The Reading Bud

Book Details:

Author: Aaron Benmark
Release Date: November 20, 2026
Series: Children of the Wolf (Book #1)
Genre: Alternative History, Greek-Roman Retelling, Historical Fantasy
Format: E-book
Pages: 482
Publisher: –
Blurb:
We all know the legend of the founding of Rome. But what happens if Remus doesn’t stay dead?
Remus wants to be a simple shepherd with his brother Romulus. But when his brother kills him, he learns he is a demigod tied to the immortal city of Rome. His simple life in flames, he is thrust into centuries of conflict with Rome itself as the ante. And at all times, his brother Romulus is…

Review

Sins of the Palatine by Aaron Benmark is a mythological historical fantasy that reimagines the founding and early development of Rome through the eyes of Remus, the brother history remembers primarily for dying at Romulus’s hand. Murdered during their dispute over the new city, Remus awakens to discover that his divine parentage has made him immortal and that his fate remains inseparably bound to Rome. Returning in successive mortal identities across the reigns of its seven kings, he attempts to temper his brother’s appetite for conquest, strengthen the city’s institutions and guide Rome towards a system in which power might belong to its people. What begins as a familiar myth consequently expands into an ambitious political chronicle about the ideas, violence and compromises from which a civilisation is constructed.

The novel’s most compelling achievement is its treatment of immortality as a form of historical consciousness rather than convenient invincibility. Remus remembers every demolished city, political betrayal and person whose life has ended while Rome continues to grow around him, making him both participant in and witness to the consequences of its progress. His ideological conflict with Romulus is equally absorbing because Benmark resists reducing the brothers to virtue and villainy. Romulus represents military power, hierarchy and territorial ambition, while Remus believes in civic participation, restraint and institutional reform, nevertheless, Remus’s principles are repeatedly tested by grief, vengeance and the temptation to manipulate mortals for what he considers the greater good. Their relationship retains a thread of wounded affection beneath centuries of hostility, lending emotional force to what might otherwise have remained a purely philosophical conflict.

Benmark also integrates early Roman history with considerable intelligence, incorporating the Sabine women, the Horatii and Curiatii, the destruction of Alba Longa, the Servian reforms, the Tarquins and the movement towards the Republic without allowing Remus’s presence to erase the mortals responsible for these events. The women are especially well served: Hersilia, Concordia, Tanaquil, Ostia and Lucretia possess political intelligence and agency within a society designed to deny them both, while the gods emerge as self-interested powers whose favours carry agendas of their own. The gradual transformation of Rome, from an unruly settlement into a city of temples, sewers, assemblies, social divisions and expanding influence, makes the city itself feel like one of the novel’s principal characters.

Its considerable scope does, at times, make the narrative feel closer to a dramatised chronicle than a fully continuous novel. The repeated pattern of Remus entering a new life, establishing another identity, gaining political influence and debating Rome’s future creates some loss of momentum through the middle, while several administrative developments and ideological arguments explain ideas that the surrounding action has already made clear. A more selective treatment of certain reigns, along with greater compression in the political conversations, would sharpen the emotional progression and give pivotal losses more room to resonate. The accessible, contemporary register keeps a formidable period of history readable, although its most modern turns of phrase occasionally weaken the atmosphere of antiquity.

Nevertheless, Sins of the Palatine is an imaginative, intellectually engaged opening to the Children of the Wolf series, combining myth, history and political fantasy in a story concerned with far more than the rivalry between two legendary brothers. It asks whether a civilisation can transcend the brutality upon which it was founded, whether benevolent power can remain benevolent when exercised without accountability, and whether institutions truly restrain human ambition or merely give it a different language. Readers who enjoy historically grounded fantasy, morally complicated immortals and expansive stories about the formation of states will find much to admire here.

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