A review by annemieks
Antony and Cleopatra by Adrian Goldsworthy

informative slow-paced

2.5

The book is well-written, but a bit too elaborate for my taste. Goldsworthy clearly is very knowledgeable about Roman history. However, his three books dealing with the lives of Caesar, Augustus and Marcus Antonius have lots and lots of overlap. I read them in sequence and had to deal with loads of repetition because their lives cover only a relatively short period of history, and for some part they lived simultaneously, had a lot of dealings with each other. Maybe it would have been better for Goldsworthy to just write one book about this important period in Roman history, or make it into a trilogy, where one is not expected to repeat hole chunks of information. Now it made tedious reading and therefore the books on Augustus and Marcus Antonius get a far lower rating than the book on Julius Caesar.