"Life is cheap in Byzantium. Life is cheap everywhere that the Romans are." Byzantium. The imperial city — rising dramatically, as if by a trick of the light, from the peninsula of the Bosphorus and the Black Sea. Its domes and towers and minarets overlook a place of intrigue, lust, power, oppression, resistance and murder. Romans, Greeks, Zealots, Pharisees ... all meet in the market squares of the great city, but mutual loathing and suspicion are rife.