Joseph Thomas Rossettie

The Lycurgus Cup Joseph Thomas Rossettie

My book is a literary fiction painted on the authentic historical tapestry of the Eastern Mediterranean in the year 400. It's an adventure story, but constructed around a number of theological problems of the day.

The central character, Veritus, is a student from Corduba who has come to Ephesus to interview a powerful but dying Roman bureaucrat. Several attempts are made on his life, but why? By whom? He soon finds that he is embroiled in an undeclared war of theology. He becomes a pawn in this deadly game as he agrees to set a trap for the Capoderms, a group of intolerant "protectors of the faith." Instead of closing the trap, he finds himself betrayed and at the point of death in a wine cellar on the Sinai. There, during that night, he goes through a transformation, a personal Pentecost, during which he is given the Faith by the Holy Spirit. He emerges as a man of faith and is extricated from the hands of the evil Capoderms by a remarkable sequence of events.