The most recommended books on Rome

Some authors have an innate faculty for bringing the dim and distant past into such razor-sharp clarity that it’s hard not to believe that they were once present at the time. That’s how it is with Mary Renault (real name Eileen Mary Challans): any number of her books could have made this list.

What I particularly love about this duology (the sequel The Bull From the Sea isn’t quite as strong) is that Renault retold the ancient tale of Theseus and the Minotaur as historical fiction. Though she followed the main beats of the well-known story, she boldly stripped it of gods, monsters, and magic, and the narrative doesn’t suffer at all from it. If anything, it makes it even more compelling because it feels like she has stumbled upon a possible origin to the myth.

While not as funny as the above books, I like this one for its story of betrayal, dignity, and revenge. Set in Mussolini’s fascist regime and the Nazi occupation, young Angelina Rosini witnesses her mother’s brutal murder and will enact revenge no matter how long it takes. She escapes to Rome with her daughter and joins the resistance where she encounters spies, and friends that are not really friends. Who can you really trust? The characters are believable and flawed like most of us. This novel is full of action, Nazi cruelty, and a relentless determination to make things right.

Logic! While Machiavelli is looked upon as a shrewd politician he is quite the opposite of John Potenza, the character in my book, but that’s where the similarities begin. Machiavelli was the most logical person ever. I’m fascinated by Logic. So is my crime-solving detective, who uses everything logical to figure out life. Potenza is a loyal Italian, so is Machiavelli. Machiavelli is loyal to himself and his cause, for Potenza it's the cause and family.

If you love logic and intrigue, you will love The Prince. It deals with the logic of human experience; one powerful tool in our repertoire. It certainly was for the politician. The same for a surfing cop trying to keep two biker gangs from going to mattress. 

It would seem strange not to include at least one work on Julius Caesar in any list of recommended reading on the Republic’s fall, and Stevenson’s book strikes just the right balance between Caesar’s career and the wider Republican background against which Caesar must be set. The challenging evidence for Caesar’s life and motivations is presented with great clarity, including his own writings, and so too are the often contradictory judgments made by modern scholars. Stevenson taught me during my MA at the University of Auckland, so I was delighted to see this book appear, and he has provided an invaluable contribution to the ongoing debates over Caesar’s responsibility for the Republic’s collapse and the transformation from Republic to Empire.

Lastly, one you can try for yourself at home (party togas, garlands, and changing the dining room furniture are purely optional): proof that Roman eating habits didn’t stop at roast dormice, larks’ tongues, and dodgy mushrooms (although you will find a recipe for the first on p289).

This is a lovely book, not just for the culinary background but because it includes over 150 authentic recipes taken from the works of ancient authors, in particular Marcus Gavinus Apicius, the legendary chef and epicure who (if he existed at all) flourished during the early part of the first century. Fancy trying meatballs with a Roman slant? Or stuffed cuttlefish with an Apician sauce? Or something more exotic like roast suckling pig or boiled ostrich vinaigrette? Congratulations; you need look no further.

Oh, and one more thing; you might want an authentic Roman wine to go with your meal. If so, then… show more.

Already when I was writing the first edition of Rome. An Empire’s Story it was clear that the subject was being transformed by scientific discoveries. Over the last decade, science-led projects have changed our notions of ancient Roman nutrition and health, of Romans’ impact on the environment, on the animals and plants they farmed, and also of their own vulnerability to plague and climate change. Scheidel, who is a world leader in this field, has gathered together historians using everything from human DNA and skeletal material to the remains of ancient seeds and animals to explain how the life sciences can unlock whole new areas of ancient history. This is a fast-moving field, and this short book gives a crash course on what has been done to date, and what might come next.

One of the most disquieting things about medieval peasants for me is that many of them were not free.

Some were outright slaves, particularly at the very beginning and the very end of the Middle Ages, but by 1100, most ‘unfree’ peasants were serfs. Although not a commodity to be bought or sold like slaves, serfs did unpaid labor and suffered serious limitations on their liberty, like the inability to move or marry at will.

Many historians have written on the medieval transition from slavery to serfdom (and back again), but what I like about Rio’s book is her attention to the variety of forms that ‘unfreedom’ could take and to how and why people might lose or gain freedom in the centuries after the fall of Rome and its slave system. 

I ran across this book recently and it resonated with my attempts to expand how we think about the relationship between past and present. In my own thinking about Rome and America, I wanted to move away from just talking about analogies. Storey opens up a way of thinking about the relationship between Rome and America that departs from analogies and explores how America incorporated a Roman logic of empire, not by recalling a past but by grafting itself onto a constellation of images and metaphors that connect past with present. The book is challenging, but opens up a different way of thinking about history.

A vast propaganda effort has been undertaken since the Club of Rome first issued ‘The limits to growth’ report in 1972 to rubbish its predictions and hypotheses. If you actually take the trouble to read the 1972, 1994, and 2004 reports, then you can see through this desperate effort. The authors were fundamentally – in broad terms – correct, and visionary. True, they overestimated how rapidly the planet was likely to succumb to world-scale resource-depletion crises; but they actually underestimated how rapidly we would start to succumb to crises arising from pollution. Their warnings need to be heeded very rapidly, now.

This is my favorite of McCullough’s Masters of Rome series. Though fictional, they are impeccably researched, rendering the collapse of the Republic in truly astonishing detail. McCullough manages to render the twists and turns of Roman politics in a way that a reader can not only follow them, but understand why they mattered so much. You’ll feel as though you are right there in the Forum or the dining-room with Caesar, Antony, Pompey, Servilia, Fulvia, and the rest. McCullough’s vivid prose drives home that these were real people, living real lives, with the same petty concerns and daily frustrations as all of us, even when they were also shaping the fates of nations.