The Best Roman History Books

You’ve just written a fabulous book, The Shortest History of Ancient Rome. How was it to cover the entire history of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire in fewer than 250 pages?

That was the difficulty with this book (and also with The Shortest History of Italy). It would have been much easier if it had been the longest history of ancient Rome or if I had gone the full Cassius Dio and spent 25 years researching and writing it.

I had to hit the essentials—without telling people things that they already knew through cultural history—and refresh their opinions about ancient Rome and the Roman Empire.

So it was an incredibly daunting task. But partly because there were such great historians, some of whom we’ll be talking about today, with works running to thousands of pages, there was a lot of source material.

In your book, you’re very clear on the myths about ancient Rome versus Roman history. How hard was it to distinguish what happened from what was just made up?

It was very difficult, and I think Roman historians themselves struggled with it. There are so many stories about ancient Rome which are almost certainly not true—but they’re wonderful stories! I did what I’ve done with my previous books, which is you tell the mythical story—about Michelangelo or whoever it might be—but then cast doubt on it and say that it is not true.

I think you cheat your readers if you don’t give them the entertainment. Also, those stories became part of the cultural memory of ancient Rome—many Romans believed they were true. In the 1st century BCE, Julius Caesar, for example, seems to have believed in the myth of Romulus and Remus—and also the fact that he was distantly related to them through the goddess Venus.

So you don’t want to be overly credulous, but you do want to tell the story and illuminate through entertaining.

I was quite surprised when I was on the Palatine Hill in Rome last year; there was a hut supposedly belonging to one of them.

Yes, the hut of Romulus. In fairness, some archeologists believe that it has credibility. It dates from roughly the right time. But Rome is not named after Romulus. Romulus, the fictional character, is named after Rome.

One thing I really liked in The Shortest History of Ancient Rome was your delight in the etymology.

I think one of the best ways into history is to look at the words that they used and where those words came from. I love the fact that our word ‘candidate’ comes from the Latin word for white (candidus). It’s a reference to the whiteness of the robes politicians wore, which was supposed to show their purity. So Roman politicians had to do the rubber chicken circuit and glad-hand people in the street. They usually had a slave or assistant to remember people’s names for them, like a permanent private secretary. The whiteness of the robes came from urine—that’s what they used to bleach them.

There are all these delightful things that were part of everyday Roman life. The Romans were not just these distant figures who conquered much of the known world—they were people with their own peccadillos and idiosyncrasies that we can appreciate today.

Let’s turn to the Roman history books that you’re recommending and go through them in chronological order. First up are the Histories by Polybius, who predates Julius Caesar and is writing at the time of the Roman Republic. Can you tell us a bit about his book? Also, how readable is it?

Polybius is writing in the middle part of the 2nd century BCE, around 140 BCE. He is Greek, and he is writing in Greek. In some ways, he’s writing for a Greek audience, because what had happened in his lifetime and he had been witness to was the subjugation of the Greek world by the Romans. It was the passing of the cultural and military torch from ancient Greece to Rome.

What Polybius is doing is convincing his fellow Greeks that this is the way of history, this is inevitable, this is what was bound to happen. These are our conquerors.

Polybius spent about 15 years as a hostage in Rome because he’d been quite an important Greek politician. While he was there, he got to know some very prominent people, including the general Scipio Aemilianus. They became good friends and Polybius went with him on his expeditions and witnessed the final extinction of Carthage. He describes Scipio weeping as he watches Carthage destroyed, because he realizes that this is the end of the great Carthaginian civilization. Rome is now the big Mediterranean power. But Scipio knows, in his heart of hearts, that this is going to come back on Rome and that Rome will end that way also. So he sees this vision of the future now. Polybius is wonderful for telling stories like that.

He is a good read. He’s quite analytical and there are more narrative historians coming up. But Polybius is great on Hannibal, for example, because he went and interviewed people who had witnessed the Hannibalic invasion in the first and second decades of the 3rd century BCE. He’s writing 70 years later, but he did his boots-on-the-ground research and tried to trace Hannibal’s path across the Alps and things like that.

So it’s really exciting history from someone who lived it and had access to many of the great players from that particular time. As well as Carthage, he also witnessed the fall of Corinth.

Polybius also has great descriptions of Roman politics and the Roman mixed constitution. Those are probably some of the most influential things ever written by a Roman because that is what people like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison read when they were setting up their constitution.

Wow. I didn’t even know we had a history written contemporaneously with some of these events.

Yes. He’s writing about a period of around 120 years and he begins it with such an arresting statement. Rome has just become master of the Mediterranean by defeating the Greeks and the Carthaginians. He’s looking back at the previous century, and he says, “Who could be so indolent or indifferent as not to want to know how the Romans made themselves masters of most of the known world?” And when you read it, you think he must be writing from the time of Augustus. But no, he’s writing from the point of view of 150 years before Augustus. So we get this sense of the grandeur that Rome became in about 150 BCE, and that’s going to continue after that.

Let’s move on to the Roman historian Livy (or Titus Livius). So he’s living at the time when Rome is turning from a republic into an empire and writing in the reign of Augustus. Tell me about his history of Rome, Ab Urbe Condita (From the Founding of the City), which starts at the beginning.

Yes, but very sadly…I did a book called The Bookseller of Florence, which was about ancient manuscripts and the attempts to recover them. People often ask me, ‘What books do I wish that we had that have been lost?’ Probably in my top three, if not my top one or two, would be Livy’s history of Rome. 35 books of it have survived, but there were 142 or so, so we’ve only got about a quarter.

So he was going back to the origins of ancient Rome and coming forward to his own time, which was the age of Augustus. It was meant to be comprehensive, but we’ve lost most of it, which is really tragic.

Of the books that are lost, I suppose what I would want to read most of all is what he says about the Social War (91-87 BCE) and the last decades and extinction of the Republic. We don’t have those, and it would be great to get them. It would just fill the knowledge gaps that we have of what was happening in the first half of the 1st century BCE, just before Julius Caesar and Augustus. But we’ve lost all that.

Livy is probably an easier or more entertaining read than Polybius. Livy’s whole thing is storytelling. He’d be a good BBC historian, popping up and doing documentaries, tramping around fields to tell us where things happened, and then stopping the camera and giving us a mini lecture or dramatically acting out what was said at a particular moment.

He’s very rhetorical and into the narrative. He tells us some of the same stories that Polybius does—he gives us Hannibal crossing the Alps, for example. But Livy makes it much more dramatic. He is just a better writer. One of my favorite passages in historical writing is Livy’s account of Hannibal crossing the Alps. It’s absolutely classic.

And I guess the knock against him—as opposed to Polybius or Tacitus, who’s coming up—is that maybe he’s not always 100% reliable. It goes back to how much is myth and how much is factual. Traditionally, people have looked at Livy and said that he’s not reliable because he doesn’t match other sources. And the other sources and records must be right because they don’t match Livy and Livy is unreliable. There is a bit of circular thinking.

So there is some dispute about how accurate Livy is, because he does not let the truth get in the way of a good story. I think some of his stories might be entirely invented. Because it’s one thing to do what I do, which is to tell a story that someone else has made up and repeat it, but also say, ‘This is almost certainly made up.’ It’s another thing to do what Livy does (and someone else on the list also does), which is to make something up and pass it off as the truth.

So some of the stories that Livy tells are not reflected in other sources. We don’t have access to all the sources he had, and so it’s difficult to judge the truth of them.

What’s the closest bit to his own life that he’s writing about that’s survived?

In 27 CE, Octavian was declared Augustus. Livy comes right up to his own day, but we’ve lost most of that. What we’ve got is the earlier stuff. It’s fairly comprehensive up to after Hannibal. Then it becomes very patchy, and massive amounts are lost. It’d be wonderful to have Livy’s reflections on his own time, but alas we don’t.

Let’s go to Publius Cornelius Tacitus next. So Tacitus is about two years old when Nero, the last of the Julio-Claudians, becomes emperor.

Yes, after that dynasty has been extinguished, he gives us the history of it. He’s a fascinating counterpoint to Livy, because in lots of ways, Livy was a booster of Rome and of Augustus. There is nothing patriotic about Tacitus. He is a senator, and he believes that the emperors have infringed on senatorial privilege, which, of course, they have. They slaughtered senators by the dozen. So he’s very critical.

You could say that if Polybius is trying to explain the historical inevitability of the Romans replacing the Greeks, and if Livy was giving a home field cheer for Augustus, once we get to Tacitus—who’s coming along much later than Livy—there’s more criticism of the emperors, including Augustus and Livia, his wife, whom Tacitus accuses of murdering Augustus. We don’t have any documentary sources for his claim: it was probably Tacitus’s misogyny that made him believe that a woman who was close to power was this insidious figure. He claims that Livia poisoned Augustus so Tiberius, her son, could become the next emperor.

Tacitus is hypercritical of the Roman Empire. His most famous quote is from a Caledonian chieftain called Calgacus, who was captured and taken to Rome. I could never find out if Tacitus actually met him, but talking about the plunder and destruction, he puts in Calgacus’s mouth the words, “They make desolation and call it peace.”

Throughout the book, Tacitus struggles with the fact that the Pax Romana has brought peace to the world—there is prosperity and political stability—but against that, he sees that the ancient liberties of the Romans have been taken away from them.

So Tacitus is quite a trenchant critic of his society, writing at the absolute height of the Roman Empire under Trajan and Hadrian. He’s a powerful person: he’s a senator, and his father-in-law is Agricola, the great general. From the podium, he is casting aspersions against everything that the Romans represent. That’s one of the things that makes him so interesting: for the first time, we get this critical interrogation of what Rome is doing.

Do you have any guesses where that attitude came from?

Tacitus seemed to worship his father-in-law and wrote a book about him. Agricola was the general who conquered Britain. If they sailed on Ireland, he was the man who was going to do it. Tacitus celebrates Agricola for that. And yet, he is very critical of imperialism. In some ways, what he says has a very modern ring to it, because you could say he’s anti-colonialist and anti the subjugation of other people.

Tacitus is interested in ethnography as well. He’s interested in the British people and their customs. Likewise, he’s interested in the Germans, the barbarians, and is much more sympathetic to them than most Romans. He’s an interesting character from that point of view.

But I don’t know enough about his personal life and his senatorial record to be able to say where that dissent and discontent with ancient Rome came from.

Is he criticizing the current emperors with his writing or does he stop with the Flavians?

He gets to Domitian and ends it. He’s not making a criticism of Trajan, for example. That’s a good question: what did he think of Trajan? Trajan is often seen as the best of the emperors, and he was certainly a much better emperor than the Julio-Claudians or the Flavians (and Domitian in particular). So Tacitus might have been a little more sympathetic to Trajan.

We’re now at Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus and his Lives of the Caesars. It’s probably the most famous of the books on this list, though I have to confess, I’ve never actually read it. There’s the Robert Graves translation of Suetonius, and I saw Tom Holland’s more recent one in a bookshop yesterday, so it’s still in vogue…

When you do read it, it’ll have a familiarity to it. All of this stuff will leap out, and you’ll think, ‘Ah, of course, that’s where that story comes from!’—because Suetonius has been the most influential in shaping what we think of the Roman emperors. So if you’re going to make a documentary on Caligula or Nero, for example, Suetonius will be your first port of call.

I should have mentioned about Tacitus that most of his work has survived. Sadly, a section that is lost is the part on Caligula’s reign. Caligula gets the full treatment from Suetonius, who is incredibly critical of him. There’s an interesting passage in Tacitus where he writes that previous histories of the emperors were written either when the emperor was alive and people were being sycophants, or else after their death, when the hatred still rankled. What Tacitus is saying is that there is no such thing as an unbiased account of the emperors. He claimed that he was writing without anger or bias: ‘sine īrā et studiō’. But, of course, he is very biased against Augustus, for example.

So with Suetonius, we come to a great storyteller. It is a good read, with all of the racy gossip about the emperors. Then the question is, how much of it is true? Tacitus is probably the best of them in terms of being responsible. With Polybius, they’re probably the two who stick most closely to the truth and are honest about their sources and when they speculate.

The interesting thing about Suetonius is that he started off like that. He was writing around the same time as Tacitus. He was Hadrian’s private secretary and had access to the imperial records, which was a fantastic resource. But he then got involved in a sex scandal with Hadrian’s wife, and was sent to outer darkness, and lost his access. It’s like a scholar in Oxford losing their card to the Bodleian Library. He couldn’t do his research, and it was at that point that he thought, ‘Oh, what the heck!’ And—just possibly—began making things up or at least reporting on hearsay.

In particular with Nero and Caligula, you wonder how much he was just repeating legends that were created after their deaths to blacken them—the ‘black legend’, as it were. I’ve got a friend who’s a Roman historian who loves Nero and thinks he got a very bad rap. Mary Beard argues that Nero wasn’t necessarily a bad emperor, but because he was killed, he had to be bad: they had to paint him as someone who was a villain. Then, over the decades, these stories grew more and more preposterous, and ultimately, Suetonius got hold of them and began writing about them, and someone like Caligula is portrayed as a complete psychopath.

If we had Tacitus, there’d be a counterweight to that. And it may be that Suetonius had access to Tacitus’s work, and so some of that is in there. But I think for the most part, he was not willing to let the truth get in the way of these wonderful stories and rumors and memories that people had in ancient Rome.

For Nero, do we have Tacitus’s account?

Yes, and he’s a great source on Nero. There are certain moments in Roman history where you can look at almost all of the writers and compare their accounts. With Nero, both Suetonius and Cassius Dio claim that he set the Great Fire of Rome himself, that he deliberately burned it because he wanted to make his palace.

Tacitus says that Nero was away from Rome at that time and therefore not responsible. He is a bit more ambiguous. Tacitus says Nero rushed back to Rome a day or two later and started relief efforts, making camps for the homeless and so on. But then Tacitus does hint that when the fire began spreading, perhaps Nero realized, ‘Well, this is half burnt already. If it all gets burnt, then I’ll have an even bigger park for myself.’

So that’s a good case where Tacitus is much more measured and exculpatory than someone like Suetonius, who’s very quick to judge. Tacitus looked at things a little bit more carefully.

Suetonius is probably responsible for us knowing the emperors, isn’t he? Because the stories are so good.

Yes, and let’s face it, we love biography, and he is a great biographer. The other person I could have put on the list was Plutarch. In some ways, both Suetonius and Plutarch are biographers, rather than strict historians. Unlike Polybius, Suetonius isn’t so much concerned with the sweep of Roman history. What he wants to look at is the psychology of the people that he’s writing about and bring them alive for us.

One of the things that we have to think about when we look at these histories is, ‘To what purpose were they writing?’ In some ways, it was propagandistic, pro-emperor, or maybe like Tacitus, anti-tyranny and anti-authoritarianism. But they’re also writing as memory keepers. All of them seem to believe that Rome was the most remarkable society history had ever produced. They want to make Rome live for eternity with their words, which, in some ways, it has done—thanks to them.

In your book, you talk about people analysing the Caesars and what was wrong with them from a health or mental health perspective. Do you think that’s helpful?

It would be interesting to know! The difficulty is that there is a hobby in medicine of taking historical characters and looking at their symptoms and making judgments about what it was. So Caligula has been diagnosed with all sorts of things. The problem is that because they’re in a different discipline—they’re in medicine, and just assume facts are facts—they don’t really interrogate the source and ask, ‘Is what Suetonius says true? Did Caligula actually make that bridge across the Bay of Naples and ride across it wearing the breastplate of Alexander the Great?’ Stories like that strain credulity, and if you don’t look at them critically, you can be deceived by them.

In your book, you always mention the omens when somebody’s about to die without giving us, as readers, any caveats. Are you presuming that we will realize that dreaming about a falling star or a bird dropping a feather (say) is not a sign of impending death?

Exactly. By a certain point in the book, I thought, ‘I don’t need to make an editorial comment that this is nonsense.’ So when in 133 BCE Tiberius Gracchus goes to the Senate, I talk about how he stubbed his toe, there was a snake in his helmet, and birds squabbling on his neighbour’s roof. The reader can draw his or her own conclusions about whether those omens presaged his murder later that day.

What’s so interesting about this bizarre stuff is that the Romans were such a superstitious bunch. It’s one of the things that I find most remarkable about them. In some ways, they’re very rational and not that philosophical. The Greeks were the philosophers; the Romans were the fighters and the orators. And yet they were just cringing with fear about a snake appearing at the wrong moment. How can you master the world when you have to knock twice (or whatever it might be) and have all these prophylactic gestures just to make sure that you didn’t get clubbed to death in the Senate?

Last of the historians you’ve recommended is Cassius Dio. Can you tell me about his Roman History?

Cassius Dio is the last great historian of Rome. The Empire is falling apart by then, because he’s writing in the first part of the 3rd century. What’s coming up is what is known to historians as ‘the Crisis of the Third Century.’ There is going to be this rapid turnover of emperors, and the coins are going to be devalued. The Empire isn’t expanding and has come under new pressures, both in the east and from north of the Alps.

So Cassius Dio is writing at a time when things are ending. I think he sensed that, and what he wanted to do was to write the definitive history. He doesn’t just begin with Romulus and Remus, he begins with the legend of Aeneas, and comes up into his own time, which are the best bits of his book.

He spent something like 30 years working on it. I think he did ten years of research before he even put pen to papyrus. He served under multiple emperors. He had close contact with Caracalla as well as Elagabalus and gives us insights into those emperors and their rule.

In his history, everything starts to fly apart. Again, I would dispute how much of what he says about some of these people—like Caracalla or Commodus, the son of Marcus Aurelius, who comes in the 180s—is true, because, once again, we’re going into the realm of people who seem manifestly and undeniably insane, being in charge of the empire. Incidentally, Cassius Dio was the great source for Ridley Scott’s screenwriters for Gladiator. It’s that uncritical approach which makes Joaquin Phoenix, who plays Commodus, such a bad guy, so obsessed with being a gladiator etc.

Cassius Dio was Greek. He was from what is now Turkey and was then the Greek-speaking part of the Roman Empire. He ends up as a senator in Rome and is deeply biased against imperial rule. Like Tacitus a century earlier, he feels that the emperors had infringed on senatorial privileges and in some cases—like Commodus and Caracalla—were threatening to kill them.

So I don’t think he’s the most unbiased source. He’s writing very critically of the emperors who have just died, when I think maybe there’s an interest in blackening their names. But once again, it makes for a great read.

So he’s writing about the times he lived in?

He writes about times that he has lived through, and then all of the history of Rome behind that. I can’t think of anyone who’s ever done a project like that. He’s taken 2000 years of history and brought it up to the present.

He’s an interesting character. He was a senator and hated emperors like Caracalla, but he was not a Republican. Someone like Tacitus, in his heart of hearts, was a Republican; Cassius Dio wasn’t. He believed in an emperor. I guess we’d call him a monarchist. He’s frustrated because he’s seen the greatness that Rome can achieve under people like Hadrian or Augustus. But he’s also seen the depths that can be plumbed, whether it’s by the later Julio-Claudians or people like Caracalla and Commodus.

When you were writing your own book, did you find any of the recent, popular books about Rome useful? Because looking at your footnotes, I felt The Shortest History of Ancient Rome was very much based on the ancient Roman historians.

There’s lots of really good stuff. I think Mary Beard’s SPQR is a great book. I read it quite a few years ago, and I was tempted to go back and look at it. But I thought that if I did, I’d be too influenced by it. I wanted to tell a story that isn’t overlapping with hers. Likewise with Tom Holland. As I was writing my book, I didn’t want to take on their stories by osmosis. So I thought, ‘I’ll go back to the original sources and then supplement them with academic articles from JSTOR on the minutiae of Roman history.’

It was a labor of love, and I was so sad when I came to the end of writing it. I just loved living in ancient Rome with all the rituals and the social history—which I did include. It’s not just about the emperors: it’s about women, about Roman houses, about slaves. I was very sorry to put it aside and move on.