I don't know what to do with this one. One the one hand, it's definitely passable, with solid unremarkable prose and decent pacing, provided you're willing to overlook a proper noun dump. I'm fairly sure the author has the research chops to be doing this, and the clarification sections at the end are a concept everyone should take a lesson from. However, aside from some sprinklings of philosophy, there's just nothing new here. It's the same brutal realism Romans set of tropes that I've seen dozens of times before, and the characterization isn't carried off well enough to make me care who's torturing whom.