I hesitated before not choosing ‘crime’ as a category for this book. Whereas Caroline Lawrence’s Roman Mysteries definitely are crime, I feel her shorter books about Lupus’s friend Threptus are more something else. More ‘life with a twist’ perhaps.
Threptus is the beggar boy who has been adopted by freelance soothsayer Floridius, and as you can guess, life is as hard, if not harder, than before. That’s as far as food and warmth are concerned. It is nicer than before, because he has someone to live with, someone who cares. Apart from gambling away what little money they had…
So Threptus is cold and hungry, when he ends up volunteering to go down underneath the public toilets again, to try and obtain ‘useful information’ for Floridius.
Nice chickens. Bad bullies. And there is a – rich – banker. Very up-to-date, that.
These books about Threptus are perfect for very young readers, and nice for those of us who still enjoy visits to Ostia every now and then.
(And you can always eat your pets, can’t you?)
Re eating your pets:
Tevye: As the good book says, when a poor man eats a chicken, one of them is sick.
Mendel: Where does the book say that?
Tevye: Well, it doesn’t say that exactly, but somewhere there is something about a chicken.