Book Review: Legible Religion
/How do you manage to have religion without scripture? As a fascinating new book demonstrates, inn this as in so many other seemingly impossible paradoxes, the ancient Romans found a way.
Read MoreKeeping Up With the Romans - Hits and Myths
/Two thousand years ago, the Roman historian Suetonius wrote about the lives and loves of the founding rulers of the Roman Empire. Historian Tom Holland takes up the familiar story in his new book Dynasty.
Read MoreBook Review: Lady of the Eternal City
/Sabina, the wife of the enigmatic Roman emperor Hadrian, is beset by enemies in Rome - and safeguards a secret they'd all kill to know ...
Read MoreBook Review: Raiders of the Nile
/In Alexandria as a young man, Gordianus the Finder gets caught up in an elaborate scheme to steal the corpse of Alexander the Great!
Read MoreBook Review: The Twelve Caesars
/The ancient Roman historian Suetonius wrote such a rollicking, gossipy book about the first twelve emperors that historians have been re-writing his book ever since
Read MoreBook Review: Horace and Me
/A columnist for the Financial Times looks at what the Roman poet Horace has meant to him over the years
Read MoreNew in Paperback: Rome and Rhetoric
/The rhetoric of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar might inflame you, it might make you mad - but does Garry Wills o'ershoot himself in his analysis of it all?
Read MoreBook Review: A Jew Among Romans
/A new - and forgiving? - look at the ancient Jewish historian whose very name has been hated for two thousand years.
Read MoreBook Review: Master and God
/An ambitious historical novel about the dark days of the emperor Domitian by the popular mystery author Lindsey Davis.
Read MoreNow in Paperback: Hadrian
/A lavishly illustrated biography of the Roman emperor Hadrian - now in bookstores in paperback - takes readers inside the world of an empire (and its ruler) undergoing one long identity crisis
Read MoreSupping with Glaucus: A Tour of Roman Historical Fiction
/Steve Donoghue takes the emperor’s box to thumbs-up or thumbs-down an array of Roman historical novels, as “A Year with the Romans” continues.
Read MoreKeeping Up with the Romans: The Phenomenon of Her
/She's one of the most famous names in history, and the only figure in antiquity to rival Julius Caesar's renown--but what do we really know about Cleopatra? Stacy Schiff's biography takes us behind the legend.
Read MoreKeeping Up with the Romans: The Senator Investigates
/He toadied to a succession of emperors and trembled at the mere thought of being mugged -- on the surface, it looks odd to cast Pliny the Younger as a detective. A new mystery novel takes that chance.
Read MoreKeeping Up with the Romans: The Better Part of Me
/When he was banished for life from Rome, Ovid was trying to alter his artistic forms with his Metamorphoses. Trace the transformations in Steve Donoghue’s final “Year with the Romans”
Read MoreHorace in the Afternoon
/He was everybody’s friend, and his poetry breathes with life even today. He was Horace, and “A Year with the Romans” makes his acquaintance.
Read MoreVerissimus
/Statesmen, philosophers, and serial killers turn to the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, but what was the emperor himself like? Frank McLynn’s Marcus Aurelius tells, and in this month’s “A Year with the Romans,” Steve Donoghue assesses.
Read MoreAlexander the Grating
/The only surviving full-length biography of Alexander the Great was written by a Roman. Steve Donoghue looks at Quintus Curtius Rufus as “A Year with the Romans” continues.
Read MoreMiss Hamilton Disposes
/No one had ever written about love - in its infinite and profane variety - the way the Roman poet Catullus did; its explication by a scholarly schoolmistress might seem paradoxical - but Edith Hamilton knew something about love herself.
Read MoreUncle Livy
/Steve Donoghue’s “Year with the Romans” turns its eye upon Titus Livius, who either wrote poetical history or historical poetry, depending on who you ask.
Read MoreGuide: The Aeneid of Vergil
/Virgil’s Aeneid has been attracting translators for centuries, and Sarah Ruden’s rendering is notable in more ways than one. (She calls him Vergil, for one thing, but that’s just the start.) Steve Donoghue regards her efforts in the latest “A Year with the Romans.”
Read More
