Arguments Against My Father
A Novel of Roman Africa

About this book:

In the dust-choked roads of Roman Africa, a Numidian father delivers his son to the marble jaws of Carthage—not to become a Roman, but to learn how to outthink them. Malchus arrives in the reborn city with a wax tablet, a stiff tunic, and a tongue too hard for the oil-slick rhetoric of the schools. His father, Mastanabal, has spent a lifetime watching surveyors carve their ancestral grazing lands into taxable squares; he knows the empire takes with parchment what it once took with swords. In the classroom of the grammaticus, among the sons of decurions and the heirs of confiscated estates, Malchus will learn that declamation is not an exercise—it is armor. Every suasoria, every controversy, every forced argument for a tyrant or a traitor sharpens the only weapon that can defend his family's olive groves from the proconsul's clerk.

But the city is a machine that grinds identity into coin. Purple-stained merchants calculate the price of a boy's future in the harbor's fetid alleys; auxiliary cavalry patrol the grids the surveyors drew over sacred hills; and in the forum, a single misplaced vowel can cost a man his inheritance. As drought withers the Bagradas valley and the proconsul's shadow lengthens across the courts, Malchus discovers that his father's hardest lesson was not how to speak, but how to listen—to the silences between the laws, to the contradictions in the blood, to the rhetoric of power that wears the mask of justice. The trial comes not with trumpets but with a document in twisted Latin, and the defense must be built from the very tools the empire provided.

*Arguments Against My Father* is a novel of rhetoric as resistance, of a son learning to weaponize the colonizer's language against the colonizer's courts. Steeped in the salt wind of Salambo and the red dust of the Royal Road, it follows a young advocate through the schools, warehouses, and tribunal of a province where every boundary stone is a lie and every speech is a battle. For readers who crave historical fiction that thinks as sharply as it feels—where the texture of a wax tablet matters as much as the turn of a phrase—this is a coming-of-age forged in the fire of Roman law and Numidian pride.