Name an odd job and chances are Marcellus Durrell has done it. He has been a welder, chicken catcher, fruit picker, steelworker, warehouse loader, auto assembly-line worker, movie theatre janitor, junkyard labourer, musician, free-lance writer, cab driver, office clerk, art gallery security guard, postal worker and more. At one time, he refused to work for any company that would have him as an employee, although he later revised this policy because it was detrimental to his longstanding desire to live indoors. He is a recently retired librarian--a notably non-odd job & the best he ever had--and lives in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, with his wife and their alarmingly spoiled cat.

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Eighty Thousand Romans at the Bottom of the Hill is Marcellus Durrell's eleventh novel and a continuation of his explorations in ancient history. Julius Caesar's double circumvallation of Alesia--with which he trapped the Alesians in their city but also trapped his own men from escaping the Alesians' allies--is rightly regarded as one of the greatest military feats of all time.

If he'd failed, he would have been recalled to Rome, assuming he survived, and the Roman conquest of Gaul may never have happened. Without the Romanization of the area, the French language probably wouldn't exist in anything like its current form. 

Marcellus Durrell is currently finishing Ordinary Blasphemies, set on the Aegean island of Lesvos some time after the Trojan War, a comic fantasy about a hunter who accidentally offends a goddess, and in his efforts to appease her, accidentally offends another goddess. As he tries to appease the second goddess, he inadvertently offends the angriest god of all.