A portrait of the Roman politician describes the life and times of the ancient statesman, based on the witty and candid letters that Cicero wrote to his friend Atticus in which he described the events and personalities that shaped the final days of Republican Rome.

The history of Rome has long been narrow and one-sided, essentially a history of The Doing of Important Things, and as far as Roman historians have been concerned, women don't make that history. From Romulus through "the political stab-fest of the late Republic, and then on to all the emperors, Roman historians may deign to give you a wife or a mother to show how bad things become when women get out of control, but history is more than that. Emma...

Character studies comparing statesmen and generals of pre-Christian Greece and Rome.

""A wonderfully rich, witty, insightful, and wide-ranging portrait of the two Plinys and their world."-Sarah Bakewell, author of How to Live. When Pliny the Elder perished at Stabiae during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, he left behind an enormous compendium of knowledge, his thirty-seven-volume Natural History, and a teenaged nephew who revered him as a father. Grieving his loss, Pliny the Younger inherited the Elder's notebooks-filled with pearls...

More than two thousand years after his death, Julius Caesar remains one of the great figures of history. He shaped Rome for generations, and his name became a synonym for "emperor"-not only in Rome but as far away as Germany and Russia. He is best known as the general who defeated the Gauls and doubled the size of Rome's territories. But, as Philip Freeman describes in this fascinating new biography, Caesar was also a brilliant orator, an accomplished...

Spartacus (109?—71 BCE) has been a source of endless fascination, the subject of myth-making in his own time, and of movie-making in ours. In this riveting, compact account, Aldo Schiavone rescues Spartacus from the murky regions of legend and brings him squarely into the arena of serious history. Schiavone transports us to Italy of the first century BCE, where we encounter Spartacus, who is enslaved after deserting from the Roman army to avoid...

"The Roman emperor Nero has long been the very image of a bad ruler--cruel, vain, and incompetent. He committed incest with his mother, who had schemed and killed to place him on the throne, and later murdered her. He supposedly set fire to Rome and thrummed his lyre as it burned. Afterward he cleared the charred ruins of the city center and, in their place, built a vast palace. Historians of his day despised him, and it's their recollections that...

"A memoir of the author's time in Rome after his family was made to leave Egypt, before moving to America"--