boycotteverything
09-28-2009, 07:57 PM
It's great to finally see an interest in history here. So I'll contribute to the thread a couple of free resources in my own favorite study: Roman History.
The very best Roman historians were Tacitus and Suetonius to my mind. They lived an wrote in roughly the same time period and close to the period of their subject (1st and early 2nd century AD.) Both were blessed with the talent and style to make Roman times come alive. Both historians were essentially moralists in their outlook and each used the emperors as points of departure. Much of their lasting appeal has to do with elaborate detail of the decadence of the ruling class. But there is more here than that. In Tacitus, by his reporting of Senate speeches, allows an insight into the political conditions of the times. And in Suetonius we find description of the social condition under which the both the Patrician and Plebeian classes lived. While taken together they represent just a small part of surviving contemporaneous Roman History they are a great place to begin the study. For an overview of the period of the first 12 emperors written in modern times I'd suggest Robert Graves' "I, Claudious." Have fun!
Here is Tacitus: http://classics.mit.edu/Tacitus/annals.1.i.html and
here is Suetonius: http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Suetonius/12Caesars/home.html
The very best Roman historians were Tacitus and Suetonius to my mind. They lived an wrote in roughly the same time period and close to the period of their subject (1st and early 2nd century AD.) Both were blessed with the talent and style to make Roman times come alive. Both historians were essentially moralists in their outlook and each used the emperors as points of departure. Much of their lasting appeal has to do with elaborate detail of the decadence of the ruling class. But there is more here than that. In Tacitus, by his reporting of Senate speeches, allows an insight into the political conditions of the times. And in Suetonius we find description of the social condition under which the both the Patrician and Plebeian classes lived. While taken together they represent just a small part of surviving contemporaneous Roman History they are a great place to begin the study. For an overview of the period of the first 12 emperors written in modern times I'd suggest Robert Graves' "I, Claudious." Have fun!
Here is Tacitus: http://classics.mit.edu/Tacitus/annals.1.i.html and
here is Suetonius: http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Suetonius/12Caesars/home.html