Beware the Ides of March: Books on the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire

Dan Carlin, host of the Hardcore History podcast, calls The Storm Before The Storm, “massively entertaining and relevant to our own time” and “masterfully told” that explores “huge personalities like Marius and Sulla” and the “war, politics, money, power, corruptions and class warfare” of ancient times.

Clifford Ando of the Times Literary Supplement (UK), praises Beard’s writing: “By the end of this thrilling book we are no nearer to looking the emperor in the eye. But we are much closer to understanding what he was for. Leaning into all the wild stories rather than disregarding them […] Beard does a wonderful job of taking us into the maelstrom of fantasy, desire and projection that swirled around the rulers of ancient Rome.”

Hailed by critics as animating “the grand sweep and the intimate details that bring the distant past vividly to life” (Economist) in a way that “makes your hair stand on end” (Christian Science Monitor), this history is a highly readable classic for our time.

Isabel Allende calls Memoirs of Hadrian an “extraordinary” work of “historical fiction” where “the reader never feels the obstacle of the research, the research is a part of the narrative, is a part of life.”

Thomas E. Ricks, author of Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, and a military correspondent for The Washington Post, calls Are We Rome? “[a] lovely book” that “may be the most important thing written about the U.S. government in many years.”

Harvard Professor Leo Damrosch calls Gibbon’s work “a unifying, insight-inspiring perspective to the past,” and a masterful, renowned history that is even the basis for a Harvard class Professor Damrosch teaches.