The Ditch-Maker's Claim: A Novel of Aquincum, 168 AD (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798255043927)

THE DITCH-MAKER'S CLAIM A Novel of Aquincum, 168 AD

Rome, 168 AD. The Antonine Plague is killing soldiers faster than the legions can replace them. In the garrison town of Aquincum - a frontier fortress on the Danube, present-day Budapest - the military treasury is overwhelmed, understaffed, and processing the pension claims of the dead at a pace that serves the institution rather than the families waiting outside its doors.

Cornelius Aemilius Fossatus, iurisconsultus, has come north from Rome for four days to resolve a grain contract. He intends to leave on schedule. He does not.

In a treasury corridor he walks past a woman at a wall. He walks three paces. He stops. Tafat, daughter of a Numidian cavalry decurion who died of the plague nineteen days earlier, has been refused four times in four visits. Each refusal was technically correct. None of them were right.

What follows is twelve days of bureaucratic combat - meticulous, legally precise, and quietly relentless - as Fossatus dismantles the classification problem blocking the claim of a soldier who gave Rome twenty-two years and one hundred and forty-three days. But the pension dispute is only the surface. Buried in the treasury records is a pattern that has nothing to do with Tafat's father and everything to do with sixty-four families who will never know they were robbed.

The Ditch-Maker's Claim is the first novel in the Ditch-Maker series: a story about two people who find each other through the mechanism of the law, and about what happens when the person who is right is not the person the system was built for.
Historically grounded. Legally precise. Human.

Author: Cornelis Van Houte
ISBN-13: 9798255043927
Publisher: Independently Published
Language: English
Published: 04/05/2026
Pages: 354
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.04lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.74d