All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Another surprise was the villainous portrayal of Catalina as a violent, brute of a man who had openly murdered people who stood in his way. I had kind of come to admire Catalina as the misunderstood sometimes-rascal presented in Steven Saylor's Gordianus the Finder mystery, "Catalina's Riddle". Now I'm going to have to do more research of original sources to come to my own conclusion about this historical enigma.

However, despite that, I found the book actually very good. After a brief introduction of Tiro and a skimming of Cicero's beginnings and his marriage to Torrentia, it launches into the Gaius Verres case, which I found both highly educational and highly entertaining. I like a good courtroom drama, and here, Harris manages to create one despite the differences between ancient Roman and modern legal systems. On top of that, he is laying down the seeds of political corruption with everyone from Pompey to Crassus to a young Caesar and showing the age old animosity between the aristocrats and the plebs. The second in the series is titled Lustrum in the UK and Conspirata in the US. This confused me, and that is why I explain this here. Dictator is the title of the last.

As different from Gibbon as it could be, except for its scale and ambition. Published in 2000, this is the most brilliant and influential recent work on the ancient world. Beginning from a deep understanding of the Mediterranean environment it builds a picture of the ancient region as a world of distant but connected communities, many of them precariously balanced on the edge of sustainability. City states and empires play second fiddle here to peasants and villages: wars and revolutions matter less than bad harvests and disease. It is a compelling view of the underside of empire, the base on which it was built. The discipline is still working through the implications of their arguments. I Am a Barbarian (1967, written 1941) by Edgar Rice Burroughs; the fictionalized memoirs of Caligula's slave. The Roman empire’s USP has always been its survival. The largest state ever to exist in Europe, Rome’s empire began with the conquest of its Italian neighbours in the last centuries BC, and endured, in one form or another, for more than 1,000 years. The imperial monarchy established by Augustus at the turn of the millennium became a model repeatedly imitated into the 20th century. The Slavic title Czar is a distant echo of Caesar. Its Eagles soared over the empires of Austria, France and Mexico. The Roman fasces, an axe enclosed in a bundle of rods, were not only brandished by Mussolini and Hitler, but continue to adorn the US House of Representatives and the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford.

It's told first-person by Tiro, Cicero's scribe, who's a real guy who wrote a real biography of Cicero (now lost). It's a clever gambit by Harris; it allows him, among other things, to slyly inform you when the passage you've just read is the actual transcript of Cicero's speech, which happens often. He just has Tiro say something like, "And I am certain that the above speech is exactly as he told it, because I wrote it down myself and the record still survives." That sentence is exactly true.

The audiobook is well narrated by Bill Wallis, except that he does not clearly articulate Roman names. Sometimes they are said too fast and sometimes they drone on so long you fail to hear the end. Maybe this is why the names gave me trouble! Otherwise the narration is good. I have given the performance three stars. He does not over-dramatize.

Rome has so often been a model for later imitators that it is sometimes easy to forget how different it was from what followed. This is not the most famous of Beard’s many books on Rome, but it played an important part in exploring the combination of savagery and ceremonial that followed Roman victories. It also described the enormously creative efforts of Romans who reshaped their religion and their monumental city for each generation. I, Claudius (1934) and its sequel, Claudius the God (1935), by Robert Graves. The classic and influential dramatised account of the life of the emperor Claudius, made into a popular TV series (see below). No doubt because of all this Imperium was a fun read, a surprising paean to the skill of shorthand, and if the Roman pirate crisis was intended as a deliberate parallel to the ongoing terrorist crisis - a novel with a couple of barbed themes.

Media Reviews

I was unaware of how deep-seated an enemy Crassus was to Cicero, at least as presented by Harris. In fact, Crassus was presented with a vicious edge, more dangerous than simply a wealthy wannabe. Cicero hurried through to find two formidable men of middle age -- "the perfect witnesses from my point of view," as Cicero afterwards described them, "prosperous, respectable, sober, and above all -- not Sicilian." As Lucius had predicted, they were reluctant to get involved. They were businessmen, with no desire to make powerful enemies, and did not relish the prospect of taking starring roles in Cicero's great anti-aristocratic production in the Roman Forum. But he wore them down, for they were not fools, either, and could see that in the ledger of profit and loss, they stood to gain most by aligning themselves with the side that was winning. "Do you remember what Pompey said to Sulla, when the old man tried to deny him a triumph on his twenty-sixth birthday?" asked Cicero. "He told me over dinner the other night: 'More people worship a rising than a setting sun.'" This potent combination of name-dropping and appeals to patriotism and self-interest at last brought them around, and by the time they went in to dinner with Cicero and his family they had pledged their support. Winter Quarters (1956) by Alfred Duggan. Two Gauls in the time of Julius Caesar, one of whom is under a curse from the Mother Goddess, whose worship he finds throughout the Roman world. The Quest For the Lost Roman Legions by Tony Clunn, Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, with his account of his discovery of the battlefield The book is the first in a trilogy. The second volume, Lustrum ( Conspirata for U.S. audiences), was published in October 2009. The third volume, Dictator, was published in 2015. Publication of the sequels was delayed whilst Harris worked on other books, including his contemporary political novel, The Ghost, inspired by the resignation of Tony Blair.

The Robe (1942), by Lloyd C. Douglas, set in the same period as Ben-Hur; like Ben-Hur, more famous as a film. Three's Company (1958) by Alfred Duggan. The career of Lepidus, triumvir with Octavian and Marcus Antonius after the death of Julius Caesar. The Roma Sub Rosa series by Steven Saylor is set in the later years of the Republic and the beginning of the Augustan period. Tarzan and the Lost Empire by Edgar Rice Burroughs, a surviving fragment of the Roman Empire is discovered hidden in a corner of 20th century Africa.

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I was reading a biography of Julius Caesar after having watched some episodes of “Rome,” a rather bawdy but interesting version of the rise of Octavian in which Cicero plays a prominent, if cheesey role, so I knowing Harris through some other books, I grabbed this one. Three's Company, Winter Quarters, Conscience of the King, The Little Emperors and Family Favourites by Alfred Duggan Pompeii by Robert Harris, tells the story of Pompeii and the volcano Vesuveus during the reign of Titus.