The Rise of Rome

May 14, 2012
Unlike its decline and fall, Rome’s rise enjoys no literary tradition, but this fine history will satisfy curious readers. After dutifully recounting the founding legends, historian Everitt introduces the Republic. Born, according to tradition, in 509 B.C.E., after the overthrow of a monarchy, the Republic was an oligarchy ruled by elected consuls and a nonelected Senate. While violent conflicts occurred between the dominant patricians and plebeians (the Republic was designed “not to remove royal power but to tame it”), this was a surprisingly pragmatic system, less inclined to despotism and civil war than traditional monarchies. Soldiering was considered a privilege of citizenship. Almost continual wars led to the conquest of Italy and then most Mediterranean lands by 200 B.C.E. Reforms around 100 B.C.E. created a professional army, opening enlistment to the landless poor. This improved its fighting capacity, but shifted soldiers’ loyalty away from the Republic and toward their commanders, who took advantage, resulting in bloody civil wars led by such ambitious generals as Marius, Sulla, and finally Julius Caesar, whose victory in ended the republic. Sensibly avoiding parallels with today’s geopolitics, Everitt delivers an often unsettling account of a stubbornly belligerent nation-state that became the West’s first superpower. Photos, maps. Agent: Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson (U.K.).

June 1, 2012
Far less documented than its glory years, Rome's early period receives a capable account from historian Everitt (Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome, 2009, etc.). The legendary hero Aeneas led refugees from the sack of Troy to Italy around 1100 B.C. Another hero, Romulus, son of the war god, Mars, murdered his twin, Remus, and then founded Rome in 753 B.C. There followed seven more or less legendary kings with an implausible average reign of 35 years before the last, Tarquin, was expelled in 509 B.C. By the 5th-century B.C., the Roman Republic of history emerged, a belligerent warrior state where soldiers enjoyed such status that only property owners could enlist. The government was a senate, whose members served for life, and two consuls, elected yearly. Patricians dominated but could not ignore the unruly plebeians who elected powerful officials of their own. Unique among the ancients, no division existed between bureaucrats, generals and priests. A Roman leader combined all three. By the 3rd century B.C., Rome had become a Mediterranean power, defeating armies from Macedonia, Carthage, Greece and Gaul. Wealth poured into the city along with a burgeoning lower class, as vast estates, worked by slaves, took over the countryside. Fighting overseas required a standing army, and the decline of small farms meant that, by 100 B.C., soldiers came from the landless poor. Unlike citizen-soldiers, these warriors owed allegiance only to their generals, who used them to fight vicious internecine wars whose ultimate victor, Octavian Caesar, became Emperor Augustus, ending the moribund Republic. An engrossing history of a relentlessly pugnacious city's 500-year rise to empire.

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March 1, 2012

British historian Everitt chronicles the rise of Rome from a sleepy market town in the eighth century BCE to the world's greatest empire, smartly assuring strength and stability by offering citizenship to defeated peoples. Will folks be eager to read classical history? Well, the film Gladiator and the HBO series Rome were hits, and Everitt's biographies Cicero, Augustus, and Hadrian together have sold more than 300,000 copies.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 1, 2012
Having previously tackled the monumental Roman personages Cicero, Augustus, and Hadrian, here Everitt traces, with lucid, pithy prose, Rome's rise from a tiny settlement on the banks of the Tiber River to the conquerors of the entirety of the Mediterranean basin. With a brisk narrative ranging from mythological founders Aeneas and Romulus and Remus to the civil war between Sulla and Marius, Everitt takes readers on a remarkable journey into the creation of the great civilization's political institutions, cultural traditions, and social hierarchy. Even Rome's greatest enemies, Everitt claims, were astounded by its resiliency in the face of overwhelming odds and dynamic leadership that produced a culture of invincibility, a powerful will to victory, and a bloody-minded refusal to accept defeat. Everitt draws heavily upon the contemporary accounts by Livy, Polibius, and Plutarch as he recounts Celtic invasions, the struggle between patricians and plebeians, the existential rivalry with Carthage, and the internal death throes of the all-powerful republic. Although a host of more scholarly, in-depth treatments exist for the multiplicity of individual topics covered, general readers would be hard-pressed to find a more comprehensive, engaging work that will captivate and inform from beginning to end.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)