Please recommend the best books about Ancient Rome

>nobody mentioned The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

I think at this point it's considered a given. If you haven't read it or at least heard of it, you probably shouldn't be on Veeky Forums

was just about to rec this lel

Veeky Forums doesn't like it because they're full of lefttards. Mary Beard herself is a leftist at key parts but them has to admit that Rome wasn't leftist and if it were it would've collapsed. At the end she even admits it collapse was partially due to that. It turns out to be an incredibly redpilling book, if you can forgive her for not pointing out Africans weren't black sub saharans-which can be misleading in context for an eager SJW reader.

I'd say he overexaggerates Christianity's role in Rome being destroyed, other than that it's alright.

*exaggerates

It really did disconnect them from their legacy built up from their ancestors. It's hard to overestimate anything that tore Rome apart

Anyone read "the storm before the storm" yet?

I'd say it's more of the fact the military had a lot of control in who could become Emperor. The 3rd crisis century literally had Emperors appointed by the military basically (Vespasian), and would literally overthrow them instantly if they didn't get their bonus pay, which is one of the reasons why a huge amount of expenditures was on the military. Also corruption playing a part. Christianity did play a role, but Gibbon's "It distracted Emperors from more serious things" as he states is a bit silly imo.

Wait fuck what the fuck am I talking about, Vespasian wasn't in the 3rd crisis century.
Christ I need to get some sleep.

Anything by this man. His Cicero and Augustus are his best, I think.

Also, anything by Goldsworthy

There is nothing wrong with SPQR. Stormfags just don't Mary Beard because she said that Rome non-white people lived in the Roman empire.

>the marian regorms were a disaster for the republic
shes really dumb

>the marian reforms were a disaster for the republic

Ugh......they definitely were. They might have been unavoidable, but the overall result was very negative and they paved the way for generals like Caesar to take over.

actually, people not looking out for each other caused teh fall in republican fervor. Read socrate's laws on the forms of governments and who will watch dialouge

I can't find an epub of that except for a torrent with no seeders. ;_;

There's this neat new thing call "libraries."

They don't have ebooks and even if I wanted to read the hardcover I'd have to wait weeks to get it over interlibrary loan and I want it now!

I found a pdf of it on libgen.io

The one you have is "Augustus: First Emperor of Rome", probably "From Revolutionary to Emperor" is actually a seperate book.

adriangoldsworthy.com/book10.php

Seems to be just differing UK and US publications.

Thanks, I'll convert it to epub with calibre and pray to jupiter it comes out alright.

Polybius, Livy, Plutarch, Tacitus, Suetonius, etc.

Tom Holland maybe

Avoid Mary Beard like the fucking plague

It didn't. ;_;

If you can handle fiction
Masters of Rome series by Colleen McCullough (could be a textbook it's that accurate to events and culture)
Julian by Gore Vidal
The Roman by Mika Waltari
Pompeii by Robert Harrisn(no relation to any terrible films)
Steven Saylor's Rome stuff

For the love of Lares, avoid Conn Iggulden

The Republic fell because the government had great difficulty dealing with it's own expanded size and wealth in a post-Hannibalic state.

I don't think so really. Most of Gibbon's reputation as a rabid antichrist has to be taken in terms of the period when he was writing. He limits the majority of his discussion of Christianity to two or three chapters out of seventy. Sure it's a hot take influenced by Gibbon's personal dislike of the church, but he really doesn't claim anything like "it was all Jesus' fault". He assigns far more importance to the collapse of any sense of civic virtue among Romans, the influx of barbarians, the excessive influence of the military on political leadership, the bad choices of individual leaders, and the incessant civil wars.

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Check out Max Gallo

Not a polfag but she is retarded and her books is made for american children. I hated her even before bbc.

Brainlet here, what's the best introductory book on Ancient Rome?

The A Very Short Introduction series is good for all subjects

I have two Jewish authors for you OP:
>The Jewish War - Josephus
Iosef's Bizarre Adventure. A two part book, first part about Herod the >Great's ascendance to power, his relationship with Rome and the state that led to the Jewish rebellion; second part is the documentation of Rome's military operation in Judea. Apart from that it's interesting to note that Josephus is one of the few ancient authors (so it said in the notes of the book) to give a more or less full account of Roman military training. In addition to all of this, this book of course contains all of Josephus' kike schemes like tricking his party into killing themselves and defecting to the Romans' side, or the time he did a coastal siege with some hundred of empty boats but the other side surrendered because their optics were shit and all they saw was a potential navy.

>Plebs and Princeps - Zvi Yavetz
A one of a kind book in that it specifically focuses on the relationship of the Roman rabble with its rulers throughout the Julio-Claudian era. It's an interesting analysis that examines the real power of the plebs and the mob, their reaction and sheds light on policies of ancient rulers.

also fun fact I forgot to mention: during Herod's rule Judea was to Rome what is today Israel to USA. Not even kidding - all the benefits and patronage. Iirc only some Caucasian kingdom had the same liberties and independence that Judea had.

bump good thread

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size has nothing to do with how long a form of government lasts

It does before the advent of modern communication technologies. Rome constantly had to rework her government structure as the wars got further away and the campaigns became longer.

>size has nothing to do with how long a form of government lasts
this was literally a huge debate in the enlightenment period when discussing the reason for the failure of republicanism in antiquity and the failure of its revival in europe until the late 18th century. the conventional thinking was that SIZE was at the heart of that problem, my dear brainlet.

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THanks based info anons

Great to read on your Casper mattress after a nice Harry's Razors shave!

Kek

>overexaggerates
Why is this a thing people say?

Anyone ever read pic related? I picked it up cheap in a second hand store in my town but haven't read it yet.

>he sort of has a fairly controversial opinion on the state of Late Rome.
In what sense?

I like this SPQR book, but it doesn't go late enough into Roman history, for my preference, and it ends arbitrarily around 212 AD, with the mass-citizenship imposed upon the Empire. I would have preferred to have the book include the Third Century Crisis, and the later 4th and 5th centuries of barbarian invasions, to the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire in 480 AD.

While he did pioneer the idea of Late Antiquity not being completely nightmarish and horrible, he pretty much downplays the fall of the WRE as being "meh" to an outright cultural blossoming. He throws the baby out with the bathwater so to speak, focusing only on the prosperity of the Greek east and ignores the utter shitstorm that was Britain, Gaul, and parts of Italy and Spain.

I think reading his works in conjunction with Ward-Perkins Bryans (for the more grimdark view of the WRE's collapse) and Christopher Wickham (A synthesis between the grimdark and sunshine happiness outlooks) would provide a more balanced viewpoint of Late Antiquity.

Basically what said, he sort of has a positive outlook on WRE's fall, consider a "Cultural rebirth". In the sense that all the villas and of the sort did not fall because of "decline", but because of "Rebirth". As historian Edward James puts it:
“Decline” has been banned from the late antiquist’s vocabulary. In part this is a sensible recognition of the fact that one man’s decline is another man’s progress.
It's also why I recommended Ward-Perkins Bryan's book, gives a mroe balanced outlook. Also seconding Wickham

Then Amazon.com is the answer for you.

If you don't want to pay for it, then I guess you are shit out of luck.

It would have only been a shitshow for the wealthiest members of society, who suddenly found their vast property claims to suddenly be rendered worthless as the Germanics divided the land up among their foot-soldiers. For everybody else it was your shitty old Roman bosses being replaced with slightly less shitty Germanic ones and life went on. People were poorer... in the sense that they went back to being small time farmers living in comfy villages instead of wagecucks crammed like sardines into urban areas, but Italy actually experienced something of a mini golden age under Gothic rule, no longer straining to support a bloated opulent imperial court, only descending into ruin when the Byzantines burned it all down trying to reconquer it. And once the migrations died down, Europe experienced a period of peace and tranquility. Science still took place, gothic architecture was far more splendid and intricate than anything the Romans built, even if it wasn’t at the same scale. The foundations of western civilization were laid in this period, flowering out of the corpse of classical antiquity.

I actually think it seems like an apt theory.

>It would have only been a shitshow for the wealthiest members of society,
Wrong. Many of the nobles merely swapped paymasters and became more martial. They benefited from not paying taxes to the emperor and not getting any levies of troops, hired out barbarians and created a cyclical chain of events.

>People were poorer... in the sense that they went back to being small time farmers living in comfy villages
t. someone who has never done work in the field a day in their lives. 80% of the Roman population lived outside the cities, but the institutions and practices inside the urban environments facilitated a flowering of economic prosperity and mass-shipment of bulk goods (grain, wine, oil) which enhanced the everyday life of a peasant. Not to mention the Aqueducts and baths that greatly increased sanitation and health.

>Italy actually experienced something of a mini golden age under Gothic rule, no longer straining to support a bloated opulent imperial court,
Which quickly descended into utter chaos once Theoderic had died. Justinian and Belisarius certainly didn't help, but much of the damage can be attributed to the Plague wiping out a fuckhuge portion of gothics and italians/byzantines thus being ill staffed to rebuild Italy proper.

>Europe experienced a period of peace and tranquility.
The livelihood of being killed in combat shot up for all members of society, and kingdoms barely remained consistent as civil war and petty wars took the lives of your typical peasant. How 20 smaller petty warring kingdoms are more peaceful than 1 empire is beyond me.

>gothic architecture was far more splendid and intricate than anything the Romans built, even if it wasn’t at the same scale.
Name one piece of gothic architecture that was superior to the Romans before 1000 AD. Hell name anything superior to the Hagia Sofia.

I personally downloaded a few pages from Ward-Perkin's article. Do you really believe Italy experienced a golden age with the degeneration of villas anad pottery? Bryan makes a good point
First pic

Second.

Blaming the Marian reforms is really a mis-attribution of cause. The social problems of land ownership and refusing to expand the manpower/franchise pool to include the Italian states was the problem. The Marian reforms were just the only solution that could stop the bleeding without fixing the problem. Decades of complete refusal to reform was the problem. The Marian reforms saved the Republic from dying then and there to the multiple crisis that loomed over the coming period. Don't blame the symptom for the disease.

You misspelled Julio-Claudian dynasty. Judo makes it sound like it's got something to do with Judeo-Claudian some thing.

>The Marian reforms were just the only solution that could stop the bleeding without fixing the problem.

And, by not fixing the problem, they didn't fix the problem, plus creating a new one down the road.

>The Marian reforms saved the Republic from dying then and there to the multiple crisis that loomed over the coming period.

True enough, but that does not mean they did not create a new, specific problem that was integral to the decline of the Republic.

Somebody who wants to write alternate-history novels should grab hold of "Judeo-Claudian Dynasty" and run with it.

bump

I have note that his board really love to talk about rome republic and its fall, in everythread its the same, they are arguing as why the republic fell

Why do you think it fell?

What do you guys think of James O'Donnell's "The Ruin of the Roman Empire"?

fairly controversial I would say as he bashes and blames Justinian for his wars to reconquest former regions of the Roman Empire, and his diplomatic approach to persia as (one of the main) reason of the Rise of islam, IIRC.

oh also, Justinian trying to impose his own views on christianity trough the Council of Chalcedon or Nicene (dont remember which) played a mayor role as well, according to the author, as the Churches of Antioch, Alexandria and Africa were theologically closer to Islam than Constantinople's christianity

>tfw when we translated caesars commentary on the gallic wars in school
>i was too much of a brainlet back then to care about it
;_;

The mongol empire ruled the largest empire in the world and they didn't need "modern communications". They even continued expanding after Genghis' death.

That sounds nice desu

Because its corrupt

Gibbon wrote in a beautiful english that makes me think something has been lost since then. No-one alive writes english as well as gibbon.

Stop pretending to be me you nigger, it's not funny.

What's so fab about Gibbon's writing?

Just started listening to this and it has been great so far. In the introduction, the author says that Tom Holland and Adrian Goldsworthy both assisted in writing the book, which is a very good omen in my opinion.

Mike Duncan's new book came out today. Has anyone started reading it? Is it worth picking up if I really enjoyed his podcast?

Also would like to know the answer to this question

>bought the Rubicon book while still in High School over a decade ago
>read it when I finally had a chance
>became my favorite history book

Neat that Veeky Forums also recommends it.