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607 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 19, 2015
SPQR: "The Senate and People of Rome"
For the earliest history of Rome and when it was expanding in the fourth century BCE from small village to major player in the Italian peninsula, there are no accounts written by contemporary Romans at all. The story has to be a bold work of reconstruction, which must squeeze individual pieces of evidence - a single fragment of pottery, or a few letters inscribed on stone - as hard as it can. Only three centuries later the problem is quite the reverse: how to make sense of the masses of competing contemporary evidence that may threaten to swamp any clear narrative.