It is rather rare these days to encounter a historical novel that successfully evokes the spirit of bygone epochs.  Not since Marguerite Yourcenar and her novel  Memoirs of Hadrian has there been much of anything that actually places the reader, spirit and soul, in the time period written about. o­ne could blame the pervasive firewall that positivist, nineteenth century scholarship set up to prevent access to o­nce living traditions or perhaps to our own senses atrophied by computers and television.  However, the cause of our incapacity or unwillingness to fully appreciate and experience things historical, becomes quite moot when o­ne encounters a work of such consistently high caliber as The Nero Prediction.   Knipe so fruitfully evokes the dreadful, constellated world of the hubristic, yet musical emperor, making for a most vivifying and engaging read. 

Nero comes to us through the perspective of  Epaphroditus, a slave who was brought to the emperor's mother, who somehow foresaw her son's providencewritten in the stars. After some skillful, careerist maneuverings that impress the cunning, cut throat Nero afterwards, Epaphroditus quickly  becomes a kind of astrological yes man to the emperor, who is constantly scanning the skies, like his mother, for signs of stellar import in regards to his reign and of course, the fate of Rome.     

The author brings the Italic characters to such astonishing life, primarily through reviving the lost art of writing good dialogue, a capability that few contemporary authors possess these days.  The verbal exchanges between the characters are actually more effective at evoking the peculiarities of the time period they lived in, more so than the physical descriptions of personae and locales, although these are quite excellent in themselves.  It is obvious that Knipe has a very well developed ear for detail and no doubt could actually extend the range of his hearing beyond the physical and listen to the characters speaking out from an otherwise deeply entombed past.  In fact, Humphry so believably conjures up the Romanesque world, that it is most likely that he did this through the extensive study of the actual natal charts of Nero (which are  included in the appendix, along with a treatise o­n Neronian astrology) rather than through the usually arid and o­ne dimensional venues of academic scholarship.

Such a unique approach allows the reader, homeopathically, to appreciate how the Romans themselves not o­nly heavily relied o­n astrology to determine their strategies of gaining ultimate power, but fully let the planets express themselves through them in archonic and frequently catastrophic ways.  It is unsettling to realize just how morbidly dependant the ancients were o­n liver readers, soothsayers and of course astrologers.  Such a folly ridden addiction to various forms of divination no doubt was o­ne of the major causes of the downfall of ancient Rome, considering that steering an empire away from disaster by using free will didn't stand much of a natal chance during such malefically aspected times.