What do You think about The Misplaced Legion (1987)?
I picked up this book because it was sitting on my shelf with it's three brothers and at the time I was looking for a long, mindless science fiction series to get me through the beginning of summer. It wasn't quite what I was looking for. I think what I really wanted was to reread Harry Potter. However, Turtledove clearly did a lot of research and planning for this series and he rewards a patient reader with a rich and (magically enhanced) historically accurate story. My only complaint so far is that it's somewhat sluggish tempo has kept me from finishing the second book, so I don't really know how it all ends.
—Paul Johnson
The Misplaced Legion is an excellent book that starts off the Videssos Cycle series. Marcus Scaurus is a Roman tribune who bears a Gaulic sword taken from a slain druid. As he leads his troops through Gaul he encounters an ambush, led by the chieftain Viridovix. The Romans are superior in their tactics but the shear numbers and ferocity of the enemy causes them to slowly lose ground. Finally, it comes to the point where Viridovix challenges Marcus to a duel. Marcus, in a futile attempt to save h
—Nicolas
This is a novel about a group of Roman soldiers mystically transported to a fantasy world; nitpicking its historical accuracy is, obviously, as pointless as it is irresistible. Here goes:1. On p. 148: "The Roman knew how easy it was to judge a man by the company he kept. Caesar himself, in his younger days, had fallen into danger through his association with Marius' defeated faction." This makes it sound like Marius was the leader of a motorcycle gang, and poor naive Caesar fell in with the wrong crowd by accident. In fact, "Marius' faction" basically meant the populist cause in Roman politics, and Caesar played up his family connections to Marius as part of a deliberate political strategy.2. On p. 173: "Coming from Rome, whose history was little more than legend even three centuries before his own time, Marcus had never quite gotten over the awe Videssos' long past raised in him." If he'd said "four centuries," I might have let this pass. But the mid-fourth century (Marcus was fighting under Caesar in Gaul) is the time of Rome's conflicts with the Latin League and the Samnites; even for us, this is solidly historical (if somewhat blurry) material, and Marcus would have had access to all sorts of literary and documentary sources that have since been lost.3. I understand that it's hard to come up with plausible-sounding words in a fictional language, and it's a perfectly acceptable choice to model that fictional language on a real one. But when most of your main characters come from ancient Rome, and one comes from Greece, the mysterious, incomprehensible language they encounter in a magical alternate universe should not, for God's sake, be obviously based on Greek. It is immensely distracting (at least to me) to have these characters acting utterly confused when the hear that the gods of light and darkness are named "Phos" and "Skotos," the chief official of a city is the "hypasteos," the emperor is called "Avtokrator," and so on.4. The choice to represent the speech of the one Gaulish character as Irish-accented English is exactly as irritating as you would imagine.
—Emlen
