City of Cats
It’s 384 A.D., the dawn of the Christian monotheistic state. Emperor Theodosius has decreed the Nicene version of Christianity the exclusive religion of the Empire. Allegiance to any other interpretation of Christianity or any form of paganism would be subject to criminal prosecution. For the first time in a thousand years of Greco-Roman civilization mere though could be a crime. The city of Rome, however, remained a hotbed of competing religious and political ideas with the conflicts between pagans, orthodox, and now-heretical Christians often breaking out into violence.
City of Cats follows the tumultuous events of one decisive year in the life of Lupicinus, powerful advisor to the Pope, who lives a duplicitous life as a clandestine non-believer, and Saturnine, the unconverted wife of a Christian senator who secretly writes against the Church. Lupicinus and Saturnine are brought together and their lives changed forever by Kharapan, a Stoic philosopher from a remote land outside the Empire, where the Hellenistic schools of philosophy still thrive. Kharapan remains true to his principles and loyal to his friends even as he, and the ancient idea of philosophy as a way of life itself, teeter on the brink of extinction.
City of Cats, deeply relevant to our time, is an epic saga about the soul-rending decisions people are forced to make when the course of history is against them and set to annihilate all they value. It is a brilliant and thoughtful exploration of the philosophic way of life that once flourished in Western culture before monotheism came to dominate the known world.