Alcestis from the Grave: A Novel of Ancient Alexandria

It is the third century. The Roman Empire is teetering on the brink of collapse.Persian armies batter the frontier; plague devastates the provinces; and teachers of strange doctrines threaten the ancient peace of the gods.Amid this turmoil, Aelius Isidorus, son of a Roman officer and an Alexandrian mother, struggles to reconcile the forces that divide his world: fate and free will, reason and faith, hope and despair. Guided by the philosopher Plotinus and the priest Origen, and sustained by the love of his wife Alcestis, he journeys to the Empire’s edge to confront the question that haunts his age:Are we the children of a divine Mother—or the prisoners of an accursed god?Set in the religious and philosophical ferment of Roman Egypt and the Empire’s eastern frontier, Alcestis from the Grave brings to life the tumultuous world of third-century Alexandria—its lecture halls and temples, its deserts and borderlands, its competing visions of the cosmos. Historical figures stand beside imagined ones; pagan, Christian, and Platonic voices contend for the soul of an empire in crisis.At once personal and expansive, this is a novel about one young man’s search for certainty in a world falling apart. Read more