History of Rome by Michael Grant

History of Rome Reviews

• 
  Matt

  “One thing that is clear is that we do not always want to relive the experience of the Romans; although sometimes what they did is entirely to be admired and envied, in other respects they were detestable. Most of what they achieved was based upon the use of force. The culture that has given us their unequaled masterpieces was created and maintained, in the last resort, by violent means that modern societies could not, or should not, tolerate today…”
  - Michael Grant, History of Rome
  
  Roman history is one of those subjects that I have always meant to get around to studying. Over the years, I have collected probably a dozen different books, all of them sitting patiently on the shelves, along with many other well-intentioned purchases. I’ve even managed to read a few select titles, ones that particularly caught my eye.
  
  The problem with such a piecemeal approach to Rome – or any other historical period – is that its hard to get a grasp without a firm contextual foundation. The way I’ve read about Rome thus far is similar to studying the pieces of a puzzle, without knowing the picture on the box.
  
  Among the Roman history books I have waiting in my overloaded bookcases is the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I tried to start it once, but didn’t get far. The first page went down smoothly enough. Then, on page two, the allusions to Rome’s long past began. Names popped up that I’d never heard. My copy is annotated, so I read all the footnotes before moving onto page three. More names, more footnotes. Page four seemed very far away.
  
  I gave up.
  
  In picking up Michael Grant’s History of Rome, I was motivated to get the necessary grounding to someday retackle Gibbon, as well as those other books I have about Julius Caesar, Augustus, and the sack of Carthage. The thing that most attracted me to this (rather than Mary Beard’s SPQR, which I probably would have liked a lot more) is its ambitious scope. Beginning 625 years before the birth of Jesus, and ending in the reign of Byzantine Emperor Justinian I, it seemed like a good bet to provide the broadest possible overview.
  
  Having finished, I think I accomplished my goal of attaining a mental synopsis of Rome's ebb and flow. But it was a struggle. Great history books have two things going for them: scholarship and literary merit. Here, only one out of two of those ingredients are present.
  
  Grant was a noted classicist with a prolific output, publishing over seventy books in his lifetime. Unfortunately, despite all that practice, it appears he never got any better at the art of writing. While he makes a worthy attempt to encompass the vast saga of Rome in less than five-hundred pages, the utter lack of any storytelling skill makes this a drag. In order to finish, I was reduced to a Fabian-like strategy, a reading-war of attrition, in which I advanced, ploddingly, from chapter to chapter.
  
  By far the roughest going is at the start, when Rome was an insignificant Iron Age settlement situated along the Tiber River. Part of the problem, narratively speaking, is unavoidable. This far back in time, there is simply not enough information about the men and women involved to tether the story to personality. Instead, Grant is left to sift through archaeological remains, and to piece together a timeline from slivers of evidence.
  
  Another part of the problem, however, is that Grant is clearly assuming that his readers have a certain amount of foreknowledge that I simply didn’t possess. For example, in discussing the Etruscans – who dominate the early stages – Grant never explains the origins of this ancient Italian civilization. Thus, within the first handful of pages, I had to set the book down, pick my phone up, and look it up on the internet.
  
  As things progressed, the pace became mildly better. It helps a lot once familiar figures, such as the aforementioned Julius Caesar, show up on stage. Grant’s structure is obligingly methodical, aided by a timeline of events. Though it is unshowy, I appreciated his chronological approach, which allowed me to avoid getting hopelessly lost. I also liked that Grant tried to give a sampling of art, architecture, and society, alongside the obvious political machinations and endless wars. History of Rome is amply illustrated, with many pictures of old coins. There are maps as well, but they are singularly confusing and scattered randomly throughout the text without any apparent logic (for example, in the chapter on Jesus and Paul, there is a map of Britain showing the location of Hadrian’s Wall).
  
  For all of History of Rome’s virtues, Grant’s dry presentation leaves a great deal to be desired. While well-researched and academically sound, this is dramatically inert. At times, Grant seems almost to revel in his ability to avoid being entertaining, even on accident. The phrase that comes to mind is aggressively boring. Though Grant – in his forward – promises a balance of analysis and narrative history, he never bothers attempting to bring anything to life. The infamously brutal murder of Julius Caesar is delivered with all the enthusiasm of the directions on a box of unscented drier sheets. The passionate affair between Mark Antony and Cleopatra is less engaging than reading Apple’s “Terms and Conditions.” Hannibal’s stunning victory at Cannae is described with the same flat tone you’d expect from the automatic voice that greets you when you call the cable company. There is no wit on display here, no humor or puckishness, no sense of reveling in the many fantastic characters. Both Nero and Caligula are mentioned without any reference to their outsized reputations.
  
  This is not a terrible book, by any means. Gathering all the historical fragments – scattered across the centuries –is the work of a dedicated historian. Meaningfully arranging the voluminous information contained between these two covers is a talent in and of itself.
  
  With that said, History of Rome proves that material – even great material – does not inevitably speak for itself. This is a tale that should leap off the page. This is an epic of power and violence, of battles and barbarians and slave revolts, of politics both high and low, of wild love affairs and drunken bacchanals and the occasional orgy, of worlds won and lost and transformed. Yet Grant somehow manages to snuff out every spark of excitement, to smother the spectacle with leaden, pedestrian prose. I didn’t necessarily expect to feel breathless when I finished History of Rome, but I certainly didn’t expect the soporific sensation of having consumed a bottle of melatonin. History of Rome served its essential purpose, but I am positive there are other, better, more enjoyable ways to learn about one of the most influential civilizations to ever exist.
• 
  Erik Graff

  I've read a lot of books by Michael Grant--and he's produced a lot of books! None have particularly impressed me but all have been serviceable. I characterize my own writing as pedestrian. He's certainly more accomplished, but among authors of such substantial studies as this one he's not to be ranked among such wits and stylists as Gibbon. There's no flash and little wit to Grant's work.
  
  This then is yet another history of Rome, adjusted to our level of knowledge as of the late seventies. It spans the period from the early settlements to, basically, the collapse of the western empire. Much attention is paid in its conclusion to the interconnected reasons for this collapse and how a change of one factor or another might have prevented it. Unlike some authors, Grant seems to portray most of the emperors in the best light possible. There is no Suetonian concentration on enormity, excess or eccentricity. All in all, a decent summary of Roman history which should be accessible to the general reader.
• 
  Mike

  Tough to cover so much history in 360 pages. Grant does a decent job, it is readable while slightly textbookish. A book you might want on the shelf as a reference but probably won't read it again. It did give me a much better picture of Roman history and where I want to dive into more detail. My only complaint was his obvious bias against those "Jesus people", his description of Jesus, Paul, the Jews' and the Christians' impact on the flow of Roman history was the only part of the book I wasn't impressed. Lots of great info in the appendices in the back.
• 
  Chris

  If you’re looking for a readable and not-too-lengthy account of Roman history — from inception to Republic to Empire to fall — then you could do worse than read Michael Grant’s History of Rome. The span of Roman history is astounding. A small city-state of little significance rises to dominance, ultimately over Europe, the Near East, and North Africa—and then it is humbled, leaving the outlines of the modern world, and modern nation states, in its wake. What a tale.
  
  One of the aspects of Roman history that stands out in this account is the city’s stupefyingly complex politics—at all times, to be sure, but even more so during times of turmoil, such as the fall of the Republic, which is an event that must have proved horrifying to those who lived through it.
  
  One person who stands out during this time is Cato (the Younger), after whom a conservative think tank, the Cato Institute, is indirectly named. It’s somehow appropriate that modern libertarian Republicans venerate Cato — a man whose intransigence and inflexibility, while admirable on a personal level, contributed in no small part to the fall of republican institutions in Rome in the first century B.C. One might even say that Cato’s unreasonable refusal to compromise in fact precipitated the fall of the Republic. Like the Roman Republic, our system was deliberately constructed by our Founders on the principle of compromise, and refusal to do so doomed it. I’m skeptical of drawing all-too-convenient lesson from history (which in any case never repeats, only rhymes), but it’s damn hard to avoid seeing some obvious parallels with the modern Republican party’s refusal to compromise — particularly since Republicans themselves have chosen Cato as an intellectual ancestor.
  
  In any case, sermonizing aside, I would describe Grant’s account as “serviceable.” Grant is not the best writer, but I’m also sympathetic to his work because it’s hard to do justice to more than a thousand years of history in 350 pages. His sometimes flat reading of momentous events—for example, Caesar’s actions in the 50s and 40s B.C. — at times proved frustrating, but in terms of subject matter all the high points were hit. Topics rarely covered elsewhere are also examined; such as Caesar’s economic policy and his measures to deal with ongoing debt crises. Also, Grant also does a good job relaying the shockingly complicated and overlapping events of the fall of the Western Empire.
  
  If you know nothing about Roman history, then yes, I’d recommend this book, with the caveat that there are other treatments of this material (even textbooks) that more effectively convey how thrilling these events really were. Recommended? Yes — sort of.
• 
  James Henderson

  This is an excellent one volume history of Rome from the Etruscan beginnings, the Republic, Empire, and through the fall of the Western empire. Michael Grant was "one of the few classical historians to win respect from [both] academics and a lay readership"(The Times, 13 October 2004). Immensely prolific, he wrote and edited more than 70 books of nonfiction and translation, covering topics from Roman coinage and the eruption of Mount Vesuvius to the Gospels. This overview, while not comprehensive in detail, provides the general reader with the significant events and trends of Roman history.
• 
  Rossdavidh

  How does one summarize a thousand years of the history of a civilization that at one point encompassed the entire Mediterranean? For that matter, how does one review a book that attempts it? For starters, certainly not by attempting a summary of the summary.
  
  Michael Grant attempts the Mt. Everest of western historians, a history of Rome, from roughly about the eight century B.C. to the mid 500's A.D. It is, of course, an impossible task to truly cover the history of so great an area over so long a span of time, so he concentrates on politics and the arts, with only occasional forays into how the economy worked or the lives of the typical low-ranking person. This is probably at least in part a function of the fact that he was writing in the 1970's, when these were largely all for which data was available in sufficient quantity. You might not think that history changes very fast, but as technology has given archaeology more tools to work with, we have learned a lot more about how Rome lived and died.
  
  But, with the tools at hand to him at the time, he does a good job of making what could have been an incoherent and rambling mess into a coherent and engaging story. It is, I think, not a spoiler for anyone reading this that Rome started small, became very very big, and then fell to ruins again.
  
  One of the attractions, to any historical writer, of the story of Rome is the fact that you can project onto it more or less any problem that you see your own society facing in the current time, and because Rome is as vast (in space and time) as it is, that problem will be there. Did Rome fall because it was corrupted by its own successes? Did it fall because it turned from Republic to Empire? Did it fall because its government imposed greater and greater loads of taxation on its citizens? Did it fall because it turned from the active virtue of paganism to the world-shunning Christian virtue that locked up its best minds in the monastery instead of sending them forth into the world? Did it fall because...you get the idea. Any of these have some grain of truth in them, and it is likely that nearly or perhaps all of them are glossing over a lot of other causes that contributed. It is likely also the case that many of these were effects, not causes, of its long fall.
  
  Grant's thesis, which he does not spend too much time dwelling on, seems to be that the city-state of Rome was brilliantly successful at transforming itself into a league of Italian cities (that could hold together even as Hannibal lead an army through Italy for years), but it failed to transform itself from a league of Italian cities into a real nation. The armies that it conquered and (attempted to) defend itself with in its later centuries were not sufficiently loyal to the idea of Rome. Instead, they were all too loyal to whichever general led them, and promised them wealth if they would make him emperor. Scale matters, and it is the rare entity that successfully transforms itself even once; that it could not do so a second time is no great surprise.
  
  I am not historian enough to judge Grant's accuracy. From what I have read elsewhere, his take on the topic is in any case at least a respectable representation of mainstream historical opinion; i.e. he was not a kook. He did spend at least some time discussing topics like the lives of slaves, the struggles of the typical farmer to make a living despite the war and ruinous taxation, and occasional other topics outside of the military/political theme. But I did find myself in some sympathy with ancient Roman historians, when he mentioned that at one time they made it their custom never to mention the names of the generals, in order to avoid glorifying the man riding atop the backs of all the common folk who were doing the actual fighting. It is difficult to believe that most of the men who happened to grab the imperial purple for a time (in some cases, less than a year) really had any significant impact on the direction of the civilization they were standing atop.
  
  These are quibbles with the methods of 20th century historians, though, no particular fault of Grant, who probably reached as far as the data available to him allowed. It is a testament to his grasp of the subject that I found it both easy to read and informative.
• 
  Randall Wallace

  Romans had 400,000 troops at their disposal, no wonder no other power could compete against them. The annexing of Sicily was the first move of Roman imperialism; they wanted Sicilian grain. The worst defeat the Romans ever suffered was at Cannae where Hannibal’s smaller force won through an enveloping of “perfect coordination”. The Second Punic War gave Rome it’s empire; it gave them the entire western Mediterranean region for hundreds of years. When Crassus caught Spartacus, he crucified “six thousand of his slave followers along the Appian Way.” All those crosses along the Appian Way, sent a clear message to slaves thinking of insurrection that the message of Jesus had now been appropriated by the strong to be used against the weak (an inversion of the values of Jesus). The first Triumvirate happens when Pompey, Crassus and Caesar team together to take on the Roman Senate. Caesar goes to England with the largest force the English Channel will see until WWII – five legions and 2,000 cavalry on 800 ships. When Caesar later crossed the Rubicon with his troops, it meant he was committing treason and could not turn back, an empire wide civil war had begun. After winning that civil war, Caesar only had one year left to live. He chose a dictatorship like Sulla before him. He was killed for daring to make his temporary dictatorship permanent. Caesar foolishly disbanded his Spanish bodyguards, and a group 0f 60 plotting against him had him killed.
  
  The cost of transportation was so high that it did not pay to “cart grain more than fifty miles; this hampered development. Most of the grain came from Tunisia which replaced Sicily as Rome’s breadbasket. The original Colosseum of Rome could be flooded to “stage imitation sea fights.” Paul made Christianity into a world religion by “extending Christianity to the Gentiles.” By the time of Septimus Severus, constant Roman war making had “virtually wiped out the middle class of society.” Also heading Rome faster toward collapse was the fact that “between AD. 218 and 268 about fifty usurpers assumed the imperial title” and costly civil wars ravaged the treasury. The King of the Vandals, Gaiseric, who had his own fleet, “contributed more to the collapse of the western Roman Empire than any other single man.” In second place for the honor, was Attila who ruled for 19 years. 476 is considered as the year that Western Rome fell. In Rome, the worst sufferers had been the agricultural poor. Augustine the pro-war justifying douchebag, “was not, it is true, a pacifist; indeed, he conceded that a literal interpretation of Christ’s saying, ‘turn the other cheek’ would ruin the state.” In the end, most of Rome’s accomplishments were only possible through the use of force, in complete opposition to the teachings of Christ (like most of the accomplishments of the imperialistic United States and Great Britain).
  
• 
  Dropbear123

  3.25/5 Giving it the extra 0.25 as I liked one of the last chapters on the factors behind the fall of the Western Empire.
  
  It is a fairly old (came out in 1978) overview of the Roman Empire from the earliest foundation of Rome to the traditional end date of the Western Roman Empire in 476AD. The book is mainly about the political history (consuls, emperors and reforms etc) and expansion of the empire. There are also a decent amount on high culture (like arts, architecture, literature etc) and on economics. But to make this fit in 356 pages (plus 60-70 pages of stuff like notes) there isn't much on everyday life beyond a top-down economic view (the poor suffering because of taxation for example) and the military details are almost all about the expansion (or decline) of the empire and the consequences of campaigns/battles, with almost no descriptions of the battles themselves. Cannae gets a paragraph, Carrhae gets a sentence for example. The writing style is fairly dry and unexciting to read.
  
  Overall it was fine. Not bad but not amazing. I liked the later bits more interesting than the early bits but personally I find the Roman Empire more interesting than the Republic so I'm biased.
• 
  Elizabeth Kennedy

  I wanted to read a solid overview of the history of Rome. This book gave me exactly that. It does read like a text book. I've always liked reading text books, so that didn't bother me. However, this book was quite dry compared to the totally delicious I, Claudius. I guess that's the difference between a good text book and a great novel. The part of this book that I enjoyed most was Grant's discussion of the fall of the empire and the Roman legacy to western civilization. I wish that section of the book had been longer and more detailed.
• 
  John Nelson

  In this book, Michael Grant sets out to summarize the thousand-year history of the Roman Republic and Empire in a single volume. He probably comes as close to succeeding at this task as anyone has. The problem lies in the fact that the subject is far too large to be covered in just one volume. Major events and figures are covered in just one or two pages, and sometimes passed over entirely, because of the need to condense. Although the book is worthwhile reading, one probably would be better off investing his or her time in books that cover smaller topics more thoroughly.
• 
  Liam Malone

  I read this during a Roman history class at Penn State in 1980. I reread it this past week finishing it today. It is a good book but the first part is obstructed by Grant's personal opinions. His reasoning for the fall of the Western Empire is good and sound. There are more recent works on the scope of Roman history, but this is a classic and if you only want to read one Roman history then this it.
• 
  Michael Anderson

  Essential reading by a great scholar.
• 
  Spike Gomes

  There's been quite a few good single volume books about the Roman Empire written recently. Unfortunately, I can't afford to buy any of them. Thankfully I dug this one out of the library discard bin so I was able to fill in some personal lacunae in my historical knowledge. It's still somewhat in demand, according some of the other reviewers here, which is not surprising. It does a very good job of condensing what is an immense amount of information into a digestible size. Roman history is covered from the prehistoric tribes of Italy to the reign of Justinian in all areas, from political and military history to the economy and the fine arts.
  
  That said, the book isn't without flaws. It is very dryly written. If one didn't already have an interest in the subject, one really wouldn't be able to hold their attention too well to the book. I don't know how someone can render the Punic Wars and the political maneuvers of the Late Republic a tedious read, but somehow Grant did it. In fact, you could possibly say that Grant's academic specialty in historical economics and material culture means that he writes with far more verve on monetary policy and interior decoration than he does the dramatic aspects of history.
  
  The fact that the book is a single volume attempting to cover over 1,000 years of history also means that you're not going to get much depth, particularly in areas that Grant implicitly deems as “covered well by previous sources”, which is why you'll get three pages on Sulla's dictatorship, and just about as many pages on the details of how tax policy changed around his time. However, I think that's a fair enough judgment call.
  
  The book was also written in the late 70s, so there are small aspects that are now outdated, in particular the discussions of pre-Etruscan and Etruscan era Rome. Modern genetic analysis and advances in archeological techniques and interpretation mean that some of the what he writes of, like the Etruscans being possible descendants of a Near-Eastern population are no longer considered valid. That said, it's not an error on his part, just something the modern reader needs to keep in mind.
  
  That said, towards the end of the book, there is a section where I think his analysis is somewhat flawed. While nowhere near as blatant and explicit as Gibbon, he points to the “otherworldly” and socially disruptive nature of incipient Roman Christianity as part of the passel of reasons the Western Empire fell along with the less controversial reasons of imperial overstretch and demographic collapse and his own uncontroversial additions of bad economic policy that kicked the can down the road until everyone was reduced back to a barter economy due to inflation and specie devaluation. I really don't want to think Grant was arguing dishonestly, but when he cites monasticism and the money and energy being put into building Christian institutions rather than maintaining imperial infrastructure, it really needs to be pointed out that the Eastern Romans got into that whole thing far more extensively before Benedict really made it popular in the now fallen Western Empire. If anything, one could say that Christianity wasn't a cause, but instead a symptom of a general loss of asabiyyah in the later Roman Empire. That said, asabiyyah was not really a fully accepted historiogical idea until the 2000s despite it being around for hundreds of years.
  
  Overall, these are small quibbles, and Grant succeeded in writing a popular history of the Roman Empire that is sufficiently modern to cover the long overlooked areas of history outside of leaders and battles.
  
  Four out of Five stars.
• 
  Curt Hopkins Hopkins

  As always, Grant is a great synthesist and analyst with good judgement and a rare talent for turning facts into stories. He was born in 1914 so as clear-eyed as he is he doesn't completely escape his time and social situation any more than any of us do. So you read "invert" for gay in one instance, as an example, and although he's empathetic to the rural poor, who never had much of a chance in the Roman system, he doesn't talk as much about the international nature of the empire as I would have like, and so on. But the really egregious -- in my mind outdated -- idea he had was that the US was influenced in his democracy by Rome and Greece, whom nevertheless he admits never had representative democracy. The only part of America that modeled itself on Rome and Greece was the South, which favored oligarchy and slavery, not democracy. US representative democracy was based on the Iroquois Confederacy, which exemplified regional representation along with a limited time for meeting.
• 
  Gayle

  I learned just what I wanted to learn about Rome and the Empire, and so much more. I took my time reading it and skipped over a lot of the war stuff. But it was still interesting. A lot of despotic Emperors and people who wanted to "be King". Some great rulers tried their best to change the system. In the end, the freedoms of the people were eroded by taxation, no middle class only the poor and rich, racial animosity, religious animosity, segregation, laws against interracial marriage, and violent coercion for the Christians to give up their Faith, sounds a lot like humanity today. I guess we learned nothing from the Romans. They did leave us some great history though.
• 
  Evan Leister

  This book was a great historical journey. I didn't agree with all of it but I absolutely had my perspective enlarged and was never lost in minutiae. The division of subject material kept the reading fresh and I'd recommend to anyone wanting a survey from start to end.
  
  I plan on digging in more in a few areas in the third and fourth century and eventually revisiting Peter Brown on late antiquity.
• 
  Evan Brandt

  A good way to get a broad overview of the history of the empire for the unitiated.
• 
  Kenny

  Takes a more topical than chronological approach.
• 
  H.

  More of a survey than an in depth study. Still Grant offers solid information and good interpretation of the information he gives the reader.
  
  Boy oh boy, though, does the man like his clauses.
• 
  Caius Terentius

  An excellent overview of Roman history with plain narration. While some may deem the analysis too shallow, for such a scope as Grant covers the depth is inevitable for a one-volume work.
• 
  Cindy

  So much information, but the approach is quite dated. Loved all the photos, but the maps were not as helpful
• 
  Luciano Salerno

  A pretty solid, relatively brief recount of the history of Rome, from the foundation of the city until the Fall of the Western Roman Empire.
  
  It's a history of facts, so don't expect a very profound analysis, but it's pretty useful to get (or get over) the classic story of what is usually considered Ancient Rome, especially for newcomers.
• 
  Adam K

  Tackling the entirety of Roman history is a monumental task, and Michael Grant steps up in a big way. Certainly, giving a comprehensive telling and analysis of all of Roman history in such a short book leaves ample room for omissions, but Grant leaves no stone unturned and manages to present all of the major events, places, and people in a coherent and digestible format. Of course, there is much that was glossed over by necessity, and there were many spots where I felt that there was a much larger and more fascinating story buried beneath all of the goings on. But, in the end, Grant manages to provide a comprehensive overview of Roman history, from birth to death, and he does so with tact and a fair bit of his own personal analysis. This book is an excellent gateway into Roman history, and provides a good framework from which one can formulate their own path of study before delving deeper into the world of Ancient Rome.
• 
  Shashwat Singh

  This is an excellent introduction to Roman history. The book covers Rome from its humble origins as a small settlement to the barbarian invasions and the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire.
  
  This book was easily readable, and it covered the major wars and events, how Roman society functioned, Roman philosophy, religions, and literature, as well as the various emperors, consuls, and generals who played a major role in Rome's rise and fall.
  
  The end of the book which covered the decline and fall of Rome was very interesting. One of the biggest factors was the definitely incessant civil wars, plots, and assassinations that sapped the strength of Rome. Another major factor was the complete wiping out of the middle class, and a general decrease in patriotism which was caused by multiple factors. An interesting note was that many in the empire thought that Rome was still great and strong even years or decades before its fall. Like a frog in boiling water, people ignored the signs around them.
  
  This was definitely a great book to get me started on the Roman Empire. Because of the great influence Roman society has on our own society, learning about the Roman Empire is something we should all put some time into.
• 
  Antoine

  This book isn't bad, but it isn't great, and it amazes me that, until quite recently, it was nearly the only survey of Roman History in print. Now it appears not to be in print, but the price tag of used paperback copies, at $15 and up, should tell you something. Ten years ago, the book was $50 in paperback. It just isn't that good, and never was. Try Boatwright et al,
  The Romans: From Village to Empire, which isn't cheap, though it is cheaper, and is certainly a better buy and a better read.
• 
  Cameron

  In roughly five hundred pages, Grant manages to pack a thorough historical narrative of Rome from its primitive Etruscan beginnings to the decline and fall of the imperial empire. The rise of Rome, as well as the various larger-than-life characters it comprised, is among the most incredible of stories and the unfurling of modern western civilization. You couldn't make this stuff up. My only complaint about this history would be that Grant sticks to breadth over detail in all cases and merely skims through Rome's more intriguing figures and events.