was called for. These are soldiers, not Shakespearean actors. These issues do not appear on every page, but they are common throughout.
I think the structure of the book could have been corrected by an external editor as well. The book is essentially two novellas: one detailing the Bar Kochba Revolt and the other following Arrius as he travels west to Britain and his new command. The book’s climax comes at about the halfway point while still in Judea... sorry, Palastina. The second half is anticlimactic and when the ending comes it is a real surprise. Not because something happens but more a sort of ‘where’s the next chapter?’ confusion. While the detailed description of the setting was one of the elements I loved, a book needs to do more than establish a setting to work.
This book has some serious problems that are unfortunately so ubiquitous that it’s never possible to forget them for long. It also has a number of elements that are so strong it compensates for these defects and then some. Since unnatural dialogue and bad grammar are elements that annoy me more than the average reader you can consider my praise for the novel despite this to be a recommendation of the highest order. The book is not perfect, and I wish it had been accepted by a major publisher who could have corrected these flaws, but an excellent novel shines clearly through the existing text and is well worth reading.
This book took me rather by surprise. It’s a little known, on demand (a low-budget independent publisher with no in-house editors) effort that attracted no real attention and has no buzz attached. But it should. It really should.
The hero of the story is the primus pilus (basically chief centurion) Arrius, an older career soldier who’s been in the army most of his life and has grown rather tired of war. Nonetheless, he is a good soldier and cares for the men under his command too much to stop fighting. And what else could he do for a living? Most of the story is a narrative of life in the Roman army, the constant campaigning and the methods of subjugation used. It’s not overly welcoming. Life seems particularly empty, with nothing to do during brief periods of relaxation apart from drinking or whoring. You can see why Arrius would be depressed.
I applaud the book for its setting. Judea, sorry, Palastina rarely features in historical fiction after the First Jewish Revolt. The second and arguably more consequential one (Jerusalem and the Temple are taken from them) has never been shown in historical fiction before, to my knowledge. The time of Hadrian in general is underexplored in fiction and getting to visit Hadrian’s Wall shortly after its construction is a delight. Even more unexplored is the Antonine Wall in Scotland, and that seems to be the direction the series is taking us. It’s wonderful to visit such unexplored places!
One of the things I really liked about the book was that, even though it was one in a long line of stories of burnt-out soldiers seeking peace, the context never felt anything but Roman. It would have been far too easy to turn Arrius into yet another Vietnam vet surrogate (you get something like this in Blood Forest), but the tales of organized rapine and genocide bear little resemblance to experiences of that conflict. There is, it’s true, a hint of Afghanistan in the accounts of soldiers hiding in desert caves and making hit-and-run assaults on the centralized armies, but anyone who’s seen the surviving caverns in Israel knows that it’s not unjustified. And even superficial similarities cannot hide that Arrius is not feeling particularly guilt-ridden for conducting genocide. What empathy he feels is more an evasion of personal involvement in atrocity and an occasional sense of mercy.
The book’s accuracy is very impressive. At every stage we feel embedded in the Roman Empire of Hadrian. The locations are particularly strongly drawn. I was particularly pleased to recognize Birdoswald from the description alone. The most distinctive element of Rutupiae (prior to its muralification) was its huge arch and that gets incorporated into the setting well. Especially the description of its visibility from the sea, something that can no longer be seen since the shoreline has receded markedly since Roman times. There are only two major issues I could spot. One, the author mixes up nomina, praenomina, and cognomina. The other issue is that the pronunciation guide at the end is nonsense and bears no resemblance to Latin pronunciation. I don’t get the point of telling readers how you pronounce words unless they’re terms of your own invention.
The book’s biggest issue lies in its on-demand nature. The book absolutely aches for a good editing as it’s filled with grammatical errors, run-on sentences, misspellings, and awkward sentence construction. Typical examples:
“Maybe it was past time to think more about his long-term future than the next battle including the once unthinkable but now lingering question was it time to leave the army.”
“He knew it wasn’t because he harbored any sympathy for the Jews, a people he neither understood nor had any inclination to do so.”
“more legionary’s dead and even more Jews.”
“Londinnium”
“I understand they did well enough to destroy the Ninth Legion and control Jerusalem for over almost two years.”
A good editor would have spotted these. They would also have reduced some of the bulky monologuing where shorter and snappier dialogue was called for. These are soldiers, not Shakespearean actors. These issues do not appear on every page, but they are common throughout.
I think the structure of the book could have been corrected by an external editor as well. The book is essentially two novellas: one detailing the Bar Kochba Revolt and the other following Arrius as he travels west to Britain and his new command. The book’s climax comes at about the halfway point while still in Judea... sorry, Palastina. The second half is anticlimactic and when the ending comes it is a real surprise. Not because something happens but more a sort of ‘where’s the next chapter?’ confusion. While the detailed description of the setting was one of the elements I loved, a book needs to do more than establish a setting to work.
This book has some serious problems that are unfortunately so ubiquitous that it’s never possible to forget them for long. It also has a number of elements that are so strong it compensates for these defects and then some. Since unnatural dialogue and bad grammar are elements that annoy me more than the average reader you can consider my praise for the novel despite this to be a recommendation of the highest order. The book is not perfect, and I wish it had been accepted by a major publisher who could have corrected these flaws, but an excellent novel shines clearly through the existing text and is well worth reading.
October 20, 2021
The trilogy has absolutely fulfilled its promising start! This is the story of Marcus Junius Arrius, who rises from aquilifer to praefectus of two auxiliary units on Hadrians's Wall. He fights in the Bar Kokhba Rebellion in Judaea against Roman rule, and comes away with a hatred of warfare. He has seen too much blood, killing, and destruction in his 20+ years in the Roman Army. With the suicide of a Jewish prisoner, he sees where the enemy are willing to fight for an ideology, not for personal glory; this incident is a turning point in his life and influences his character development from now on. This is a most unusual and sympathetic main character and I was enthralled by the whole trilogy: lots of adventure and philosophical reflection. A dash of romance is hinted at in this volume. Each character is given a human face and is well drawn. I liked the fact the hero was not a dashing, handsome young man, but middle aged and scarred. I learned a lot about this Rebellion. I feel the author did his research.
Highly recommended.
Highly recommended.
May 30, 2020
Appreciated learning about Roman campaign in Judea. Liked the setting and military perspective there and in Britain. Did not like the story enough to purchase the sequel.
The 'bad guys' - Roman officers - were just aggravating characters and I didn't wont to follow them further in the sequel.
The 'bad guys' - Roman officers - were just aggravating characters and I didn't wont to follow them further in the sequel.
January 22, 2018
Roman Empire Reborn
The best kind of historical fiction is where you know how it will end based on historic fact, but the author immerses you so completely in the plot that you keep turning the pages to discover what will happen to the characters. This is that type of story. Exhaustive research, vivid detail, and a little bit of romance and mystery combine to make this a great read. Can't wait for Volume II!
The best kind of historical fiction is where you know how it will end based on historic fact, but the author immerses you so completely in the plot that you keep turning the pages to discover what will happen to the characters. This is that type of story. Exhaustive research, vivid detail, and a little bit of romance and mystery combine to make this a great read. Can't wait for Volume II!
October 3, 2017
My only disappointment in this well researched and one of the best books I've read of this time period, is that the next in the series isn't available until 2018!
My only disappointment in this highly researched book and one of the best I've read on this period is that the next book in the series isn't available until 2018!
My only disappointment in this highly researched book and one of the best I've read on this period is that the next book in the series isn't available until 2018!
March 15, 2018
"Arriua - Sacramentum (oath)" is an outstanding presentation of the military in Roman times in the second century (AD, CE) with Centurion Marcus Arrius as the key person in the story. In the book Author Preston Holtry enriches the novel with historical facts, figures, and definitions, which brings that period of history to life. As a reader, I look forward to Volume two of the Arrius Trilogy.
October 23, 2017
Good story - well written
This is a very good story - obviously well researched. The character's are very believable and draw you in to the story. I'll certainly be looking for the next instalment !
This is a very good story - obviously well researched. The character's are very believable and draw you in to the story. I'll certainly be looking for the next instalment !
October 25, 2023
Captivating Read
This is a very entertaining book. The detail and storyline are captivating. The author does a great job in bringing the characters to life. Looking forward to reading the rest of the series.
This is a very entertaining book. The detail and storyline are captivating. The author does a great job in bringing the characters to life. Looking forward to reading the rest of the series.
January 6, 2018
A great historical fiction
June 27, 2018
I enjoyed the milieu and characters well enough, but the arch of the story isn't complete. No resolution without pushing on to the next novel.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews