the usp of the roman empire has always been its survival. The largest state to ever exist in Europe, Rome’s empire began with the conquest of its Italian neighbors in the final centuries BC, and endured, in one form or another, for more than 1,000 years. The imperial monarchy established by Augustus at the turn of the millennium became a model repeatedly imitated in the 20th century. The Slavic title of Tsar is a distant echo of Caesar. His eagles flew over the empires of Austria, France and Mexico. The Roman fasces, an ax encased in a bundle of rods, was not only wielded by Mussolini and Hitler, but still adorns the United States House of Representatives and the Sheldonian Theater in Oxford.
My book Rome: The Story of an Empire, the second edition of which has just been published, traces that long arc of history from the Iron Age peoples on the Tiber to Byzantium, besieged on the Bosphorus while their Syrian possessions and Africans fell into the hands of Arab armies. it also explores the echoes of the roman empire through the ages.
You are reading: Books from ancient rome
The following are some of the best volumes of a long and still expanding literature.
1. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward GibbonThis six-volume history (first published between 1776 and 1789) now reads More by scholars of enlightenment than by Roman historians, but no one has told the story of Rome with more flair and delight. the famous opening in the ruins of the Roman forum colors the entire book. the sense of antiquity yielding ungracefully to successive ages remains a powerful image. Gibbon also knew that Byzantium was also, and remained, Rome long after the Eternal City had been sacked by barbarians (twice) and possessed by popes. no words describe it better than epic.
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2. the corrupting sea by peregrine horden and nicholas purcell as different from gibbon as it could be, except for its scale and ambition . Published in 2000, this is the most brilliant and influential recent work on the ancient world. Drawing from a deep understanding of the Mediterranean environment, he builds an image of the ancient region as a world of distant but connected communities, many of them poised precariously on the brink of sustainability. city-states and empires play a secondary role here compared to peasants and villages: wars and revolutions matter less than crop failures and disease. it’s a compelling glimpse into the underbelly of the empire, the foundation on which it was built. the discipline is still working out the implications of his arguments.
3. The Acts of the Apostles for Rome Of course, we are lucky to have eyewitness accounts. Perhaps none is more gripping than the facts, a continuation of the gospel narrative, Life After Jesus, which takes place in Judea, among the cities of the Empire’s eastern provinces, and finally in Rome itself. Acts has everything from Roman summary justice and civic unrest to the perils of sea travel, and especially the strange combinations of identities the empire’s various subjects adopted for themselves.
4. the emperor in the roman world by fergus millar politically, everything revolved around the emperor. Fergus Millar’s masterpiece, like all great books, has inspired debate and criticism, but changed the way we understand the practice of Roman government. Millar concentrated on building a picture of what the emperors actually did, from their charters and laws and from thousands of inscriptions and provincial records, rather than the sardonic histories of senatorial writers like Tacitus and Dio. he also conveyed a sense of the immensity of the empire and the slowness with which information circulated through its arteries. the emperor of a thousand struggled not to lose sight of what was happening. he too was mostly on the defensive, reacting to crises rather than pushing policy forward. he is a difficult image to remove from the mind.
5. the world of late antiquity by peter brown another book that leaves its mark. Where others had seen Rome reach its peak in the late second and third centuries, Brown begins there and tells the story of the new worlds that arose between the reign of Marcus Aurelius and the Prophet Muhammad. the new cultures and religions and languages of late antiquity have been a fertile field for recent research. reviewing my own book, this was the period when Roman history had changed the most over the last decade. Brown began the study of late antiquity, which now has its own journals, encyclopedias, and conferences, and has continued to lead from the front.
6. the roman triumph of maria barbarome has so often been a model for later imitators that it is sometimes easy to forget how different it was from what followed. This is not the most famous of Barba’s many books on Rome, but it played an important role in exploring the combination of savagery and ceremonial that followed Roman victories. he also described the enormous creative efforts of the Romans who reshaped their religion and their monumental city for each generation.
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7. blunt. An Archaeological Guide by Amanda ClaridgeIf you want to explore the remains of that city, there is no better guide than this one. Claridge knows the modern city and its latest archeology better than anyone who writes in English. her book is a lucid and compact guide to the most dilapidated and built-up monuments. I take it with me everywhere when I’m in town (and I’ve worn a couple of copies).
8. catherine edwards roman presenceswandering through the eternal city it is impossible not to think of the many replicas of the roman empire. The subsequent reception of images of Rome has been an academic growth industry in recent years, but my favorite collection remains this one, ranging from Thomas Macaulay to Ts Eliot and from London to Bombay.
9. asterix the gaul by rene goscinny and albert uderzomi first encounter with a modern reception of ancient rome was here.it still makes me laugh as hard as when i was 12 years old. my kids learned to read on it. when i came to live in paris as a graduate student, i realized how much i had to say about france after the second world war and also under the fifth republic. pretty bright.
10. Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire by Judith Herrin , or even the Arab conquests. Herrin tells the 1,000-year history of the Christian Roman Empire not through narrative but through a series of brilliant and vivid vignettes. it is a pleasure to read it.
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Rome: The Story of an Empire by Greg Woolf is published by Oxford University Press (£12.99).
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