Taking us back to Rome in its greatest period—the time of Caesar and Pompey, the era of Dear and Glorious Physician—Taylor Caldwell has written her most ambitious novel, a majestic and poignant story that unfolds as Roman democracy faces its own inexorable decay. Its hero is Cicero—Marcus Tullius Cicero, the pillar of iron, the brilliant and idealistic lawyer, dramatically but precariously devoted to the defense of a nation and republic on trial.

Across this rich stage move some of the most vivid characters in history: Scaevola, the incredible, obese lawyer who helped Cicero win his first great case before Sulla; a uniquely-drawn Caesar, sophisticated and devious, yet a man who once said to Cicero: "I trust only you in Rome"; Catilina, the remarkably handsome and charismatic aristocrat bent on the destruction of all Rome; Noe ben Joel, the Jewish intellectual who half converted Cicero to belief in the coming Messiah; and the great tumultuous society that was Rome in the first century before Christ.

History knows Marcus Tullius Cicero in many fragmentary ways: as the author of De Republica, as the compelling and courageous orator who stood against Catilina, as a voluminous correspondent and Consul of Rome. Miss Caldwell has meticulously recreated the whole man. Here is Cicero as a young middle-class law student, passionately in love with the girl Catilina destroys; as a rising public figure whose assassination has been mysteriously ordered; and as husband, friend, devout skeptic, and sharp-tongued patriot.

A PILLAR OF IRON is a major historical novel, casting in sharp relief the embattled nobility and insidious debauchery of Cicero's Rome. Its theme is eerily modern, its canvas animated by the great figures of a civilization hovering on the brink of an abyss.

Taylor Caldwell, the author of Dear and Glorious Physician and A Prologue to Love, is one of the most successful woman novelists of our generation. Her present novel is based on a prodigious job of research that began in April of 1947, when she translated hundreds of Cicero's letters in the Vatican Library. Miss Caldwell, in trips to Athens and Rome, has personally authenticated a vast amount of information—and has drawn the story of Cicero from many of his own words, form his diaries, from the historian Sallust, from his letters to Atticus and Julius Caesar.

From the dust jacket