I also developed a great taste for all the fiction I could get about the ancient world: Quo Vadis, Darkness and Dawn, The Gladiators, Ben Hur. It might be expected that this arose out of my new concern for my religion, but I think not. Early Christians came into many of these stories, but they were not what I was after. I simply wanted sandals, temples, togas, slaves, emperors, galleys, amphitheatres; the attraction, as I now see, was erotic, and erotic in rather a morbid way. And they were mostly, as literature, rather bad books. 

~C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

I’m not sure what Lewis meant by “erotic”. Perhaps he simply meant sensationalist or appealing to the emotions. I’m not at all sure any of these novels could be called erotic in the same sense as 50 Shades of Grey is erotic, but perhaps I’m not picking up on some nuance of the definition of the word. At any rate, C.S. Lewis didn’t think The Darkness and the Dawn was a terribly good book, and I tend to agree with him. But still, it was an interesting look at a time and a place about which there is very little historical fiction to be read.

The book features horses, battles, Roman legions, Attila the Hun, a girl with golden hair, and a hero who fights to win her. If it reminded me of anything I had read before, it was Stephen Lawhead’s Byzantium, a book with many of the same themes and a similar setting (Europe, Dark Ages) minus Attila aka the Scourge of God. There’s a lot scheming, political plotting, battles, narrow escapes, rebellion, and romance as well as all of the things that Lewis mentions as attractions for his teenage reading life.

The Romans are predictably decadent and ripe for being conquered. Attila is portrayed as a shrewd but barbaric and harsh king, out to conquer the world and subject all men to his bidding. (As an aside, I don’t really understand why power is such an addictive narcotic. Why did Attila, Alexander, Julius Caesar and countless others want to rule the world? Why doesn’t Donald Trump just resign? I think I would just quit at some point, but maybe that’s because I’ve never had enough power for it to go to my head.)

Nicolan, the hero of the story, begins as the son of a back country horse breeder, is sold into slavery, and becomes the trusted and gifted advisor to Attila himself. At a critical juncture in the story, Nicolan embraces his Christian heritage and struggles with what that commitment means to his desire for revenge and his place as a military advisor. If you have ” a taste for all the fiction . . . about the ancient world,” you could do worse than pick up The Darkness and the Dawn, not an enduring classic literary novel, but a decent read nevertheless. And it’s not really “erotic” so don’t go in expecting that.