The Rise of Rome

The Making of the World's Greatest Empire

The material moves from the legendary to the historical, careful to keep the strands separate. Plenty of quotations to demonstrate what the ancients thought of their own or the immediately preceding times, and enough explanation to guide us through propaganda. These are stories familiar to our better educated predecessors, in need of a good modern presentation. The social and political history and cultural coverage is wide but not scholarly-deep. The book is less well-written than the author’s Cicero which I had enjoyed very much and which led me to read this book: Rise of Rome has some purple prose and plenty of sensationalism, but that is as much a fault of the subject as of the telling.

I am not a classical scholar, but many more years ago than I like to say I read avidly the first volume of Lewis & Reinhold’s Roman Civilization: Selected Readings on the Republic after consuming with voyeuristic glee Graves’ Claudius novels and Suetonius’ Twelve Caesars…)