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    Tyrant
    Tyrant
    Tyrant
    Ebook505 pages11 hours

    Tyrant

    By Valerio Massimo Manfredi

    3/5

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Valerio Massimo Manfredi's Tyrant starts in Sicily 412 BC: the infinite duel between a man and a superpower begins. The man is Dionysius, who has just made himself Tyrant of Syracuse. The superpower Carthage, mercantile megalopolis and mistress of the seas.

    Over the next eight years, Dionysius' brutal military conquests will strike down countless enemies and many friends to make Syracuse the most powerful Greek city west of mainland Greece. He builds the largest army of antiquity and invents horrific war machines to use against the Carthaginians, who he will fight in five wars.

    But who was Dionysius? Historians have condemned him as one of the most ruthless, egocentric despots. But he was also patron of the arts, a dramatist, poet and tender lover.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPan Macmillan
    Release dateMar 18, 2011
    ISBN9780330526876
    Tyrant
    Author

    Valerio Massimo Manfredi

    Valerio Massimo Manfredi is an archaeologist and scholar of the ancient Greek and Roman world. He is the author of numerous novels, which have won him literary awards and have sold 12 million copies. His Alexander trilogy has been translated into thirty-eight languages and published in sixty-two countries and the film rights have been acquired by Universal Pictures. His novel The Last Legion was made into a film starring Colin Firth and Ben Kingsley and directed by Doug Lefler. Valerio Massimo Manfredi has taught at a number of prestigious universities in Italy and abroad and has published numerous articles and essays in academic journals. He has also written screenplays for film and television, contributed to journalistic articles and conducted cultural programmes and television documentaries.

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    Reviews for Tyrant

    3/5

    65 ratings3 reviews

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    • 5/5
      AMAZING!! I enjoyed this immensely, entertaining, thought provoking and informative.
    • 3/5
      2.5/5. The novel gives us an unusual subject and time period--Greek Sicily at the time of the Peloponnesian War and beyond. I'm just using that as a reference as to when the story takes place. The novel tells of Dionysius of Syracuse, a good man who is badly affected by the death and destruction of his beloved wife. He then seizes power and becomes a tyrant, in the worst sense of the word--ruthless, merciless, cold-hearted. We see how absolute power corrupts him. He has mixed success against Carthaginians but does make Sicily into something to be reckoned with.Hampered by a poor translation, was the wording of the original Italian also as bad? The novel was overwhelmed with battles, but I did have to admire Dionysius's military genius: hauling ships overland, the invention to catapults. Sex scenes were risible, especially the one under water. Characters were one-dimensional but for his brother, Leptines, and his friend, the historian Philistus, whose original work has been lost. I feel this author was a better historian than novelist, although I applaud him for tackling this subject. A superior novel on a Greek who lived somewhat later, Timoleon, whose name will always be coupled with Syracuse is Peter Vansittart's A Choice Of Murder.
    • 1/5
      I've read about a third of it, and have added it to the Lifeline box. I can't stomach any more of its heavy-handed "tyrant rules, democracy drools". That's the young, handsome, capable, hunky, bad-ass, heroic, noble budding tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse vs the doddering, ugly, old, venal, indecisive, stupid, elected democratic rulers. Now, extremely probably the democrats weren't all that great, and the tyrant had his good side. It is 400 BC, and the democrats of the time were really much more like aristocrats and plutocrats. Maybe there is a decent historical novel to be written about this interesting chunk of history. But this sharply black and white apologia for fascism is not it.

    Book preview

    Tyrant - Valerio Massimo Manfredi

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