The Persian Expedition
10 best books like The Persian Expedition (Xenophon): The Agricola and The Germania, History of the Peloponnesian War, The Twelve Caesars, The Annals of Imperial Rome, The Campaigns of Alexander, The Rise of the Roman Empire, The Sixteen Satires, The History of Rome, Books 21-30: The War with Hannibal, The Civil War, The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives (Agesilaus, Pelopidas, Dion, Timoleon, Demosthenes, Phocion, Alexander, Demetrius, Pyrrhus)
| Author | Tacitus |
| ISBN | 0140442413 |
The Agricola is both a portrait of Julius Agricola - the most famous governor of Roman Britain and Tacitus' well-loved and respected father-in-law - and the first detailed account of Britain that has come down to us. It offers fascinating descriptions of the geography, climate and peoples of the country,...
History of the Peloponnesian War
| Author | Thucydides |
| ISBN | 0140440399 |
Written four hundred years before the birth of Christ, this detailed contemporary account of the long life-and-death struggle between Athens and Sparta stands an excellent chance of fulfilling its author's ambitious claim. Thucydides himself (c.460-400 BC) was an Athenian and achieved the rank...
| Author | Suetonius |
| ISBN | 0140449213 |
As private secretary to the Emperor Hadrian, Suetonius gained access to the imperial archives and used them (along with eye-witness accounts) to produce one of the most colorful biographical works in history. The Twelve Caesars chronicles the public careers and private lives of the men who wielded...
The Annals of Imperial Rome
In "The Annals of Imperial Rome", his last and greatest work, Tacitus (AD c.55-c.117) covers the period from AD 14, just before the death of Augustus, to the death of Nero in AD 68. Not all the passages have survived, but in those that have the depth and diversity of genius are manifest. From a vicious, vituperative...
| Author | Arrian |
| ISBN | 0140442537 |
'His passion was for glory only, and in that he was insatiable'Although written over four hundred years after Alexander’s death, Arrian’s Campaigns of Alexander is the most reliable account of the man and his achievements we have. Arrian’s own experience as a military commander gave him unique...
| Author | Polybius |
| ISBN | 0140443622 |
Polybius, himself a Greek and an active contemporary participant in political relations with Rome, wrote the forty books of his Universal History primarily to chronicle and account for the Roman conquest of Greece between 200 and 167 B.C. He saw that Mediterranean history, under Rome's influence,...
| Author | Juvenal |
| ISBN | 0140447040 |
Perhaps more than any other writer, Juvenal (c. AD 55-138) captures the splendour, the squalor, and the sheer energy of everyday Roman life. In The Sixteen Satires he evokes a fascinating world of whores, fortune-tellers, boozy politicians, slick lawyers, shameless sycophants, ageing flirts and...
It is Livy (59 BC-AD 17) who re-creates for us in vivid detail the terrible events of the Second Punic War, down to the Battle of Zama (202 BC). It is Livy who shows us the immense armies of Hannibal, elephants and all, crossing the Alps (still regarded as a near-miraculous feat by historians), the panic...
| Author | Gaius Julius Caesar |
| ISBN | 0140441875 |
A military leader of legendary genius, Caesar was also a great writer, recording the events of his life with incomparable immediacy and power. The Civil War is a tense and gripping depiction of his struggle with Pompey over the leadership of Republican Rome - a conflict that spanned the entire Roman...
| Author | Plutarch |
| ISBN | 0140442863 |
Spengler once wrote that Mozart would cease to be heard not when his music was no longer played, but when its meaning was no longer understood. Something of this fate is also shared by Plutarch in an age where the study of history remains distorted by positivist ideology (see some other reviews on this...
| Author | Donald Kagan |
| ISBN | 0142004375 |
For three decades in the fifth century B.C. the ancient world was torn apart by a conflict that was as dramatic, divisive, and destructive as the world wars of the twentieth century: the Peloponnesian War. Donald Kagan, one of the world’s most respected classical, political, and military historians,...
| Author | Tacitus |
| ISBN | 0140441506 |
In AD 68, Nero's suicide marked the end of the first dynasty of imperial Rome. The following year was one of drama and danger, with four emperors—Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Vespasian—emerging in succession. Based on authoritative sources, The Histories vividly recounts the details of the "long...
| Author | Plutarch |
| ISBN | 0375756779 |
Plutarch's Lives, written at the beginning of the second century A.D., is a brilliant social history of the ancient world by one of the greatest biographers and moralists of all time. In what is by far his most famous and influential work, Plutarch reveals the character and personality of his subjects...
