I enjoy great historical fiction like The Leopard or War & Peace. For breezy reading I turn to novels set in ancient Greece and Rome, like those by Mary Renault and mysteries such as those by Lindsey Davis and Steven Saylor.This novel is just trash, and has as much success depicting the Roman Empire as do those Italian sandal films of the 1960's. The plotting and dialog are at that level or worse; the fifth century deserves more than a Rhonda Fleming potboiler.It's a shame, since Galla Placidia's story is a fascinating one, though little explored in fiction. She is one of the rare women of history who, for better or worse, were central to her times. Daughter and sister to emperors, wife to a Gothic king, then empress herself and mother to an emperor, for whom she was Regent, within a few years of her death the Roman world withered away.