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rhoelle's review against another edition
4.0
I have a couple other books in this series - Roman emperors and Chinese emperors - and have read the one on the popes. The Roman Republic is not a good fit for the format though because the two consuls changed annually. If the book had covered the topic that way it would have been awesome. Alas it doesn't, only hitting the highlights, so really, unless you know absolutely nothing about the Republic, you are better off getting a general history, such as by T.J. Cornell, or possibly starting with one of the well done novel series by Colleen McCullough or Steven Saylor.
One thing I have to applaud though is that the photos and illustrations, though mostly not in color, are profuse and well-explained. It's also nice to have an at least somewhat systematic march through the centuries.
A few problems:
- Sometimes information is sketchy or skimmed over. For example, the office of praetor pre-dated consul, but this isn't really explained.
- It repeats the old tale about Rome finding a wrecked Punic trireme and using it as the basis for making their own, but most historians today doubt this. Rome had plenty of exposure to triremes before this. There were many Greeks living within their empire, for example.
- It doesn't call attention to the time leaps it's making between chapters. You have to pay close attention to notice that actually not all these events are following immediately one after the other.
- Starts the second Punic war with Flaminius, jumping right over the start of the war and the Scipio brothers.
- Claims Liguria is in northeastern Italy, but it's northwestern.
- Repeats the old story that salt was sown into the earth at Carthage, which most historians doubt.
- Discusses how under Marius the pilum was weakened, but says the purpose was to make targeted shields useless. Actually, the purpose was to make the flung pila worthless (because they separated in the middle). This made them good to use on barbarians who thus did not have the ability to fling them back or the manufacturing skills to restore them to working order.
- The story of the civil war battle of Pharsalus is greatly ovesimplified. States that senators forced Pompey to attack Caesar, but in fact Pompey had allowed himself to be surounded and had little choice.
- Doesn't really understand Lucullus and what happened to him. Also places him in the wrong chapter. He was a decade older than Pompey, but appears in the chapter after him. Likewise, Cato the Younger should have come after Caesar rather than before. Cicero also appears too late.
- Discusses that Clodius changed the spelling of his name and later that he got himself adopted, but misses that the two were connected. The adoption led to the name change.
- Spells the name of the infamous Catilina as Catiline.
One thing I have to applaud though is that the photos and illustrations, though mostly not in color, are profuse and well-explained. It's also nice to have an at least somewhat systematic march through the centuries.
A few problems:
- Sometimes information is sketchy or skimmed over. For example, the office of praetor pre-dated consul, but this isn't really explained.
- It repeats the old tale about Rome finding a wrecked Punic trireme and using it as the basis for making their own, but most historians today doubt this. Rome had plenty of exposure to triremes before this. There were many Greeks living within their empire, for example.
- It doesn't call attention to the time leaps it's making between chapters. You have to pay close attention to notice that actually not all these events are following immediately one after the other.
- Starts the second Punic war with Flaminius, jumping right over the start of the war and the Scipio brothers.
- Claims Liguria is in northeastern Italy, but it's northwestern.
- Repeats the old story that salt was sown into the earth at Carthage, which most historians doubt.
- Discusses how under Marius the pilum was weakened, but says the purpose was to make targeted shields useless. Actually, the purpose was to make the flung pila worthless (because they separated in the middle). This made them good to use on barbarians who thus did not have the ability to fling them back or the manufacturing skills to restore them to working order.
- The story of the civil war battle of Pharsalus is greatly ovesimplified. States that senators forced Pompey to attack Caesar, but in fact Pompey had allowed himself to be surounded and had little choice.
- Doesn't really understand Lucullus and what happened to him. Also places him in the wrong chapter. He was a decade older than Pompey, but appears in the chapter after him. Likewise, Cato the Younger should have come after Caesar rather than before. Cicero also appears too late.
- Discusses that Clodius changed the spelling of his name and later that he got himself adopted, but misses that the two were connected. The adoption led to the name change.
- Spells the name of the infamous Catilina as Catiline.
julis's review
4.0
Pretty good! This took the form of a series of biographies about various important Romans between ~753 BCE and 27 BCE (it didn’t really get into the latter half of Augustus’s life). On the one hand, this let the reader get a good look at the men (always…yay ancient historians) and see each of them as a narrative whole. On the other, especially during the Second Punic War and again from 100 on, this meant either a) certain events came up several times or b) certain events didn’t come up at all, even though they were relevant.
Also Matyszak has a hateboner for Julius Caesar which is like, fine, not wrong, but man did he take it to weird places (the Gallic war was not the worst loss of life until 1492, what the fuck).
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