SOURCE: "McCullough's Roman à Clef," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 28, 1990, p. 11.

In the following review, Campbell praises The First Man in Rome as "an absolutely absorbing story" that is well-researched and well-told.

In at least one respect the parallel is discomfiting: a national political leadership in which great wealth is essential to achieve power. But it's not Washington, D.C., 1990, where dug-in incumbents defy political unknowns with lean pocketbooks to unseat them. It is, instead, the city-state of Rome in 110 BC, and the republic that has endured for more than 300 years has become fat, corrupt and inept, and is beginning to unravel faster than a 39-cent pair of socks.

This is the critical juncture that novelist Colleen McCullough—she, primarily, of the enormously popular The Thorn Birds—has chosen as the take-off point for her awesome and epic new work, The First Man in Rome. And, for...