David László Conhaim

David László Conhaim is a writer and historian whose work sits at the intersection of classical scholarship and literary fiction. His deep engagement with the primary sources of the Roman Republic — particularly Livy's Ab Urbe Condita — informs every page of Spurius, while his instinct for narrative tension keeps the story moving at the pace of a thriller.

Conhaim's research into the Bacchanalia suppression of 186 BC led him to the bronze Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus, one of the oldest surviving Latin inscriptions, now housed in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum. That document — a direct order from the Roman Senate — forms the backbone of the novel's historical authenticity. According to the historian Livy, the suppression claimed some 3,500 Roman lives, making it one of the most dramatic episodes in Republican history.

In Spurius, Conhaim finds a story that speaks directly to the present: a state apparatus weaponising fear of the foreign and the transgressive to crush freedom of belief, and a lone official who must decide how far duty extends before it becomes complicity. The novel is simultaneously a political whodunit, a portrait of a civilisation at its most confident and most ruthless, and a meditation on the manipulation of truth in times of national emergency.

Spurius: A Novel is his debut and the first volume in a planned trilogy set in the late Roman Republic.