Books by Robin Waterfield (translator)

“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.” Read more...

The Best Roman History Books

Ross King,

“The Lives is a big folio book with a lot of close type. I don’t know where Shakespeare got it, but he seems to have had it early in his career. Some people think that episodes in an early play like Titus Andronicus may borrow from it, but he uses Plutarch all the way through his Roman plays—Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra—through to Timon of Athens, which comes out of a small story in the Lives. So, Plutarch’s Lives was a great fund of Roman and Greek history for Elizabethan dramatists.” Read more...

Shakespeare’s Sources

Robert S Miola, Classicist

“The first chapter is essentially a long exercise in gratitude. It’s a list of people that Marcus is grateful to, and why. ‘I’m grateful to my father, because… I’m grateful to my teacher, because… etc. etc.’ So exercises in being grateful, in gratitude, are part and parcel of the kind of exercises that you do if you want to engage in self-improvement. You want to recognize what is good in your life, you want to recognize the people that have been influential. It’s an example of a good exercise. But from this we also get an idea of what Marcus’s criteria for ‘good’ were. What is he thanking these people for? And, it turns out, he’s thanking them for being just and honest and straightforward and not deceitful to other people. So you get a long list of points of reference in a moral compass that Marcus builds for himself.” Read more...

The best books on How to Be Good

Massimo Pigliucci, Philosopher

“He is a good read. He’s quite analytical…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.” Read more...

The Best Roman History Books

Ross King,