skopia
Gibbon follows Rome from its imperial peak to the fall of Constantinople thirteen centuries later, in the finest prose English history possesses. His contempt for Christianity still makes readers laugh.
Tacitus promises to write without anger or partiality, then follows Rome from Augustus through Tiberius, Claudius, and Nero, ruining each of them in half a sentence. Power has never had a colder witness.
Livy tells Rome's story from the wolf and the twins onward, pausing on the people whose conduct he believes made the city. These are the legends Europe retold for two thousand years.
Stammering, limping, and dismissed as an idiot, Claudius survives the Roman imperial family as it murders its way through Augustus, Tiberius, and Caligula, then sets down the secret history of what he watched.
Justinian's official historian kept a second book he could not publish: the emperor a demon pacing the palace at night without a head, the empress insatiable. Nothing from antiquity carries this much hatred.
Beard covers a thousand years of Rome, opening on Catiline's conspiracy and closing the day Caracalla made every free inhabitant a citizen, and she cares as much about slaves as emperors.
The Roman Republic destroyed itself, and Tom Holland tells it at the pace of a thriller. Caesar reaches the Rubicon with a single legion, knowing crossing it means war against his own state.