Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Robert Casey asks You seem to do a lot of episodes that involve Roman history.

Do you have any special interest in Roman history? Is this something you have studied? What book would you recommend as a good short history of Rome that is also enjoyable to read?

There are several reasons for doing episodes on Roman history. Rome had an outsized impact on the development of the Western world, and perhaps more importantly, we simply know more about it than other ancient cultures.

Even though the vast majority of what was written in Ancient Rome is gone, what survived has given us a rich history of the period. We have Caesar’s commentaries, which are perhaps the oldest and most complete first-person accounts from a leader in the ancient world.

My knowledge of Roman history came from my own independent reading. If you are interested, a good place to start would be Mary Beard’s 2015 book, “SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome.”

However, there are many, many books going back hundreds of years, including translations of original texts that you can read, most of which are available online for free. Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was published in the late 18th century, is in the public domain, and you can get a print version cheap on Amazon.