100 books like The Epistles of Horace

This book is a treasure-trove of wise and gorgeous sentences—like, “Knowledge of Rome must be physical, sweated into the system, worked up into the brain through the thinning shoe-leather. Substantiality comes through touch and smell, and taste, the tastes of different dusts.”

Like the Eternal City, A Time in Rome by the Irish-British novelist Elizabeth Bowen doesn’t fit into tidy categories.

Is it a guidebook to the city? Is it a memoir? Is it a history of Rome? Yes and no.

Though I can’t quite put my finger on what it is, I love it. It’s a perfect book for reveries over a mid-morning caffé.

As someone who spent part of the pandemic trying to keep sane by translating ancient Roman poems, I’m definitely part of this book’s target audience.

But Long Live Latin is much more than a spirited ode to the pricelessness of a useless language. In swift and insightful chapters, the Italian writer Nicola Gardini takes us—regardless of how much or little we know about Latin—on a tour of the greatest ancient Roman poets and philosophers—Catullus, Cicero, Lucretius, Virgil, and Seneca, among others.

Like la bella figura, so characteristic of Romans throughout history, these essays are a celebration of how style is inseparable from the good life. 

All the easily-portable volumes in Princeton University Press’s “Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers” can be read in the time it takes to drink two glasses of wine (along with this book, one of my other favorites is How to Drink by the Renaissance humanist Vincent Obsopoeus).

For all their quarrels, ancient philosophers agree that the art of life is the preparation for death. Nobody expresses that wisdom with more panache than Seneca, a philosopher, financier, tutor to Nero, and playwright.

This selection from his works teaches us how to face the death and destruction that we see everywhere in Rome—and everywhere else too.

I turn to Seneca’s essays and letters for a good reminder to live with a minimum of regret and resentment.

One of my favorite Italian figures of the twentieth century is the writer, painter, and anti-fascist Carlo Levi.

This collection of his essays, evoking the complexities of Rome and its people, sums up what it means to come to terms with the Eternal City:

“Here, everything has already existed: and existence has not vanished into memory, rather it has remained present... The virtues are not the moral and ideological values (which the passage of too long a time has gradually flattened out), but simpler and more visible values: health, physical strength, knowing how to eat and drink, knowing how to speak with a certain humor and brevity, knowing how to command respect, sincerity, friendship.”

May all roads lead to this understanding of the world. 

Decades ago I wouldn’t have recommended Vergil’s Aeneid. It’s a scandal for a Latin teacher to say that, but there you have it. And then one day the light came on, and I saw the incredible depth of the characters, to say nothing of the artistry of the poetry itself. As I have taught the poem to juniors and seniors each year and worked on my own translation along the way, I never cease to be amazed by Vergil as a writer. He crafts each scene, each character, as if he were a sculptor or a jeweler working the most exquisite cameo. Don’t miss out on a world classic that is too often overlooked in the modern age. For this, I chose a prose translation that really showcases Vergil’s storytelling. 

Heliogabalus became Emperor aged 14, manipulated into power by his mother and grandmother.

As a relative and possible illegtimate son of Caracalla, he appears in my Imperial Assassin series in the days before he rose to power. He is considered by many to be one of the worst Roman Emperors on account mainly of his outrageous lifestyle.

He married a Vestal Virgin, and a male charioteer, was reputed to have prostituted himself and to have turned the palace into a brothel, and offered a fortune to any doctor that could turn him into a woman.

He scandalised the religious Romans by replacing Jupiter as head of the gods with the eastern god Elagabal, of whom he was high Priest. But to modern eyes, a more sympathetic reading is of a teenage boy with a confused sexual orientation who unexpectedly had unlimited power and wealth thrust upon him.

Harry Sidebottom writes… show more.

Syme was wrote about the fall of the Roman Republic in the shadow of the rise of totalitarianism. 

But for me what is most interesting about this book is its use of collective biography and its argument that the rise of Caesar and Augustus is best understood as the rise of a party or a faction. Most books on the Late Republic focus on the larger-than-life personalities: Caesar, Pompey, Crassus, and Cicero. Syme focuses on structures and systematic factors.

He writes with an at times jarring cynicism. His treatment of Cicero is particularly critical for example. For Syme, all states are governed by coalitions of elites.

And the writing is unforgettable: "a monarchy rules through an oligarchy"; "at its worst, biography is flat and schematic: at its best, it is often baffled by the hidden discords of human nature... undue insistence on upon the character and exploits of a single… show more.

Mouritsen’s short, detailed, survey of Roman politics in the Republic packs such a punch in terms of its sophisticated, but brief, analyses of Roman political systems including the fall of the Republic. In short, I think Mouritsen has done as good a job as any historian, page-for-page examining in brief the mechanics of Republican politics and their collapse. I certainly relied on his broader analysis of Roman political systems and their collapse on a number of occasions in my book as we investigated the turbulent tenures of this and that aristocrat. Politics in the Roman Republic is an excellent first step to Mouritsen’s thoughtful analysis, since it will provide the stories of essentially all the key aristocrats who form the evidence for his analysis. For those who want even more understanding of the political and competitive systems as they operated, Mouritsen’s book is a terrific next step.

This is a great read on the way that Rome became an empire. It puts the whole story of the city of Rome and what it developed into (i.e. the biggest power of the ancient world and a paradigm for many empires that followed) into context and into the history of the Mediterranean world. The book is so useful to read because it is well written and contemporary, but it also helps us to understand Hannibal. This is because Rome's version of Carthage and Hannibal is the only version that we have to deal with, Hannibal in many ways becomes a reflection of Roman ideas of their own imperialism.

This is a work on a grand scale about Rome and Jerusalem and relations between Romans and Jews written by a scholar of both Jewish and Roman history. It goes into great depth about the cultural, political, and religious beliefs and practices of Romans and Jews and uses the evidence for them to explain how and why these two ancient civilizations repeatedly came into tragic conflict. This book is probably the best and most informative guide to the antecedents of the great revolt of Jews against Romans.