228
people found this helpful, as of 2023
ranked #132,117 most helpful
out of 571,544,897 reviews
★★★★★
Roman history woven with discussions of primary source material
Mary Beard in this book opens with Cicero attacking Cataline and ends with the granting of citizenship to all the inhabitants of the Roman Empire and goes back and forth in time from there while discussing the sources of what we know about the Romans. I have five shoeboxes filled with primary source paperbacks that cover the entire swath of Greco Roman history and what Mary Beard has done is taken the texts in those boxes combined with recent archaeological discoveries and in one place at one time written a magna opus on the Romans replacing myth with fact making it all relevant to the present time. SPQR.
