W/CW: Violence, brutality, torture, slavery, murder, suicide, sexual assault

RATING: 4/5

REVIEW: The Rise of Rome follows the history of Rome from its foundation myths with Aeneas, Romulus and Remus, to the fall of the Roman Republic in the 1st century BC. It examines not only the history, but also the myths the Romans created about their own history and the ways that they justified their more brutal actions to themselves and to the world.

I enjoyed this book, and learned a lot from it about times in Roman history that I do not know well. It was a little dry at points, but they felt necessary to the story. It was also frustrating to hear of all the great works of literature that have been lost, but of course that is the fault of time and not the author! The book is written for a general audience, and not just historians.

I recommend this book to history lovers and those interested in Roman culture and history. ( )

Excellent history of Rome from its mythical and archaeological beginnings to the end of the Republic (Julies Caesar is only mentioned on the last page). ( )

Very readable. A bit more of a critical view on Rome than I have found in other books. ( )

One of the finest books on the history of Rome I have read. Highly recommended.

This book covers the origins of Rome from its earliest days of the semi historic kings through the fall of the republic. The author has a simple, concise and easy reading style which is both interesting and informative. His narrative flows extremely well, something not often found in a book which is essentially a historical survey spanning many centuries.

While a book of this scope cannot go into great depth, the author succinctly covers all important persons and historical developments. Highly recommended for those like myself with a significant background in this area, and for a novice just beginning his interest in Roman history. ( )

A pretty typical popular book on Roman history. Think Beard's SPQR but with a focus from the founding of Rome to around the time of the rise of Augustus. Nothing too exceptional, but that may be because I have less interest in this period than the late republican period. I suspect (though I cannot confirm) that the book is mostly a summary and synthesis of Polybius, Livy, and Sallust. The book's description of the fall of the republic is pretty orthodox, making allusions to the Marian reforms, to Sulla and the collapse of the oligarchical consensus necessary for republican rule. An aspect of the book that I thought was inventive and positive was the separation of the book into story, legend, and history. Roughly the first third of the book is dedicated to the Aeneid retelling of Rome's origins up to the end of reign of kings. It was interesting to see how the Romans assigned each king a specific role in Rome's historical development and to see the stories of each king fleshed out in one place. I was surprised to learn that of the seven kings, there were foreign ones. Everitt takes the now popular view of interpreting the stories as expressions of the anxieties and concerns of the story tellers, so there's some interpretation of these founding legends as exemplars of a lost Roman virtue or the shadow of fratricidal violence. It was interesting to learn about the practices of devotion (where a self sacrifice or devotion would cause the ruin of an enemy), evocatio (calling the gods of a foreign enemy to abandon them and make their home in Rome), and the rituals involving causi belli (the Romans were very legalistic and thought their wars required a legal purpose to be waged, this was accompanied by religious ritual, of sending emissaries to explain the cause of the war and symbolically throwing a spear into the land of the enemy). I was also interested in the traditional role of the king, who balanced the nobles and the common people, a conception of the rule of orders that survived until John Adams. Additionally interesting was the traditional concept of the tyrant, who using demagoguery used the power of the people ruled over the polity (instead of oligarchical rule) and the various fears Romans had about the Gracchi trying to replicate the Greek tyrant.

The second section runs from the expulsion of the kings, into the beginning of recorded/verifiable history. Included in this second is Brutus's execution of his sons who conspired to return the king (which even some ancient commentators thought was unnecessarily cruel) to the conflict of the orders, and the controversy of the 12 tables (Everitt advances a theory that the Decemviri were an experimental form of government that failed). Everitt notes that throughout the conflict, there was give/take and compromise which collapse near the end. Also described are the various wars Rome had with its neighbors gradually growing into the dominant power in the area and but also assimilating past enemies into to the polity with tiers of citizen rights.

The third section of the book summarizes what is well trodden ground. From the three carthaginian wars (which show the injustice of Rome when it seized Sardinia after the conclusion of the first war in violation of the peace treaty, and the third unprovoked war where Rome attacked Carthage), to the social wars, the Gracchi, the eastern campaigns, Marius, Sulla and the fall of the republic. Nothing too novel or original here, though a good summary of the era in the traditional telling of history. I was interested to learn of some of the unlikely bed fellows made between enemies of rome (one of the cities was citizen ruled and did not like Rome's typical support of local aristocracies [an interesting application of Dictator's Handbook, Rome prefered to deal with a small coalition when it came to foreign affairs] and called for help from an oriental style tyrant). Rome's involvement with the Greeks was interesting as well, from it's "liberation" of Greece, to the destruction of Corinth, and the various clashes with Alexander's successors, cumulating with the defeat of the Macedonian phalanx by the Roman offset three lined maniple. ( )