Agnes Strickland: Selected Literary Works Literary Elements

Historical fiction

The action takes place in the first century A.D. in Rome.

The action is told from the perspective of a third-person objective point of view.

The tone and mood is a violent one.

The protagonists are the Christians and the antagonists are the Roman soldiers.

The major conflict is between the Roman empire and the Christian faith. The conflict is caused by the different beliefs the people had.

The story reaches its climax when the main characters are killed in the arena.

The description at the beginning of the book, that of an unnamed group of Christians being killed by lions in the arena foreshadows the later scene in which the main characters will be killed in the same way.

When Alda decides to become a Christian she claims that nothing bad will happen to her and her family because God will protect her. This is however an understatement since the narrator later describes how both Alda and her family are killed because of their faith.

One of the main allusions is the idea that most of the Christians believed that God wanted them to be killed by the Romans and as such did not did everything to change their faith.

No important images which have not yet been analyzed can be found here.

One of the main paradoxes found here is the idea that the Christians try to help the rest of the Romans even though those people were actively trying to kill them.

A parallel is drawn between the Christians in the ring, preparing themselves to be killed by lions, and the Romans watching from a distance and waiting patiently for the events to play out. This parallel is an important one and is used to highlight the different types of thinking caused by the two different religions.

The term blood is used in the book as a general term through which the narrator makes reference to the violent nature of the Roman empire.

We have a personification in the sentence "even the sky cried for them".