Daniel J. Gargola

The work provides a broad overview of Roman history up to Constantine. The work covers both the political and military history as well as the cultural developments and contributions in literature and philosophy. Overall, the work provides a very broad summary of the history, focusing more on the broad flow rather than the details and individual reigns of the various emperors. Greater attention is paid to the transition between the late republic and early empire, as the otherwise sparse detail and individual attention expands to a more detailed exploration of this critical transitional period. Considering how much attention is paid to the early Imperial period, a more in depth consideration of the period that laid the foundation of this development is a welcome addition to the general negelct of this confusing time.… (más)

TW/CW: Death, assassination, talk of incest, talk of cruelty, torture, suicide

REVIEW: I have always had a fascination with the Roman empire, so I decided it was a good time to find some books and read them. Of what my library had, this one seemed to cover the greatest time period (from the Etruscans to Constantine), so I decided to read it first.

This book is very dense and has a lot of information between its pages. It is more text book than regular non-fiction book, and the writing can be dry. There’s a lot of frustration about the source material (for obvious reasons) and the book lays out before each chapter exactly what they’ve been able to find find and what is conjecture. There were things I would have liked to hear more about – especially the lives of the women and the the slaves, although I realize that any existing evidence about those two marginalized groups would be very rare, if it exists at all.

This book throws a lot of names and place and battles at you, but if you want the history, it’s definitely here! Obviously it can’t go into depth on everything, but I think it gave me a basic knowledge base to go read other books from now, which is kind of what I was looking for, so this book worked for me! I’d recommend to people who don’t mind reading kind of dry history and are interested in pretty much the entire history of Rome.… (más)

A brief history of the Romans indeed, but a very good and concise history. The book is largely political, but there are occasional splatterings of Roman social history and structure. This isn’t a book full of ‘fun’ facts, but after you read it you leave with a sense that you understand Rome's progression from Republic to Empire to Decline. The book has some really great maps and pictures, as well as boxes with quotes from writers such as Livy and Polybius. Fortunately, the events in the book are also given fairly chronological, which is a blessing when reading about so many events and people, especially when names tend to be very similar. All in all, it’s a great book for anyone who wants a more than general (though not complete and in depth) idea of Roman history.… (más)