Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire (2006)

For reasons I will never quite understand, my school insists that the English department teach one quarter of history. I do have some freedom to choose my era. I’ve covered all this before, and have for the past three years been teaching the Wars of the Roses. As rewarding as that may be on some level, I don’t want to be doing the same thing over and over again, so I’m looking to switch to Ancient Rome for next year. That means I need a new book to teach out of. There are a lot of books on Rome, but how many cover the entire history of the Empire without being over 400 pages long?

So, I thought I’d start with Simon Baker’s Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire.

Actually, this one is a bit of an oddity. The book wasn’t written just as a book so much as a counterpart to a BBC multi-part documentary. I actually found the documentary on Britbox and watched the first episode. It…seemed weird. Like, it relied more on actors recreating history and kept voiceover narration to a minimum. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a docu-series like that before, and I’m not sure how much I liked it. Consequently, I probably won’t be going any further, and that’s going beyond the fact the episodes were not listed in chronological order, starting with Nero and then going back to Caesar for Episode Two.

But this review is about the book, so how was that? Truth be told, it was fine. I didn’t know a lot about Rome, and even learned a few things I didn’t know, like how Nero not only didn’t do the time period equivalent of fiddling while Rome burned, his reaction was actually the exact opposite where he tried to save the city as soon as he realized it was on fire, leading to some massive building projects designed in part to minimize a second such fire.

But the problem with a book like this is that there is a lot of history to cover in a short space. Early chapters on the pre-Empire days, the lives of Caesar, Augustus, and Nero are much livelier and detailed than later ones. Heck, the last one on the Fall only covers on incident that happened well before the Western Empire actually finally collapsed. I’m glad I got a nice primer on the basics of Roman society, but I don’t think this book will work for my purposes.

Grade: B-