What's the best history book about Rome from its beginning to the end? I heard Gibbon is not that appreciated...

What's the best history book about Rome from its beginning to the end? I heard Gibbon is not that appreciated, I want something accurate and comprehensive. Also heard Mary Beard is not that great.

Unironically probably the History of Rome podcast.

Mommsen came the closest to writing the definitive history but died before he even get to writing about the Empire.

I prefer a book, I can focus easier.

In that case, there is nothing that meets your criteria. Trust me, I've tried to find it too.
The best you can do is find books that cover specific periods and read them in chronological order.
Like reading Caesar's account of the Gallic Wars, and then reading Suetonius, and then reading Tacitus, etc.
It's going to be a bitch to figure out the chronology though.

You will need extensive historical knowledge to put those works into the right context though.

Same goes for Gibbon OP, his work is nowadays famed for pioneering certain scientific approaches, nobody reads it to learn about the history of Rome anymore.

If you are not very experienced in Roman history and you're not from /pol/, Marby Beard's book is pretty good.

If you want a more scientific approach, try books such as pic related for the period of the Empire, which are prescribed as reading material in unis today.

Wikipedia.
And Gibbon is essential Rome. There is study of Rome's history where you don't need to read it.

There is no study of Rome's history* that doesn't require EG's epic

Pretty sure not even Veeky Forums approves SPQR

Just remembered this OP.
You can read the Cambridge Ancient History. It's 19 volumes about the ancient world.
But you'd have to judge on which volume you want to start on, because the first volume is literally about the formation of the world and tectonic shifts and shit like that.
Then it talks about ancient civilizations, then Greece, and Rome doesn't show up until volume 12.

Also, the whole series is available in public domain on archive.org if I remember correctly. Downloaded all the PDFs there. Unless they took it down.

>You can read the Cambridge Ancient History. It's 19 volumes about the ancient world.
Mutter Gottes...

Do it you pussy.

Why the fuck are these shits $150 per volume. It's like 278 years old, you've made your money back. As a matter of fact, the families of the people who contributed aren't even alive anymore, these books are so old they probably fucking perished together, jerking off of over a game of Trivial Cavepursuit, before getting cooked by the war chief Cal Dera at the battle of Pompei. Who is my 150 of cardboard and sheet paper money going to exactly

TCAH being found in a 1. set 2. all together 3. new = rare.

That raises the price a lot.
or you could buy Kobo, go to archive org and get it for free lol

Elitist bullshit. Smug university types who are still living in another era where "only patricians should own books." Basically, evil people who are actively trying to make sure that knowledge only stays in the hands of the few and privileged.
Pirate and download as many of these books as you can find and don't give them a cent.

Will Durant.
Or:

>I heard Gibbon is not that appreciated
Oh you mean the classic masterwork that every classics professor I ever knew in school had prominently in their office?

The whole Veeky Forums consensus that it has no value is not echoed in academia. Instead the discussion is on where modern scholarship has changed the discussion.

Beard is ok for beginners, Goldsworthy is superb though and Holland's Rubicon is a good take on the last days of the republic

>caring about the opinion of Veeky Forums

It's probably some /pol/fags sperging out about her feminist leanings which are evident but do not detract from the book which is extremely well written. Using Cicero as a reference she is able to narrate the history of Rome in an engaging fashion that actually helps you to establish a functional timeline in your own head.

SPQR is probably one of the best books to start with if you are new to reading history. She has an extensive "futher reading" section in the book as well you can draw from. I'm just about done the book myself, after which I'm going to read Caesar by Adrian Goldsworthy.

SPQR is a good introduction for people who know nothing about Roman History. It outlines the basic periods (early monarchy, tuscan expansion period, colonization, Punic Wars, formation of the Republic and Civil Wars, Parthian Wars, on into the collapse of Rome) and namedrops a few of the most notable Roman authors to use as primary sources, but lacks both detailed focus and the sheer size of a multi-volume work.

How is Syme's Roman Revolution?

This, it isnt even pop, its a primer

>asks for an accurate history of Rome
>recommends Caesar, Suetonius and Tacitus
I'm pretty sure historiography has come a little bit farther than that m80.

>Oh you mean the classic masterwork that every classics professor I ever knew in school had prominently in their office?
He obviously means appreciated as a work of accurate history.

>The whole Veeky Forums consensus that it has no value is not echoed in academia
Lit has never said that it has no value, lit consistently says that the book is so outdated, hell it existed before archaeology did, and that the biases of the author are so big that it doesn't have a place in an academic setting as a history of Rome though it may itself be the subject of study and has great literary and historic merit. Cambridge and Oxford stopped using it as a general book of history decades ago. It may be studied, just it is where the book itself is the focus, not what it teaches.

Cool, I'm gonna read Mary Beards book then.
Thanks for the answers and the dubs.

>I'm pretty sure historiography has come a little bit farther than that m80.
If you want an A to B reading of history then you can use wikipedia. Primary sources are invaluable for understanding not just the history itself, but its socio-political context and consequences from the eyes of those acting within it.

>Suetonius and Tacitus
>they are old so they must be primary sources
Yes primary sources are important, that's why historians use primary sources while weighing them against other evidence, often including other primary sources.

>If you want an A to B reading of history then you can use wikipedia.
Has nothing to do with anything that has been said.

Yeah and Oxford has people advocating for White Genocide in Gender Studies, why do I not care.

If you are going to study history of Rome, at one point or another, you will have to read it.

You will only read it in an academic setting where the book itself is the focus. If you have disagree you have to point me towards a syllabus with it in it where the book is not the actual topic of interest.

Can anyone recommend a source/sources on Roman history for someone learning Latin?

I know all the grammar and morphology but my vocabulary is shit, and I want to improve it. It would be cool if there were some books that combined original Latin passages with English historical exposition.

Here’s the thing; if you want to understand a historical period, the best strategy is not finding the lengthiest and most comprehensive work you can get your hands on, and reading it from beginning to end. That is just simply not how humans understand shit.

Understanding is far more like a printed image, the first pass lays down the broadest structures, the next adds substantial lines, and as pass after pass is made over the same image more detail is added in to each spot, forming a complicated and dense full colour picture.

Something that a lot of people here don’t seem to get is that the big detailed books on any subject assume you actually already know the broad outline. For example, right now I’m reading Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler, and throughout there are references to events that are yet to come, and because I already have a background on the subject I understand these, but somebody who doesn’t could be confused. One such instance is this; when the book introduces Goebbels, a paragraph ends ‘... his admiration for Hitler would last down to their last days in the bunker.’ If you knew nothing of Hitler going in, would you not ask yourself ‘what bunker do they mean?’

The best history of Rome is probably some 30 volume Oxford set, which goes into the detailed minutiae of everything, but if you don’t know anything about Rome to begin with, such a volume would be absolutely unapproachable.

If you want to learn about Rome from scratch, or any other time period, you want to start with a relatively short, broad overview which will introduce to you the names of the most important people, places, events and so on. These will form the basis around which you can structure further understanding as you read more focused works.

And to that end, Mary Beard’s SPQR is absolutely a perfectly good introductory work for understanding Rome. It’s not too long, it’s reasonably comprehensive, and it’s totally accessible to somebody starting off with little to no knowledge of Rome. Most importantly, SPQR contains a lot of good resources for Further Reading, so that once you’ve got your overview, you have some idea about what step to take next.

Gibbon’s book is indeed a classic, and fantastic, but now should be read more as literature than as history, like Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. As History it is indeed outdated and superseded, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is a literary masterwork. Read it for the same reason people still read Plutarch, or Livy, as interesting and influential literature. Read it for the same reason as somebody would read Darwin’s Origin or Species, or Galileo’s Dialogues, as important milestones in our intellectual history, rather than as an entry level explanation on biology or astronomy.

Or you could instead read a book by a professional historian who can contextualize those works and actually lay out a chronology. It’s vastly more interesting to read a book about caesars campaigns, than wad through pages and pages of the man himself talking about corn.

t. Oswald Spengler

read livy or tacitus. You can find PDFs really easily online

I like this post. Thank you, user.

Well said.

I don't get Mary Beard. She doesn't even like the ancient world. Here is the world's foremost classicist, and she spends all of her time condemning this or that feature of the past. I'm serious. Watch any video or listen to any podcast in which she features and you will see that she boils with hatred for the past. Now it must be said that she conceals her loathing behind a mask of affable smugness, but it is there dripping along the edges. The whole thing is absurd. I mean, imagine inviting a paleontologist onto a talk-show only to have this person spend most of his time denouncing dinosaurs.

Does that reflect in the book

Not really.
She tends to restrict her focus to those few figures that meet her approval though.
This restrictive focus is a manifestation of her bias I think.

In a funny sort of way, she's very old-school.
Like the classicists of old, she is very judgmental.
This stands in stark contrast to the new crop of classicists for whom everything ancient is good in some way--even the bad stuff.

I'll second this. While it doesn't bleed through much in SPQR, her bias does rear its ugly head at least in the opening when she directly condemns the Romans for their practices of slavery and patriarchal social balance, despite the fact that that was status quo of the times and Rome was fucking VASTLY liberal on most social views.

She also tends to cling onto points of no, or misconstrued historical significance like the eunuch priestly sects of Rome. She avoids talking about those hangnail concepts in any detail though, probably as a means of ennabling modern revisionist readings of history in line with her leftist paradigms.

>This stands in stark contrast to the new crop of classicists for whom everything ancient is good in some way--even the bad stuff.
I don't think 'good' is the right term there; most modern classicists accept that a lot of the ancient world was bad by today's standards, but are interested in why it came to be.

Yes. This may be a better way of saying it.

For many of today's scholars, everything is worthy of attention. It wasn't always so.

Mary Beard is a Hillary-Clinton-supporting feminist who spends her time debating about refugees on Twitter with alt-right trolls. These are not the characteristics of a reliable and wise historical writer.

SPQR just recently got me into Rome and it was great. Using Cicero as a narrative centre for the entire period in which he was alive really did work incredibly well. He's so petty and over-dramatic that it makes the entire world he lives in feel more human. The guy was exactly the kind of out of touch, idealistic introvert with an inflated sense of self importance, embarrassing predilection towards self-pity and obsession with various hobbies that would be posting right here if he was alive today. He's a vast collection of childish flaws that come together to be likeable.

She also did great highlighting how his entire family, throughout all their arguments and splits and feuds, came together around this one slave that they all liked more than they liked each other-like the family dog, which is so ridiculous that it humanises them all even further, but she then segues that into a discussion on the casualisation of slavery and its various forms.

It's a good book.

Simon Baker - The Rise and Fall of an Empire, is one I enjoyed.

>Reading primary sources that directly directly document their experiences isn’t the best way to learn about history

Go away Marx.

Do you have some examples of her behaviour?