The Nero Prediction

It is 48 AD, a time when Rome rules the world and astrologers rule Rome.

Agrippina, the emperor Claudius’ niece, reads in the stars that someone born in Alexandria on July 19, 32 AD, is destined to help raise her son, the future emperor Nero, to the throne of the Caesars. This fated young man is Epaphroditus, a library slave and the book’s narrator, who at the age of 16 is taken by force to Rome to serve young Nero.

Epaphroditus becomes Nero’s confidant as the art-obsessed Caesar dreams of an age when music rules the world. After Nero performs his musical spectacles in public, apocalyptic Christians—believing him to be the antichrist—set Rome afire.

Revolutionary unrest strikes Rome, a fiery comet makes a foreboding appearance, and the young emperor makes a concert tour of Greece as enemies sprout like Hydra’s heads. Epaphroditus, fortified by the return of his faith in astrology, discovers that he, Nero’s protector, is fated to kill his Caesar.

Author Humphry Knipe’s brilliant historical novel shakes the rafters of conventional belief about Nero and his Rome and the ancient science of astrology. As Michael Grant, the preeminent published expert on the Roman Empire, says: “The belief in astrology was so predominant in the Mediterranean world that it exceeded every religion in power and influence. I admire Humphry Knipe’s ingenuity in weaving an imaginative and fascinating story around it in The Nero Prediction.”

Miriam T. Griffin, the author of Nero: The End of a Dynasty, writes: “The Nero Prediction captures very imaginatively an aspect of ancient thinking that conventional scholarship ignores. . . . It contributes to understanding the ancient mental landscape.”

Humphry Knipe is co-author of The Dominant Man (Delacorte), screenwriter, and editor. He lives on a horse ranch in Malibu with his wife, glamour photographer Suze Randall, and their children. This is his first novel.