Rome category: 2065 books

Women in ancient Rome challenge the historian. Widely represented in literature and art, they rarely speak for themselves. Amy Richlin, among the foremost pioneers in ancient studies, gives voice to these women through scholarship that scours sources from high art to gutter invective. In Arguments...

One of the noblest possessions of the Roman Empire was the province of ancient Gaul. Much blood and treasure had been expended in its conquest; infinite wisdom, moderation, and vigour had been displayed in the means taken to attach it to the dominion of the Caesars; and the passing of several centuries...

Cicero in Letters is a guide to the first extensive correspondence that survives from the Greco-Roman world. The more than eight hundred letters of Cicero that are its core provided literary models for subsequent letter writers from Pliny to Petrarch to Samuel Johnson and beyond. The collection also...

The great spectacles of ancient Rome have become proverbial for their cruelty, bloodlust and glory. In the arena, the games were savage and brutal. Gladiators fought each other to the death, wild animals were put to fight each other and criminals were executed by barbaric means. Military victories were...

Constantine the Great is a titanic figure in Roman, and indeed world history. Most famed for making Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire (and thus ensuring its survival and spread), and for moving the seat of imperial rule to 'New Rome' (Constantinople), he is most often studied...

THE present series of lectures is designed to give a broad and general view of the long sequence of the migratory movements of the northern barbarians which began in the third and fourth centuries A. D. and cannot be said to have terminated till the ninth. This long process shaped Europe into its...

The battle of the Catalaunian Fields saw two massive, powerful empires square up in a conflict that was to shape the course of Eurasian history forever. For despite the Roman victory, the Roman Empire would not survive for more than 15 years following the battle, whilst the Huns, shattered and demoralized,...

Two of the most famous mosaics from the ancient world, in the church of San Vitale in Ravenna, depict the sixth-century emperor Justinian and, on the wall facing him, his wife, Theodora (497-548). This majestic portrait gives no inkling of Theodora's very humble beginnings or her improbable rise to...

In 52 BC Caesar's continued strategy of annihilation had engendered a spirit of desperation, which detonated into a revolt of Gallic tribes under the leadership of the charismatic young Arvernian noble Vercingetorix. Major engagements were fought at Noviodunum, Avaricum, and Gergovia, with the last...

A military history of the campaigns of Belisarius, the greatest general of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Emperor Justinian. He twice defeated the Persians and reconquered North Africa from the Vandals in a single year at the age of 29, before going on to regain Spain and Italy, including Rome (briefly),...

To say the Punic Wars (264-146 BC) were a turning point in world history is a vast understatement. This bloody and protracted conflict pitted two flourishing Mediterranean powers against one another, leaving one an unrivalled giant and the other a literal pile of ash. To later observers, a collision...

“The story of a Roman Emperor that might have been” (Fighting Times).   Germanicus was regarded by many Romans as a hero in the mold of Alexander the Great. His untimely death, in suspicious circumstances, ended the possibility of a return to a more open republic. This, the first modern biography...

In the years between 31 BC and AD 500 the Romans carved out a mighty empire stretching from Britain to the deserts of North Africa. The men who spearheaded this expansion were the centurions, the tough, professional warriors who led from the front, exerted savage discipline and provided a role model...

The Roman Revolution is a profound and unconventional treatment of a great theme - the fall of the Republic and the decline of freedom in Rome between 60 BC and AD 14, and the rise to power of the greatest of the Roman Emperors, Augustus. The transformation of state and society, the violent transference...