Historical fiction
The Farthest Shield
The lost legion of Carrhae marched east into history. One man marched all the way to China.
Lucius Ateporix Vettius is born on the edge of Roman Italy — half-Insubric, raised between two pantheons and belonging fully to neither. At seventeen he follows Crassus into Parthia to earn the citizenship his birth denies him. At eighteen he survives Carrhae, Rome's worst defeat of the age, and is sold east across the steppe as a garrison soldier.
He should have died in that desert. Instead he walks for forty years, carrying a battered legionary shield past the Oxus, past the Talas, into the service of warlords and the gaze of a Han general — toward a town at the edge of the known world.
What does a man become when Rome forgets he ever existed? And what becomes of the shield he can no longer carry?
Inspired by the Lost Legion hypothesis — the proposal that survivors of Carrhae ended their long march as the Han frontier county of Liqian.
Literary historical fiction of Rome's lost legion and the long road east.
The Farthest Shield is a novel of one man’s forty-year march from Roman Italy across the steppe to the Han frontier — a life lived past the far edge of the empire that made him and forgot him. It is Alessandro’s debut novel, and is available in English, Italian (Lo Scudo più Lontano), and Romanian (Scutul cel mai îndepărtat).