2.  Dictator, by Robert Harris
     One argument for belonging to a book group is that it encourages one to get out of a rut.  I wouldn't have chosen this one or plowed on through it without anticipating the future gathering of reader friends. I've never been up on history, especially of a time and place so far away.
     This book is about Cicero, the third in a series of bestsellers that together are his fictional biography, as told by his secretary and slave, Tiro.  The author says Tiro really did write a biography that has been lost. What I know about this period in Roman history is mostly from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra.  I appreciated the two maps and the glossary. A map of the city of Rome, had it been there, would have helped me out.  There was a lot of research to put this together, and I admire the author for that.
      To think about a time of voting, not exactly as we do but citizen participation anyway, being replaced by a system of dictators then emperors, is worrisome to me. Also, I find the whole idea of slavery being accepted by society so confusing.  How the great orator could, like Thomas Jefferson, talk about freedom while keeping slaves is just mysterious to me.
    In my own time, I worry how long our government can last given outrageous borrowing, war-making, and the widening gap between the wealthy and the poor.  I worry about overpopulation, which contributes to almost every other problem here and in the world.
   I  don't plan to read the other two books in the series, but I believe a person with wider history interests than mine would appreciate the series more.  It will help me fill out the character of Cicero in my head if I run across him again in Shakespeare or other literature.