Caligula: A Biography
10 best books like Caligula: A Biography (Aloys Winterling): Alexander the Great, Daughters of Isis: Women of Ancient Egypt, Caesars' Wives: The Women Who Shaped the History of Rome, Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero, The Last Pagan: Julian the Apostate and the Death of the Ancient World, The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy, In Bed with the Tudors: the Sex Lives of a Dynasty from Elizabeth of York to Elizabeth I, Henry VIII: The Mask of Royalty, Lives of the Caesars, Volume I: Julius/Augustus/Tiberius/Gaius Caligula, Chronicle of the Roman Republic: The Rulers of Ancient Rome from Romulus to Augustus
| Author | Robin Lane Fox |
| ISBN | 0141020768 |
From award-winning historian Robin Lane Fox, Alexander the Great searches through the mass of conflicting evidence and legend to focus on Alexander as a man of his own time.
Tough, resolute, fearless, Alexander was a born warrior and ruler of passionate ambition who understood the intense...
Daughters of Isis: Women of Ancient Egypt
| Author | Joyce A. Tyldesley |
| ISBN | 0140175962 |
In ancient Egypt women enjoyed a legal, social and sexual independence unrivalled by their Greek or Roman sisters, or in fact by most women until the late nineteenth century. They could own and trade in property, work outside the home, marry foreigners and live alone without the protection of a male...
| Author | Annelise Freisenbruch |
| ISBN | 1416583033 |
In scandals and power struggles obscured by time and legend, the wives, mistresses, mothers, sisters, and daughters of the Caesars have been popularly characterized as heartless murderers, shameless adulteresses, and conniving politicians in the high dramas of the Roman court. Yet little has...
| Author | James Romm |
| ISBN | 0307596877 |
From acclaimed classical historian, author of Ghost on the Throne (“Gripping . . . the narrative verve of a born writer and the erudition of a scholar” —Daniel Mendelsohn) and editor of The Landmark Arrian:The Campaign of Alexander (“Thrilling” —The New York Times Book Review), a ...
| Author | Adrian Murdoch |
| ISBN | 0750932953 |
Since his death on a Persian battlefield in A.D. 363, the violent end of the Emperor Julian has become synonymous with the death of paganism. But how did a young philosopher-warrior, who ruled for only eighteen months, come to be seen as one of the most potent threats to Christianity?
Driven...
| Author | Adrienne Mayor |
| ISBN | 0691126836 |
Machiavelli praised his military genius. European royalty sought out his secret elixir against poison. His life inspired Mozart's first opera, while for centuries poets and playwrights recited bloody, romantic tales of his victories, defeats, intrigues, concubines, and mysterious death....
| Author | Amy Licence |
| ISBN | 1445606933 |
Illegitimate children, adulterous queens, impotent kings, and a whole dynasty resting on their shoulders. Sex and childbirth were quite literally a matter of life or death for the Tudors - Elizabeth of York died in childbirth, two of Henry VIII's queens were beheaded for infidelity, and Elizabeth...
Henry VIII: The Mask of Royalty
| Author | Lacey Baldwin Smith |
| ISBN | 0897330560 |
This was not really a biography but more of a study of Henry VIII.A study that mostly succeeds in showing who Henry was behind all the glamour and majesty that was kingship in the Tudor era.Henry was a king,some say a monster but ultimately he was just a man caught up in the power and drama that became his life...
| Author | Suetonius |
| ISBN | 0674995708 |
Suetonius (C. Suetonius Tranquillus, born ca. 70 CE), son of a military tribune, was at first an advocate and a teacher of rhetoric, but later became the emperor Hadrian's private secretary, 119-121. He dedicated to C. Septicius Clarus, prefect of the praetorian guard, his "Lives of the Caesars."...
| Author | Philip Matyszak |
| ISBN | 0500051216 |
The Roman Republic was one of the most civilized societies in the ancient world, ruled by elected officials whose power was checked by a constitution so well crafted that it inspired the founding fathers of the United States of America. Here Philip Matyszak describes fifty-seven of the foremost Romans...
| Author | Michael Grant |
| ISBN | 0785818286 |
I am not "currently reading" this. I read it a long time ago and want to reread.
I have read so many books on Cleopatra and this is one of the best. (Though "I Cleopatra" still ranks as my favorite"). I love the vivid descriptions of Egypt. I have read so many books on Cleopatra that after awhile some...
Caligula: The Corruption of Power
| Author | Anthony A. Barrett |
| ISBN | 0300074298 |
Was the Roman emperor Caligula really the depraved despot of popular legend? In this book -- the first major reassessment of Caligula's life and career in over fifty. years -- Anthony A. Barrett draws on archaeological, numismatic, and literary evidence to evaluate this infamous figure in the context...
| Author | Richard Miles |
| ISBN | 0670022667 |
An epic history of a doomed civilization and a lost empire.
The devastating struggle to the death between the Carthaginians and the Romans was one of the defining dramas of the ancient world. In an epic series of land and sea battles, both sides came close to victory before the Carthaginians...
| Author | Richard A. Gabriel |
| ISBN | 1597972053 |
The world often misunderstands its greatest men while neglecting others entirely. Scipio Africanus, surely the greatest general that Rome produced, suffered both these fates. Today scholars celebrate the importance of Hannibal, even though Scipio defeated the legendary general in the Second...
| Author | Christopher Scarre |
| ISBN | 0500050775 |
Those naughty, naughty Roman emperors. They may have been a handful and then some, but they certainly make for interesting reading. While some were downright scary, a few were more Benny Hill-ish, which was scary by itself.
While you don't need to start with
Chronicle of the Roman Republic:...
In 312 A.D., Constantine-one of four Roman emperors ruling a divided empire-marched on Rome to establish his control. On the eve of the battle, a cross appeared to him in the sky with an exhortation, "By this sign conquer." Inscribing the cross on the shields of his soldiers, Constantine drove his rivals...
| Author | Edward Champlin |
| ISBN | 0674011929 |
The Roman emperor Nero is remembered by history as the vain and immoral monster who fiddled while Rome burned. Edward Champlin reinterprets Nero's enormities on their own terms, as the self-conscious performances of an imperial actor with a formidable grasp of Roman history and mythology and a canny...
The Joy of Sexus: Lust, Love, and Longing in the Ancient World
In her previous books, Vicki León put readers in the sandals of now obsolete laborers, ranging from funeral clowns to armpit pluckers, and untangled the twisted threads of superstition and science in antiquity. Now, in this book of astonishing true tales of love and sex in long-ago Greece, Rome, and...
Oh My Gods: A Modern Retelling of Greek and Roman Myths
| Author | Philip Freeman |
| ISBN | 1451609981 |
From acclaimed writer and scholar Philip Freeman, a contemporary retelling of classic Greek and Roman mythology.
The Greek and Roman myths have never died out; in fact they are as relevant today as ever in their sharp observations about human nature. For thousands of years they have inspired...
| Author | Samuel Noah Kramer |
| ISBN | 0226452387 |
The Sumerians, the pragmatic and gifted people who preceded the Semites in the land first known as Sumer and later as Babylonia, created what was probably the first high civilization in the history of man, spanning the fifth to the second millenniums B.C. This book is an unparalleled compendium of what...
| Author | Stephen Dando-Collins |
| ISBN | 0306818906 |
On the night of 7/19/64, a fire began beneath the stands of Rome's great stadium, the Circus Maximus. For more than a week the fire spread, engulfing most of the city, nearly burning it to the ground. With its capital in ruins, Rome's powerful empire teetered on the edge of collapse as Nero struggled desperately...
| Author | Robert Knapp |
| ISBN | 0674061993 |
What survives from the Roman Empire is largely the words and lives of the rich and powerful: emperors, philosophers, senators. Yet the privilege and decadence often associated with the Roman elite was underpinned by the toils and tribulations of the common citizens. Here, the eminent historian Robert...
