Copyright © 2016 Paul Doherty

The right of Paul Doherty to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2016

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

eISBN: 978 1 4722 3362 2

Cover images © Mary Evans Picture Library/Alamy (gladiators); Classic Image/Alamy (Colosseum plan); siro46/Shutterstock (background)

HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

An Hachette UK Company

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.headline.co.uk

www.hachette.co.uk

About Paul Doherty

Author photo © David Headley

Paul Doherty was born in Middlesbrough. He studied History at Liverpool and Oxford Universities and obtained a doctorate for his thesis on Edward II and Queen Isabella. He is now headmaster of a school in north-east London and lives with his family in Essex.

Also by Paul Doherty

Novels

Roseblood

The Death of a King

Prince Drakulya

The Lord Count Drakulya

The Fate of Princes

Dove Amongst the Hawks

The Masked Man

The Rose Demon

The Haunting

The Soul Slayer

The Plague Laws

The Love Knot

Of Love and War

The Loving Cup

The Last of Days

Non-fiction

The Mysterious Death of Tutankhamun

Isabella and the Strange Death of Edward II

Alexander the Great, The Death of a God

The Great Crown Jewels Robbery of 1303

The Secret Life of Elizabeth I

The Death of the Red King

Series

Hugh Corbett Medieval Mysteries

Sorrowful Mysteries of Brother Athelstan

Sir Roger Shallot Tudor Mysteries

Kathryn Swinbrooke Series

Nicholas Segalla Series

The Templar Mysteries

Matthew Jankyn Series

Alexander the Great Mysteries

Canterbury Tales of Murder and Mystery

The Egyptian Mysteries

Mahu (The Akhenaten-Trilogy)

Mathilde of Westminster Series

Political Intrigue in Ancient Rome Series

Praise for Paul Doherty’s historical novels:

‘Teams with colour, energy and spills’ Time Out

‘Deliciously suspenseful, gorgeously written and atmospheric’ Historical Novels Review

‘Supremely evocative, scrupulously researched’ Publishers Weekly

‘An opulent banquet to satisfy the most murderous appetite’ Northern Echo

‘Extensive and penetrating research coupled with a strong plot and bold characterisation. Loads of adventure and a dazzling evocation of the past’ Herald Sun, Melbourne

Introduction

The Romans believed firmly in ghosts. They celebrated two great festivals in their honour: the Parentalia, held for ten days in February, and the Lemuria, which took place over three days during May. During the latter, the head of each household would walk barefoot through his dwelling in the dead of night, throwing black beans over his shoulder and saying at least nine times, ‘Ghosts of our ancestors depart’. He was not to look around, as the ghosts would be trailing behind him picking up the beans!

They had every right to be fearful. Ghosts could turn nasty. The Emperor Caligula, mad as a box of frogs, was eventually assassinated, his corpse given a clumsy cremation in the Lamia gardens in Rome. According to the writer Suetonius, this led to a fearful haunting, ‘where no night passed without some terror’. The Emperor Nero, just as bad and just as mad, believed he was constantly haunted by his mother, whom he’d murdered. The Emperor Otho was visited at night by the ghost of his murdered rival Galba, whilst Caracalla, the fratricide, was haunted by the demented spirits of both his father and his brother. Roman ghosts intervened to summon and advise, as Brutus’s own spirit did, warning that fierce republican how they would meet again on the battlefield at Philippi, where Brutus would be defeated and so take his own life.

The Colosseum would be a logical setting for ghosts. Dio Cassius reports how this great amphitheatre was built by the Flavian emperors Vespasian and his two sons Titus and Domitian (AD 69–96). This stupendous killing ground was financed by the plunder from that most sacred of places, the Holy of Holies in the Temple at Jerusalem. Many thought that both the Flavians and their great showpiece were cursed because of this. The bloody spectacles staged at the amphitheatre deepened the darkness of what one writer called ‘that house of blood’. The Emperor Titus opened the Colosseum with games that lasted a hundred days, with five thousand animals being killed in a single day and thousands of gladiators matched against each other. The fall of Rome and the adoption of the Christian faith led to the end of these gruesome spectacles. Nevertheless, the Colosseum continued to enjoy an evil reputation. The great sixteenth-century artist Benvenuto Cellini has left us a chilling account of a seance there in 1534 that went hideously wrong, Cellini and his confederates having to flee the ruined amphitheatre pursued by vengeful spirits.

The catacombs, too, had a macabre history. These ancient burial places, a veritable labyrinth of tunnels cut through the porous rocks surrounding Rome, became an underground necropolis for Christians during the great persecution, which only ended with Constantine’s edict of AD 313. Until then, Christians met there to pray, bury their dead and hide from their oppressors, one of whom was the Emperor Domitian, whose assassination is accurately described in this chilling ghost story of ancient Rome.