Is there a chart or reading order for getting the full story of the rise and fall of Rome and everything in between? I'd prefer ancient texts like picrel, but I'd be open to more modern texts.
>>24960014Also interested. I was planning to read Mommsen this year, I think that might be what you're looking for.
That depends on why you want to study it. If it is for pure interest in history itself, start with Mommsen. But if you care about references and allusions in literature, start with Livy. Polybius is considered one of the most objective historians of antiquity and his stuff analyzes Rome's government which is what he credits with their rise. Tacitus is the best historian for the transformation of the Republic into an empire, and Sustonious is a must when it comes to the age of Caesars. Plutarch's Lives are half Roman and therein are both mythical men and biographies which are a crucial source to historians. And as for the decline, Gibbon is the most literary but of course he is very opinionated. He collates a lot of primary sources though and follows the thread of Rome through to the Byzantines which I personally like
>>24960147Suetonius*
The ancient sources are fragmentary and incredibly granular, like way too granular. Even someone who has studied Roman history for years as a hobby would find it very daunting to read all of extant Livy, it'd be like a 1-2yr project. He would have to take meticulous notes to remember anything, since it's written more like an encyclopedic soap opera for contemporary Romans, who of course already knew all the events and people being talked about, so they could just dip in and enjoy Livy's narrativization of this famous thing they already half-remember from their patriotic education.Tacitus is shorter obviously, but basically the same problem. It's a difficult read. It's not written for future readers, it's written for contemporaries who know all the people, places, and events as points of reference like the backs of their hands. This doesn't make it impossible to read these as your intro to Rome. That's how it used to be done before the 20th century, when elite education meant learning Latin at 4 years old via beatings and reading and rereading the major texts for years. That and memorizing huge chunks of classical Latin by rote because the theory was that it improved your own skill at composition. Modern surveys are useful because they give you structures that will allow you to appreciate the granular detail without drowning in it. However, modern surveys have the opposite problem of assuming the retard is a retard who is afraid of detail, or only wants to think in "big themes," so you have to pick good ones.
>>24960153I would recommend Garrett Fagan's TTC lectures on Roman history (audio or video, easily pirated), and I'd recommend reading a survey history of Rome for pre-1945 European schoolboys who wanted to get the major structures and "important bits." Mommsen is a bit too much at this stage in my opinion. Mommsen is assuming you ALREADY have this "major structures + important highlights" overview of Rome from your own primary education. He's not writing a survey. To find a good survey of the Republican period that isn't Mary Beard pontificating at you about how elegant Roman doorknobs were, you basically have to ignore the last century. Go back to old school British "so you want to pass your exams and not disgrace the family? here's a 400 page book trimmed down to everything you absolutely need to know, but with no handholding beyond that" severity. Either Heitland's Short History of the Roman Republic or even Adrian Goldsmith's. Are you going to know the cutting edge archaeological research? No, but you're going to know who the Decemviri were when you read about them in Livy later, and you're going to be able to understand and appreciate Syme's Roman Revolution when you read it. And you'll even be able to enjoy Niebuhr and Mommsen at this point. If you want to dive even deeper, read Cornell's Beginnings of Rome and Forsyth's Critical History of Early Rome. For the Principate, I similarly recommend Bury's History of the Roman Empire from its Foundation to the Death of Marcus Aurelius. It's just as good as his History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great. He also has ones on the later Roman empire. This should prepare you to read Gibbon and actually enjoy it. Then read Ostrogorsky on Byzantium.
>>24960153NTA but I am reading Livy and taking notes on my e-reader which is a lot easier because they are indexed so when I'm doing a review it pulls up all my highlights in their contexts with my notes underneath
>>24960160Definitely nothing wrong with that, if you can make sense of Livy then you should definitely keep at it. I find Livy difficult to read even though I love him. I started rereading books 1-5 recently and I felt the immediate discouragement of "who the fuck is this guy again?" "what is the occasion of this speech again?" "what war even is this again?" My advice is really only for newbies, so they don't hit this wall and then assume "If I don't understand all this, I must not 'know Roman history'." No, Roman history for centuries has come pre-packaged in key anecdotes, figures, structures, and events that "everybody just seems to know." And it's because they read stuff like Goldsmith and Heitland, not because they dug through Livy and the Big Things You Gotta Know just magically stood out like Jesus' words being in red text in certain bibles. But if you enjoy it you enjoy it. Personally my key to enjoying Tacitus was reading Robert Graves' I, Claudius and Claudius the God first, because the figures all started to seem like real people. But Suetonius you can just jump right into. Plutarch's Lives I would say are harder to get into if you have NO idea who these people are. For a long time I've had this idea of putting together a pdf study guide version of the later books of Herodotus (on the Ionian and Persian wars), Thucydides, and Xenophon's continuation of Thucydides that is very subtly/mildly color-coded and annotated, so that The Big Things You Gotta Know are "lit up," so you know when to perk up and pay close attention, and then the twisty-turny back-and-forth of feints and counterfeints that nobody but one dead specialist ever knew inside and out are "lit down" slightly so you know "okay, I'm not expected to remember this guy." So for example Brasidas is highlighted, because it's Brasidas, and Pericles' Funeral Oration and the aftermath of the Sicilian Expedition are lit up like a Christmas tree to indicate "This is one of those things people will think you're retarded for not remembering well if you read Thucydides."The same could be done for Livy, Tacitus, etc. I'd also want to include structural chronologies and timelines so that, e.g., the Peloponnesian War the war doesn't seem so daunting, because newbie readers could instantly get the visual in their head of "okay, there are x big phases of the war I need to know, and y big events." Old classical education assumed you had soaked in this stuff since birth, and modern scholarship is built on the work of people who were (like Niebuhr/Mommsen) AND the work of people who were soaked in the work of Niebuhr/Mommsen, so the modern neophyte generally doesn't even know where to start. I want to synthesize the best of each of these eras: classical education's intuitive structure --> modern scholarship's best nuancing (like Syme's Roman Revolution) --> ability to appreciate granular primary sources (like Plutarch's Alcibiades). Apologies for this unsolicited autistic rant.
>>24960403This helps a lot in understanding how to approach reading this stuff.
>>24960014The Routledge ancient world series is pretty good. Especially for the 2-4th centuries>>24960157>To find a good survey of the Republican period that isn't Mary Beard pontificating at you about how elegant Roman doorknobs were, you basically have to ignore the last century.This is absolutely not true. Just about any narrative or survey made in the past 80 years will serve your purpose. Mary Beard enjoys what you'd probably regard as time wasting and irrelevant. Early 20th and 19th century historians are just as bad, or even worse.
>>24960728Early 20th century historians still believed that students could learn more of pre-218BC Roman history than a 20 page summary of "there were some wars" + Etruscan pottery pictures. Anything since 1960 is either Beard-style pop social history, Boatwright's watered down and voiceless shit that feels like a high school biology textbook, committee-designed bloated crap that errs on the side of picturesque social history because again it's afraid of "overburdening" learners with detail, or overly interpretative crap like Harriet Flower that newbies can't understand without having the basics down first. Even Michael Grant compresses 500-218BC into 50 pages. People want to know who Camillus was, and people are mature enough to know that the Struggle of the Orders is a later literary fiction dimly reflecting social realities. They don't need some bloodless social-democratic 15-page narrative with 5 pointless glossy pictures interspersed about how "modern scholarship tells us that it probably wasn't so simple as poor plebs vs. rich patricians."
>>24960157>Forsyth's Critical History of Early Rome.This is a good post with good advice. I just want to comment that Forsythe is drier than dust and the most boring book I have ever read on Rome, and this is coming from an anon who vicariously enjoyed Syme. The infomation is interesting but the way it is presented is so dreary and lifeless it made the read a chore which is a shame because he made excellent points. Made me long for the flair of Gibbon.
>>24960780>Early 20th century historians still believed that students could learn more of pre-218BC Roman history than a 20 page summary of "there were some wars" + Etruscan pottery pictures. Anything since 1960 is either Beard-style pop social history,>Even Michael Grant compresses 500-218BC into 50 pages. >They don't need some bloodless social-democratic 15-page narrative with 5 pointless glossy pictures interspersed about how "modern scholarship tells us that it probably wasn't so simple as poor plebs vs. rich patricians."Have you ever actually read anything that is not shitty pop history for people who have never heard of Rome before? Your criticisms do not apply to any work not made for lobotomites. Literally all you have to do is pick up an actual history book to remove everything you are complaining about. Good early 20th century historians are not writing for you, they were writing for each other in articles, they explicitly did not write for an audience and they did not want it. The works aimed to a general audience by people from that period are poorly written, meandering and provide less value than just reading the primary sources themselves.
>>24960812We're talking about introductory histories for beginners. The question of whether newbies should just read thousands of pages of Livy cold, or read Brunt's Social Conflicts in the Roman Republic cold, was already discussed. The entire discussion is about whether you should read Mary Beard or something older to get your basic introduction to Roman history. A book neatly summarizing modern scholarly consensus on 10,000 pages of primary sources in 300 pages so you can go access those primary sources intelligently is not "meandering." However, "Just about any narrative or survey made in the past 80 years" is likely to have the defects I described in my last post.
>>24960824>A book neatly summarizing modern scholarly consensus on 10,000 pages of primary sources in 300 pages so you can go access those primary sources intelligently is not "meandering."Other surveys also do this and do it far better. There is a real issue with 20th century and early 19th century historians in that they waste your time and enjoy doing so in favour of trying to make pretty prose where it is not needed. >The entire discussion is about whether you should read Mary Beard or something older to get your basic introduction to Roman history. You can just not read either of them and read a competent work that doesn't waste your time. There are more choices than pop history and pop history for people a century ago.>is likely to have the defects I described in my last post.Except they don't. You've made up an issue which doesn't exist.
>>24960835Maybe instead of obsessively trying to demonstrate your insider knowledge of esoteric PRIMARY SOURCES and MONOGRAPHS and ARTICLES (wow!!), acquired during your four year degree at your second choice school half a decade ago, you should demonstrate an ability to read the thread before posting. Everything you are trying to pick a fight over is covered in previous posts or in the OP itself. Looking forward to you greentexting half of this post in snippets and saying "nuh uh" to them.
>>24960843So you're just mad that I am not willing to engage in a debate I never participated in? I am arguing about something else and for some reason you want to turn it into an argument about choosing between two types of histories which I think are inferior to any competently written piece of work?>Maybe instead of obsessively trying to demonstrate your insider knowledge of esoteric PRIMARY SOURCES and MONOGRAPHS and ARTICLES (wow!!)At least try to criticise what I am actually saying instead of just making up shit to be mad at.
>>24960857I'm not mad, I just don't know how to respond to surgical greentext strikes from a guy who is arguing against positions no one ever held. That's why I suggested you read the thread. I do not know what your position is. When I read each new post of yours all I think is "how does this apply to what is being talked about though."
>>24960861>I'm not madThen why are you making up things about me to get mad about?>I just don't know how to respond to surgical greentext strikes from a guy who is arguing against positions no one ever held.Are you now just pretending like you didn't complain about post 1960 works being bad for a variety of (made up) reasons? Also if you have issues with greentexts, maybe you should lurk more?>I do not know what your position isThen reread my posts. Here it is if you really can't understand what I have clearly laid out in every post. Both Mary Beard and early 20th century historians wrote bad histories which do not competently cover Roman history compared to non-pop history surveys.
Saint Augustine's De Civitate Dei is all you need. Written by a Roman who nonetheless had true, higher insight, he provides a comprehensive diagnosis of Rome's history and failures. He shows how it was never a true Commonwealth, and preemptively refutes Gibbon's nonsense about Christianity causing the decline of what was always an unstable and ultimately flawed and broken Pagan system built of violence and sin.This is all you need. It looks back on Rome from within its history, at the end of its history, and renders a firm accounting.
>>24960824I'd recommend Discorsi by Machiavelli
What do you think of Appian? He has not been mentioned in this thread so far.
>>24960885>don't read this book, read thisi think i will read gibbon, thank you
>>24960014The best way is to pick any overview of Roman history, preferably from before 1980 and read it. Then read the primary sources at your leisure while using commentaries and more specialized works. The one caveat is that you can't truly understand Roman history without knowing Latin and Greek.
>>24960014Florus' Epitome of Roman History
>>24960014I like Plutarch’s Lives
>>24961609>you can't truly understand Roman history without knowing Latin and Greek.This is not true, and I do read Latin and Greek.
>>24962063NTA, but I'm inclined to say yes depending on what one really means by "truly" and if you want to extend this to Graeco-Roman civilisation as a whole. It's not even (at least for me, since I'm a Latin beginner myself) some academic gatekeeping thing. I can read Caesar, Livy, Dionysus and Plutarch in translation all day, but do I really understand the soul of what it really meant to be Roman without speaking their language?
>>24960014LivyTacitusCaesarSuetoniusGibbon
I find Gibbons incessant talk about the laziness and oriental sloth of certain races of people. It's like reading purply roman prose written by a chud.
Mary beard' spqr is fine for a lay person. I don't know why she riles up contrarian autists here. I appreciate that she doesn't provide another narrative account and spqr is mostly about why do we know what we know and how we should be critical of the sources with fun archeological tangents here and there. You get to know what you're getting yourself into and how you should approach the subject matter. I mean that's the best you can get in the pop history section. After that you have to dig into academic stuff based on your particulate interest like A critical history of early Rome, New men in the Roman senate, War and Imperialism in Republican Rome, From the Gracchi to Nero, A Companion to the City of Rome, Social Factors in the Latinization of the Roman West, The Alternative Augustan Age etc
Read Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome for late republican politics if you're okay with fiction that straddles the line between fiction and non-fiction. The attention to detail is insane and it can get as dry as non-fiction.
>>24960014If you straight jump into livy you will lose interest in rome altogether. Start with the secondary sources.
>>24960014This book is pretty monotonous, although there are interesting parts. Not recommended if you’re just starting to get into rome.
>>24960014Mommsen and Gibbon
>>24960014Early Rome & Punic Wars - Livy (some Plutarch in here as well)Fall of the Republic to start of the Principate = PlutarchReign of Augustus = Cassius DioTiberius to Vespasian = TacitusVespasian to Commodus = JB BuryCommodus to the Fall = GibbonByzantium = JB Bury+ Mommsen, Florus
>>24963092What? Livy is easy and fun.
*rolls eyes*Another thread where anons assume that OP is a lobotomised child and MUST read a survey history/secondary source before diving into the primary sources. Not everyone is a retard like you guys; it's not hard to look up words/phrases in a dictionary, or even better nowadays, ask AI to explain definitions for you.
>>24964309>or even better nowadays, ask AI to explain definitions for you.This is the ultimate game changer when it comes to studying these ancient texts. AI is really good at explaining things to you that you otherwise would have had to look up in a dictionary or secondary text before. I find that if you tell it which translation you're reading, it's also quite good at pointing out nuances/points of contention regarding the way that a specific passage was translated.Reading primary sources has never been easier. I'm jealous of zoomers and how easy their undergrad studying must be.
>>24964309If you're a beginner how would you know how to even be critical of primary sources when you have no fucking context for anything
>>24964634By reading a shitton of them
>>24964634>t. zoomer tard who just reads and doesn't studyIt's not hard, champ. As you read, when you come across something you're not sure about, you look it up. The internet and now AI make this extremely easy.
The fuck are you talking about, Livy is a straightforward narrative with light digression, yeah there’s a lot names but if it’s not your first time engaging with an ancient primary text it’s a breeze to read. Bluds acting like it’s the I Ching or Finnegan Wake. An easier read than Herodotus, Thucydides, and anything out of premodern china.
>>24960403I heard Adrian Goldsworthy to be decent for a secondary source. Opinions?
>>24960403Thank you this actually helps.I've read the bigger Greek historians (herodotus, thucydides, xenophon) and they made sense for the most part as I was aware of the general timeline of Greek events and also read a more modern history beforehand. Also read a bunch of the myths for them and homer and hesiod before tackling the historical works Did the same with the helenistic period and alexander. Its helped some (shame there isnt more ancient stuff on the period).For Rome though I just jumped straight to livy assuming I could follow along sense i had the general concept of it going from kingdom to republic to empire. Got overwhelmed and forced my way through 1-10 and while I got some stuff out of it, i can't pretend that I got as much as when I was reading Greek histories I want to work my way through Rome but its been a slog
>>24964966Livy is probably the worst source to go into. Compared to just about every other source he is rather obtuse. Plutarch, Polybius, just about any other historian for the period(s) are clearer. Livy is an annalist before a historian, unless you already have a sort of grasp on the figures that appear you're going to be left in the dust.
>>24960014Ya gotta plute your arches, bbaaayyyy
>>24964309>lmao just get a robot to hallucinate for you, you don't need to read an introductory text written for people in exactly your position, that's just stupid
>>24963092>>24963223you're so wrong, mate.
>>24960014nope
>>24960157>Garrett Fagan's TTC lectures on Roman history (audio or video, easily piratedQuite literally impossible to find the video
>>24964778It's not about unknown terms.
>>24966311Nevermind, after spending 3 hours looking through every torrent website possible I found it on bilibili of all places. I love the Chinese
>>24960014I look like that
>>24966328>cap-wringing lowlies
>>24960014Check out "Summoned to the Roman Courts: Famous Trials from Antiquity" by Detlef Liebs. He presents several Roman legal cases throughout Rome's history, and it is quite interesting.
