A midst the buildings that survive—like the Colosseum where gladiators fought to the death and the villas and shops of Pompeii—ancient Rome can seem both tantalizingly close and very far away. Nor are its remnants purely visual: We also have access to the work of Roman poets and historians, and the correspondence and extensive writings of Cicero, a senator as Rome changed from republic to empire. This makes for novels about the period that are often rich in historical detail and a lot of fun. We’ve listed some classics of the genre below:
“I picked up the book in a bookstore one day. From the opening lines, I was completely hooked. It’s very funny in that way of English writers of a certain generation (to the extent that, inexcusably perhaps, I tend to get the author confused with Roald Dahl). I once saw an interview with Robert Graves and apparently he just wrote I, Claudius to make a bit of money, he didn’t take it seriously at all. But he was a great classical scholar and so the book feels real. It’s written in the first person, pretending to be an autobiography of the Roman Emperor Claudius, and although I know, deep down, it’s only Robert Graves pretending to be Claudius, I came away feeling I really knew Clau-Clau.” Read more...
Favourite Books
Sophie Roell ,
Journalist
by Marguerite Yourcenar, translated by Grace Frick
Marguerite Yourcenar’s twelfth book is considered a landmark in historical fiction. Yourcenar began researching Memoirs of Hadrian —the story of the Roman emperor’s life, told in the form of a letter to his adopted grandson, Marcus Aurelius—as a youth, but didn’t finish the book until she rediscovered her notes in an old chest in her forties. Yourcenar once recalled the writing of Memoirs of Hadrian to have been so intense as to constitute a “controlled delirium”. Yourcenar utterly inhabited the mind of a far-off historical figure. As Joan Acocella once wrote in The New Yorker , “No other document takes us so deeply into the pre-Christian mind.”
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“He sees the death of Virgil very much in terms of modern autocracy and totalitarianism. He depicts Virgil almost as a Christ figure who wants his Aeneid destroyed because this is to be his pledge for a freer world.” Read more...
The best books on Virgil
Sarah Ruden ,
Literary Scholar
“It’s the classic Pompeii disaster story everybody replays when they write about Pompeii. When he went to Pompeii it was a ruin. These days they’ve done a lot of work on it. What Lytton did was build it up layer by layer. And what you get is a fantastic reconstruction of the ancient world. Christians who are going to escape, the nasty priest of Isis, the sacrifices and the gladiators. The cultural backwash that came out of it was extraordinary. The characters, statues, movies.” Read more...
The best books on Ancient History in Modern Life
Mary Beard ,
Classicist
“Now this is one of the very few books that actually changed my life. What’s so good about Alfred Duggan’s novel, indeed, all Alfred Duggan’s novels—he wrote an awful lot of them, nonfiction too—is that, although he didn’t really engage all that much with contemporary scholarship, he did read all the primary sources and thought about them.” Read more...
Historical Fiction Set in the Ancient World
Harry Sidebottom ,
Classicist
“In Eagle in the Snow, Maximus, a Roman general who’s a pagan, is given the impossible task of defending the Rhine frontier with just one legion against six German tribes. It’s a novel that is full of historical mistakes…I’m not 100% sure he even made much of an effort to get the internals right, beyond making his hero a pagan, and putting him in the tricky position of defending a Christian empire. But what is so good about Wallace Breem’s Eagle in the Snow is the action sequences. He wrote really good battle scenes. And, although his main character may be a bit anachronistic, he’s interesting and conflicted. He’s a man who is the archetype for all sorts of later heroes in historical fiction. He’s a man going to do his duty even though he really, really doesn’t want to.” Read more...
Historical Fiction Set in the Ancient World
Harry Sidebottom ,
Classicist
“It’s an odyssey about a warrior from Gaul, which had been recently conquered by Rome. And every time I reread it – and I do that every few years – I get swept up in it, this perspective of a former enemy of Ancient Rome, who decides to join the army of Julius Caesar. He leaves his village in the Pyrenees, and goes on Roman campaigns across Germany, France, Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor. Then they travel to the edges of the Steppes, to what is now southern Russia. Finally his Roman army is defeated in Parthia, now modern Iran, and our hero survives and decides to join the victorious Parthian army. He finds himself patrolling the borders of Afghanistan.” Read more...
The best books on Enemies of Ancient Rome
Adrienne Mayor ,
Classicist
“Gore Vidal’s Julian is about the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate. Julian was emperor from 361 to 363 AD and attempted to turn the empire back from Christianity to paganism. It is very much a literary novel. It has quite a complex structure whereby it starts with letters between Libanius and Priscus—two real pagan intellectuals—who write to each other about Julian after the emperor’s death.” Read more...
Historical Fiction Set in the Ancient World
Harry Sidebottom ,
Classicist
“With the case of Lavinia , she does careful research about the lives of people in what we now call Italy, when the events of the Aeneid were meant to have taken place. They have different gods, different ways of thinking about violence, different ways of thinking about gender. It’s an alien culture, if you will. It’s a book that really shows the power of stories. And, ultimately, that’s what Le Guin has explored throughout her career—the power of stories in shaping cultural values and political societies.” Read more...
The Best Ursula Le Guin Books
Sherryl Vint ,
Literary Scholar
“In Imperium we see the life of Cicero through the eyes of his slave, Tiro. We know Tiro was a real person, who recorded everything Cicero wrote. The late Republic is my favourite period of any period of history ever. You get all the figures: Cicero, Caesar, Pompey, Crassus, Octavian, Antony and Cato. Robert Harris paints portraits of these people so nicely that even with Crassus, say, who comes up every so often, you get a sense of who he is.” Read more...
The Best Classics Books for Teenagers
Olly Murphy ,
Teacher
“Shaw paints a portrait of Caesar in which all the motivations that romantic biographers and filmmakers like to show as being all for love, were actually driven by hard-nosed, brutal political calculations and realities. Shaw was making comments, in a sense, on the British occupation of Egypt, which had started in 1882, and relating it to the Roman occupation.” Read more...
The best books on Julius Caesar
Peter Stothard ,
Journalist
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