I don't know much about Rome except little things here and there.
Apparently Napoleon liked this a lot. This is an abridged 800 page version of it, does anyone know if this is an alright place to start?
I don't know much about Rome except little things here and there.
Apparently Napoleon liked this a lot. This is an abridged 800 page version of it, does anyone know if this is an alright place to start?
read the wikipedia page on latin writers and pick a few that interest you, they have a lot of historians. or read that. no correct one place to start.
Gibbon is incredible , but I recommend going through some primary sources first, they're really not as difficult as people make them out to be. Suetonius, Polybius and Titus Livius are all pleasant and readable. You can then move on to stuff like Plutarch, Diodorus and Caesar himself. Gibbon is arguably more challenging than most of the primary sources.
If you want the best of Barnes&Noblecore on the subject that would be Tom Holland and Mary Beard (careful with her though, very biased).
Once you've finished with the Greeks, you can resume with the Romans.
I read this over a period of a year, supplementing it with about eight or nine other texts to fill gaps in my understanding. I believe it to have served me well.
>No Polybius
>No Plutarch
>No Diodorus
>No Dio Cassius
>But somehow Josephus merits a place
Holy hell, what a goddamn mess of a chart
Most of your suggestions should already be covered by the time you get to this chart.
Gibbon is great.
There is nothing wrong with SPQR or Mary Beard in general
don't @ me
yeah she's good for an overview. goldworthy caesar + augustus is good too.
Will Durant's Caesar and Christ is unironically one of my favorite surveys about roman history even though it's pretty old fashioned. the audiobook is good too.
Why it is old fashioned?
Okay this is pretty overwhelming.
Should I read Plato's republic?
Rome truly was the gem amongst civilization as a whole; a rough one, in many ways, but still something beautiful to behold. I hope you find it to be as great as I do, OP.
Also, good suggestions ITT. While it isn't that helpful as a foundational tool, Plutarch's "Five Roman Lives" provides great biographies of important Romans, and they're not long either (I read Caesar's and Brutus' in one sitting, respectively).
Plato is exit-level Greek. You have to read the Greeks first before the Romans because the Romans stole pretty much everything from the Greeks.
I see Anabasis is not included on this list. Is it considered to be early capeshit? I found it an interesting read.
>Gibbon is arguably more challenging than most of the primary sources.
Probably because you read modern translations of the primary sources, while Gibbon is read in his original 18th century glory
This chart bugs me.
>No Euripides
>No Xenophon
>No Lyric (except Theognis??)
>Epic Cycle?
The premiss is also weird. No harm comes from reading Romans along with Greeks on most core issues of Classical learning, and I don't see why I need to finish reading the whole Corpus Aristotelicum before I start on Virgil... Depends on your field of study. If I want to study Stoicism I won't start with Chrysippean fragments out of principle and than move on to Seneca - they've been thoroughly intertwined, and we have fuller surviving texts by the latter.
The main reason not to start with Gibbon, magisterial though he is, is that his starting point is the Severan dynasty, and that's very late: Rome was around for 800 years by then.
To my mind, the best possible introduction to Rome is Cicero's de Republica and de Legibus. But use a scholarly edition and write notes. Than move on to Plutarch (chronologically) and Livy.
There are also short synopseis of Livy and general Roman history, like Florus and Eutropius, Kinda barbarous, but helps bring order to the scheme.
I like Scullard's 'From the Gracchi to Nero'. Theodor Mommsen History - 19th cent., very influential and much admired, deals from the Monarchy to Caesar - is anachronistic, heinously biased at points, and was probably superseded by later research, but it has its' paedagogic virtues. You cant start there if you're willing to change your mind. Can be used a modern substitute for Livy, of sorts.
In terms of literature, imo: lots Cicero, Virgil, Tacitus, than move on to the rest.
>no Greeks in my Roman chart
Greeks that wrote in Roman times about Roman history. OP is asking for history.
I know this is a literature board and you want books, but really if you want a basic history of the western roman empire from the semi-mythical founding of the city up until the "fall" of the west roman empire then The History of Rome podcast really is a good start.
Of course you should also then go and read, but the podcast will give you everything you need to get all the memes on /his/
Dan Carlin's Death Throes of the Republic is what got me into roman history.
If you want a fiction/non fiction meeting, once you get up to Caesar's Gaul book, read that, then watch HBO's Rome, then read I, Claudius. HBO's Rome starts at the end of Gaul in Caesar, and I, Claudius starts a little after the end of Rome.
Start with Colleen McCulloughs Masters of Rome series
Thats what made me fall in love with Rome
If you just jump into a bunch of facts and dates it will bore you to death
Instead i found reading a story about history but with characters and context given to the history made it so much better
>stole
Inherited is quite different from stealing retard
Would you settle for "inherited by force"?
What did they "inherit by force"?
A whole bunch of slaves and the philosophies and religious content therein?
Gibbon is incredible, though not in the way you mean.
No reason whatever to waste time on her when we have piles of competent 19th century work laying around.
>philosophies
Greeks had been living on the Italian peninsula for hundreds of years before Rome came to dominate it
The patrician Romans often sent their children to Greece or hired Greeks for tutoring
Greek philosophy was widely accepted long before they went to war
So are we stealing philosophy by reading Plato?
>religious content
Pedestrian misconception
All pagan pantheons in the old world were related because they all came from a common source
They all had the same gods just with different names
Caesar says the Gauls worshipped Mars when they obviously didnt call the god Mars
It wasnt a matter of "stealing" they already had their religion long before the conflict with Greece
Afterwards some Greek influence was left on Rome but I'd hardly call it stealing when they fought a war and won the territory. Naturally having multiple cultures in the Empire would affect the overall culture of the Empire.
It has nothing to do with Rome but if you care at all about politics then yeah you should
>All pagan pantheons in the old world were related because they all came from a common source
Sure, but echoes are sure to have bounced around the region as variants. This can be seen in how Greece co-opted the tradition of "Maneros", that was actually Tammuz, when they already had a tradition for "Adonis" - who was also already Tammuz.
>They all had the same gods just with different names
They became distinctly different traditions in many cases.
>So are we stealing philosophy by reading Plato?
I would not necessarily say "stealing" - but, from my original reasoning, we should not take credit for it either. Plato is Greek in origin and Greece deserves credit - for better or for worse - for such. It's all murky and I am but a lowly shitposter anyways.
>All pagan pantheons in the old world were related because they all came from a common source
I wholesale agreed with this previously, but I would like to make a qualification. Though there was plenty of pollination, I believe Frazer to make a compelling argument - that many traditions are inherent to human nature and will arise in parallel without pollination.