By the historians you hear on these shows
The Best Books on Ancient Rome
The historians you hear on these shows have written books. This is what they wrote, what each one is for, and where to get it.
39 books · 30 authors,
every one of them on a show indexed here
I feel like…
ThinkingAny
Cogitare, how it was thought and ordered
FeelingAny
Sentire, what was lived and endured
DoingAny
Facere, what hands made and did
PeriodAny
when it happens
Book formAny
what kind of reading you want
Spend twenty hours listening to somebody explain the third-century crisis and sooner or
later you want the long version. The people you hear on these shows write books, and this is
where those books are.
It makes for a better list than the usual one. A historian who will give an hour to a
podcast audience is, almost by definition, a historian who can write for people outside a
university. And you get to audition every one of them first: click a name and you have every
episode they have appeared on, and then you can decide whether you want three hundred pages of
their company.
If you want one book and no further deliberation, read SPQR. If you have read it,
read Rubicon.
Start here
Four books, and between them twelve centuries.
SPQR
Mary Beard · 17 episodes to listen to first
The one to start with and the one to give people. Beard writes her working as she goes, marking where the evidence runs out, which turns out to be the most useful habit in the book.
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Rubicon
Tom Holland · 61 episodes to listen to first
The fall of the Republic as narrative, and the best-paced history of Rome written this century. Holland translates Herodotus and Suetonius for a living, so the storytelling is not bought at the price of the sources.
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The storm before the storm
Mike Duncan · 193 episodes to listen to first
The century between the Gracchi and Sulla, which is where the Republic actually died, written by the man who made The History of Rome. If you liked the podcast this is the same voice on paper.
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The Fate of Rome
Kyle Harper · 3 episodes to listen to first
Climate and disease as the causes. The argument is contested and it changed the field; read it and then read Heather to hear the other side.
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The Republic
From the kings to the Ides.
Rise of Rome
Jeffrey Tatum · 2 episodes to listen to first
How a city on a river crossing came to run Italy, told with the early sources treated as the problem they are.
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The End of the Roman Republic 146 to 44 BC
Catherine Steel · 1 episodes to listen to first
The scholarly account of the last century, and the one to read after Rubicon when you want the argument.
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Killing for the Republic
Steele Brand · 3 episodes to listen to first
Citizen soldiers, and what it did to a state when the men who voted stopped being the men who fought.
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Hannibal
Eve MacDonald · 5 episodes to listen to first
A life of Hannibal that takes Carthage seriously as a civilisation in its own right.
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Carthage
Eve MacDonald · 5 episodes to listen to first
The city itself, from the archaeology up. Pairs with the Fall of Civilizations episode on Carthage.
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Caesar and Augustus
The two men the Republic could not survive.
Caesar
Adrian Goldsworthy · 4 episodes to listen to first
The standard modern life. Goldsworthy is a military historian and it shows in the best way: the campaigns are legible.
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Augustus
Adrian Goldsworthy · 4 episodes to listen to first
The harder book of the two, because Augustus spent forty years making himself difficult to see. Goldsworthy gets closer than most.
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The Death of Caesar
Barry Strauss · 5 episodes to listen to first
The assassination as an operation: who planned it, who was told, and why a conspiracy of sixty men held together long enough to work.
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Marcus Agrippa
Lindsay Powell · 3 episodes to listen to first
The man who won Augustus' battles and built his city, and then had the poor judgment to die first.
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Pax and the Politics of Peace
Hannah Cornwell · 4 episodes to listen to first
What the Romans actually meant by peace, which turns out to be a claim about who has stopped fighting and why.
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The emperors
One family, then anybody with an army.
Dynasty
Tom Holland · 61 episodes to listen to first
The Julio-Claudians, and Holland is at his best on how one family produced Caligula, Nero, and the most stable century Rome ever had.
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Ten Caesars
Barry Strauss · 5 episodes to listen to first
Ten emperors from Augustus to Constantine, one chapter each. The fastest way to get the shape of five centuries.
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Agrippina
Emma Southon · 15 episodes to listen to first
Nero's mother, and the best demonstration on this page of how much of what we know about Roman women was written by men who disliked them.
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Pax
Tom Holland · 61 episodes to listen to first
The second century, which is the hardest period to make interesting because so little goes wrong. He manages it.
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Pax Romana
Adrian Goldsworthy · 4 episodes to listen to first
What the empire was like to live in for the people who were conquered, which is a different book from the one about the conquerors.
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Death in ancient Rome
Catharine Edwards · 1 episodes to listen to first
How Romans thought about dying, which explains a surprising amount about how they thought about living.
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The fall, and what came after
The most argued-over question in ancient history.
Empires and Barbarians
Peter Heather · 4 episodes to listen to first
The case that the barbarians were the cause, made at length by the historian who makes it best.
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Alaric the Goth
Douglas Boin · 2 episodes to listen to first
The sack of 410 from the other side, and a good corrective to a story usually told entirely from inside the walls.
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Fall of Rome
Nick Holmes · 66 episodes to listen to first
Holmes commits to a thesis and defends it, which gives you something to argue with, and he makes the podcast of the same argument.
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Rome Resurgent
Peter Heather · 4 episodes to listen to first
Justinian's reconquest, which nearly worked and arguably broke both halves of the empire in the attempt.
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Romanland
Anthony Kaldellis · 13 episodes to listen to first
The argument that the Byzantines were Romans, called themselves Romans, and were renamed by later scholars for reasons that were not about evidence. Changes how you read everything after 476.
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Byzantium
John Haldon · 1 episodes to listen to first
The standard single-volume introduction to the eastern empire, for when The History of Byzantium has made you want the book.
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Everyday life, the army and the edges
What it was actually like.
Naked statues, fat gladiators, and war elephants
Garrett Ryan · 1 episodes to listen to first
Answers the questions people actually have, in two or three pages each. Ryan makes the toldinstone videos.
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Rome of One's Own
Emma Southon · 15 episodes to listen to first
The empire through the lives of women who left enough of a trace to reconstruct, which is more of them than the standard histories suggest.
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Hadrian's Wall
David Breeze · 1 episodes to listen to first
The definitive account of the wall by the archaeologist who has spent a career on it.
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Vindolanda
Andrew Birley · 2 episodes to listen to first
The site that produced the tablets, dug by the family that has been digging it for three generations. The letters about socks are in here.
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Romans at War
Simon Elliott · 6 episodes to listen to first
The army across the whole span, illustrated and readable, and the right book if the Ancient Warfare Podcast has got its hooks in.
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London in the Roman World
Dominic Perring · 2 episodes to listen to first
Londinium from founding to abandonment, and the best demonstration of what the end of Roman Britain looked like on the ground.
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The city itself
For anyone actually going.
The rough guide to Rome
Agnes Crawford · 21 episodes to listen to first
Crawford is a licensed guide in Rome and makes the Understanding Rome podcast. The guidebook is the same knowledge in your pocket.
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Ancient Rome As It Was
Ray Laurence · 1 episodes to listen to first
Reconstructions of what you are looking at, drawn to scale, which almost no site provides on the spot.
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Fiction, properly done
Novels by people who did the reading.
Imperium
Robert Harris · 1 episodes to listen to first
The first of the Cicero trilogy, narrated by his slave and secretary Tiro. The politics are the plot and the research is real; Harris also turns up on The Ancients.
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Pompeii
Robert Harris · 1 episodes to listen to first
An engineer walks the aqueduct in the days before the eruption. The best thriller anyone has built out of Roman infrastructure.
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Iron & rust
Harry Sidebottom · 2 episodes to listen to first
The third-century crisis as fiction, by an Oxford ancient historian, which is why the chaos is accurate.
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Hannibal
Ben Kane · 4 episodes to listen to first
The Second Punic War from inside both armies. Kane is a former vet and writes battle at ground level.
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Nero
Conn Iggulden · 1 episodes to listen to first
Iggulden takes the standard hostile sources and asks what the man thought he was doing. Fiction, and honest about it.
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About these links
Each button looks the book up in the shop for your own country. In the United States
and the United Kingdom that is Bookshop.org, which pays the independent bookshops a share
and only delivers inside those two countries. Everywhere else it is Amazon, which ships to
fourteen markets.
They are affiliate links: buy something and a few percent comes back here, at no cost
to you. The disclosure has the details. Your local bookshop is
the better idea and we will survive it.