Ancient Roman Empire History Book Recommendations - Chronological Order

Booktube, today we're talking about the Roman Empire. Not the meme, not how often I think about it, which is obviously every day, several times a day, but we'll be talking about the Imperial Roman Period and the books that I used to educate myself about it in chronological order, mostly. Now, in the last video, I did this same thing with history book recommendations for the period of kings and mostly the Roman Republic, and we ended as Octavian was becoming Augustus, roughly 753 BC to 27 BC was covered there. Make sure to check that out. And as always, your support is very much appreciated. So if you're feeling generous, drop a like, smash the subscribe button. And if you like the content, I would really appreciate you doing both of those. So let's get to some qualifiers, get those out of the way, and we'll get into the books. First, this is not meant to be a you don't see highlighted here, go ahead and drop it at the end of this. This is merely what I used. Second, whereas in the first video, I had a pretty clean list that went neatly from one period to the next and mostly avoided significant overlaps, this will not be that. Just about all of these, if not all of these, will have some sort of overlap. And I'm also going to give multiple recommendations for some of the same periods, which I didn't do in the last video, but this will give you a variety of paths to the same end. Third, I'm going to be going past the fall of the Western Roman Empire, traditionally dated around 476 AD, all the way through the Byzantines and up to the Ottoman siege of Constantinople in 1453. That's just over 1400 years of history to cover, which is a tall task. And hopefully I'm able to give you a coherent and effective list to work through this complicated history that had many ups and downs and different phrases and frameworks to talk about it. So let's hope for that. Fourth, the ancient sources are a valuable resource. No one denies this, but this set of videos is aimed at beginner to intermediate history book readers, so I won't be including them in this list. But sure, read your Tacitus if you're up to it. Read that scamp, Seutonius, who is a personal favorite of mine because he's like the ancient version of TMZ. Live your dreams. I'm just setting those aside for this video. For the same reasons regarding accessibility, I'm setting aside Edward Gibbon too. Yes, if you're super into the subject, you should read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I did. I didn't love it. I don't agree with the thesis, but I'm just a dropout. What do I know? And to each his or her own, that was a lot of qualifiers. Let's start the show. Now, one of the last books I recommended on the history of the Roman Republic was Rubicon by Tom Holland. This spans 91 to 29 BC, which spells the end of the Roman Republic and the beginnings of the Roman Empire. If you ended up loving that as much as I did, stick with Holland and go with Dynasty, The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar. The Julio-Claudians were the first dynasty of this period, and it has five pretty prolific emperors that you may have heard of. You've got Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, who are all very famous for a variety of reasons. This dynasty lasts from 27 BC to 68 AD, and a lot happens in that span. First, you've got Augustus, who is consolidating his power and is considered by some as the greatest emperor Rome ever had. Tiberius is the grump who wanted nothing to do with politics, but was thrust into it anyway, and that caused a lot of speculation in the ancient sources about what type of nefarious stuff he might be up to on his island retreat at Capri. Caligula had a very short and turbulent reign. He was known for his floating pleasure barges, his erratic behavior, cruelty, and possibly even madness after a fever may have overcooked his brain a touch. Then you've got the stuttering, stammering, family fool, Claudius, who you may know from I, Claudius. He also may have been craftier than he was given credit for, who knows? And then, of course, Nero, who ascends to power at the tender age of 16, and to the shock of everyone, became the first emperor to act in public, which acting was a profession considered tremendously scandalous for an emperor to participate in. He also performed in chariot races and persecuted Christians. Dude had a lot of hobbies. These are all deeply fascinating characters, and with a writer like Holland and his keen eye for the story and sense of drama, this is an excellent read. Now, here's where the aforementioned overlap starts, because from here, you can pick up a couple things. From Mary Beard, you've got emperor Rome, and you've also got 12 Caesars. But these definitely lean more towards cultural history in a non-linear fashion. You talk about art in this. So something more fitting of the chronological framework here, you can go with Barry Strauss' 10 Caesars, which skips some less consequential emperors and takes you all the way through Constantine in 337 AD. Now, the first three emperors covered here are duplicates with Augustus, Tiberius, and Nero. But then you get Vespasian and his infamous urint text. I'm going to mispronounce the names, by the way. You get the underrated Trajan. You get Hadrian, who you may know from Hadrian's Wall in northern England. The Stoic Marcus Aurelius. You get the first African-born Roman emperor in Septimius Severus, another underrated fellow in Diocletian, and the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity, Constantine. Now, 10 Caesars will have some coverage on the crisis of the third century during the chapter on Diocletian's reign, which is the ninth of 10 emperors that he profiles here. But let's take a quick pit stop, because that was a pretty wild and wacky period, and recovering from that, to me, is what makes Diocletian so underappreciated. So for the book on this, we've got The Roman Empire in Crisis, 248-260, When the Gods Abandoned Rome, by Paul and Pearson. This period is also known as the Military Anarchy and the Imperial Crisis. Essentially, what happens here is the empire splinters into three entities. There are at least 26 claimants to the title of emperor. Most of them are Roman generals, because there's a lot of fighting and civil war going on. There's foreign invasions from the Goths and Persians. There's a massive plague that's wiping out 60% of the population in places like Alexandria. There's an economic situation caused by hyperinflation. The internal trade network is breaking down. There's dogs with the bodies of humans and humans with the bodies of dogs. That last part is debatable. It's bad is what I'm getting at. And this focuses on a key 12 years of that 50-year period. So it's not all-encompassing, but you get the vibe. And this ends with a humiliating capture of the Emperor Valerian by the Persians. That story picks up with How Rome Felt, Death of a Superpower, by Adrian Goldsworthy. If you've read Goldsworthy before, you know that he is a good man and thorough. And this takes you from the third century crisis to their relative recovery under Diocletian to the fracturing of the empire into western and eastern parts. This was initially done by Diocletian in 285 AD and it was fully realized in 395. Now you also throw in a dash of the civil wars of the Tetrarchy, Julian's Persian War, the Gothic War, the sack of the Romans by the Visigoths in 410, Rome's battles with Attila the Hun, and all the way to what's considered the fall of the western empire in 476. That's a lot to cover and make sense of. But as always, Goldsworthy does a great job boiling it all down and delivering a thorough yet accessible book. Now this is such a watershed moment that I want to include a couple different options here. A tremendous scholarly examination of this period is The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization by Brian Ward Perkins. This is an interesting and technical counter argument to the rising opinion among historians that Rome was less of a fall and more of a transformation. It also examines some of the reasons behind it all, of which there's like dozens with no one-size-fits-all answers that anybody will ever agree upon anyway. Now there is a fantastic combo from Peter Heather that allows for a natural transition to the Byzantines. You start with the fall of the Roman Empire, a new history of Rome, and the barbarians, and you transition to the restoration of Rome, barbarian popes, and imperial pretenders. So while historians usually differentiate between the Romans and Byzantines, the Byzantines considered themselves a continuation of the Roman Empire. In fact, the term Byzantines wasn't first used until the 16th century. So what you have is this combo of over 1,000 pages where the heavy focus really starts in the 4th century AD and takes you all the way to the reinvention of the papacy in the 11th century. Dialing in for a moment on the restoration of Rome, Heather talks about four groups or people who tried to keep the Roman legacy alive after Romulus Augustus was removed. The first is Theoderic, who was one of the most successful emperors in his efforts to preserve or revive the old Roman Empire. Justinian, often celebrated as one of the greatest Byzantine emperors by popular authors, saw himself as the rightful heir to the Roman tradition. The third figure, Charlemagne, tried to bring back the glory and power of the Roman Empire through his coronation as Holy Roman Emperor and the theoretical unification of the empire. Then you've got the Latin Church, who Heather argues achieved the revival of the Roman tradition, whether that be the symbolic or spiritual or otherwise. I read these back-to-back and I can definitely recommend that experience. All right, we made it to the final book. For this, I promised to talk about the Ottoman siege of Constantinople in 1453. That's what we're going to do with 1453. I hope you can see that. 1453, the Holy War for Constantinople and the clash of Islam and the West by Roger Crowley. On one side of this, you've got the severely declining Byzantines under Constantine XI. On the other side, you have the fast-emerging Ottomans under its 21-year-old Mehmet II. What you get is a vicious siege where battles take place on land, at sea, and in underground tunnels for 55 days, where the outnumbered defenders attempt to hold out against an overwhelming force that's also in possession of one of the largest cannons ever built, which had to be transported by 60 oxen and 200 men and could shoot a 1,200-pound cannonball a mile away. And this thing is just battering the formidable walls of Constantinople. Anyway, you can probably guess how this all ends, so I'll just say that I love this book. It's detailed without being dense. It tells some fascinating individual stories while making sense of the battle at large. It unpacks the competing religious motivations in play. There are twists and turns, hope and despair. It's got it all. So that's it. My very confused and garbled timeline for the Roman Empire in books. I hope I've given you some new books to slap on the TBR or even sparked your interest in one or all of these periods. I thank you for being here. Check out my Linktree and my bio for all the particulars on my Patreon, where I'm typically dropping some early release stuff on there. I just did an interview with John Gwynn that's on the Patreon right now, will be on YouTube here shortly. He's the author of the Bloodsworn series. And go to my Linktree to see all of my other efforts. But either way, I appreciate you. I'll see you on the next one. Thanks.