Real Roman History

Works Cited Primary Sources Cassius Dio.  Roman History , Books 55–56. The narrative backbone for the decade. Ovid.  Tristia  and  Epistulae ex Ponto . The exile poetry, especially Tristia 2. Res Gestae Divi Augusti . The thirty-five-section self-account, read at the funeral and inscribed on the Mausoleum tablets and at Ancyra. Suetonius.  Life of Augustus , chapters 22–25, 65, 97–101. The death s...

Works Cited Primary Sources Cassius Dio.  Roman History , Books 54–55. The narrative backbone for this episode. Dio covers Agrippa's death in the closing sections of Book 54, and the main subsequent events in Book 55. He is working two centuries after the events from sources he does not name. Cenotaphia Pisana  (CIL XI 1420–1421). The inscribed decrees from the town of Pisa voting public mourn...

Works Cited Primary Sources Acta Ludorum Saecularium  (CIL VI 32323). The inscribed contemporary record of the Secular Games, recovered in 1890 from the banks of the Tiber. Cassius Dio.  Roman History , Book 54. The narrative spine for 23 to 17 BCE, including the moral legislation and the equestrian reaction in the Forum. Donatus.  Life of Virgil . The Octavia scene and the account of Virgil's...

Sources and Historiography This episode has been drafted primarily from Suetonius's Life of Augustus. Suetonius was writing in the early second century CE, a century after Augustus's death, with access to the imperial archives as Hadrian's private secretary. Almost all the physical description, the working habits, the superstitions, and the details of the household come from his Life....

Works Cited Primary Sources Augustus.  Res Gestae Divi Augusti  (“The Deeds of the Divine Augustus”). Augustus's own first-person summary of his career and achievements, inscribed on bronze tablets and posted throughout the empire. The religious restoration is mostly in chapters 8, 10, 12, 13, 20, and 21—the temple restorations, the Janus closures, the Ara Pacis, the assumption of the Pontifex...

Works Cited Primary Sources Cassius Dio.  Roman History , Books 50–51. The fullest ancient narrative of Actium; read with awareness of the Augustan shadow. Horace.  Odes  1.37 (the Cleopatra ode). The most complex poetic response to the battle and its aftermath. Plutarch.  Life of Antony , chapters 60–86. The essential account of the final years, Actium, and the deaths. Suetonius.  Life of Augustu...

Works Cited Primary Sources Appian.  Civil Wars , Books 4–5 (c. 150 CE). The fullest surviving narrative of the period 49–31 BCE. Essential for the Sextus Pompey campaign, the confrontation with Lepidus at Messana (5.122–126), and the political narrative of the Triumvirate. Drew on sources now lost, probably including Asinius Pollio. Cassius Dio.  Roman History , Books 48–51 (c. 230 CE). Continuou...

Sources and Historiography The source situation for this period is both rich and layered, and the layers matter. Appian wrote his Civil Wars, which is the primary systematic narrative for this episode, in the mid-second century CE, roughly a hundred and fifty years after the events. His account is built from earlier sources, most of which are now lost, and it carries the usual cautions about tempo...

Works Cited Primary Sources Appian.  Civil Wars , Book 2. The systematic political account; useful for the sequence of events in the dictatorship period and the aftermath. Cassius Dio.  Roman History , Books 43–44. The most detailed account of the political sequence in 45–44 BCE; useful for the tribune incidents and the accumulation of honours. Cicero.  Letters to Atticus , Books 14–15. Real-time...

Works Cited Primary Sources Appian.  Civil Wars , Book 2. The systematic political narrative; useful for the civil war period and the conspiracy. Cicero.  Letters to Atticus  and  Letters to Brutus . The most intimate documentary record of Brutus's intellectual world and his relationship with Cicero. Plutarch. “Life of Brutus.” The essential text; one of Plutarch's most carefully construct...

Works Cited Primary Sources Anonymous.  Bellum Africum  (African War). Account of the African campaign from the landing to Thapsus; the primary source for the terrain, the months of manoeuvre, and the battle itself. Anonymous.  Bellum Alexandrinum  (Alexandrian War). Covers the aftermath of the Egyptian war and the Zela campaign; the primary source for Pharnaces and the battle of Zela. Anonymous. ...

Works Cited Primary Sources Appian.  Civil Wars , Book II. Continuous narrative of the civil war; a useful supplement to Caesar's own account. Anonymous.  Bellum Alexandrinum  (Alexandrian War). Continuation of Caesar's Civil War, possibly by Aulus Hirtius; the primary source for the Egyptian campaign. Caesar.  Bellum Civile  (Civil War), Books I–III. Caesar's own account of the civil...

Works Cited Primary Sources Appian.  Civil Wars , Book 2. The most systematic political account of the breakdown; especially useful for the negotiations of 50 BCE. Caesar.  Commentarii de Bello Civili . Caesar's own account, written in the third person with characteristic lucidity and propagandistic purpose. Books 1–2 cover the Rubicon through the Spanish campaign. Essential, and must be read...

Sources and Historiography Caesar's Commentarii are the primary source for the entire Gallic War, and the contrast between how he treats Avaricum—flatly, without evident discomfort—and how he treats Gergovia—honestly, acknowledging the defeat—is itself historiographically interesting. The honesty about Gergovia suggests that the Commentarii, while propagandistic, were not simply fabricated, si...

Sources and Historiography The primary source for the Gallic Wars is the Commentarii de Bello Gallico itself: seven books by Caesar covering 58 to 52 BCE, with an eighth book written by his officer Aulus Hirtius covering 51 to 50 BCE. The Commentarii are extraordinary both as a military document and as a political text. Caesar writes in the third person—“Caesar did this,” “Caesar ordered that”—whi...

Sources and Historiography Caesar is the most thoroughly documented figure of the late Republic, and the documentation presents a specific problem: much of it is his own. The Commentarii de Bello Gallico and the Commentarii de Bello Civili are primary sources of the first importance and are also deliberate works of political self-presentation, written by a man who understood propaganda as well as...

Sources and Historiography The primary source for Cato's life is Plutarch's Life of Cato the Younger, which is among the most carefully constructed Lives in the collection. Plutarch pairs him with Phocion, the Athenian statesman and general who was also a man of inflexible principle eventually executed by the city he had served. The pairing is exact in the way Plutarch's best pairings...

Sources and Historiography Cicero is the most extensively documented figure of the ancient world after Augustus. The primary source challenge is not scarcity but selection: the sheer volume of the surviving corpus means that a podcast episode can only gesture at what is available. Plutarch's Life of Cicero, paired with Demosthenes, is the narrative backbone and is notably more sympathetic to C...

Sources and Historiography The primary source for Pompey's life is Plutarch's Life of Pompey, paired with Agesilaus of Sparta. For the period covered in this episode, the Life is at its most careful and most literary: the grain-price scene, the description of the triumph, the Cornelia passages, and above all the death sequence are among the most carefully constructed passages in the Parall...

Sources and Historiography The primary source for Pompey's life is Plutarch's Life of Pompey, which forms one of the Parallel Lives paired with Agesilaus of Sparta. Plutarch is sympathetic to Pompey—he presents him as a man of genuine virtues undone by the impossible political circumstances of the late Republic—and the biography is rich in specific detail, anecdote, and dialogue. For the p...

Sources and Historiography Plutarch's Life of Lucullus is the primary source, paired in the Parallel Lives with Cimon of Athens. It is one of Plutarch's more structurally interesting Lives because the two-part arc—military and political in the first half, luxurious retirement in the second—is explicit in Plutarch's own framing. He uses the ancient comedy analogy directly. The Life is n...

Sources and Historiography Plutarch's Life of Crassus is the primary narrative source and the most detailed account of the battle. Plutarch's account has been criticized for placing too much blame on Crassus personally—a tradition the academic literature calls the “anti-Crassus propaganda” tradition, examined at length in a 2017 article in Acta Antiqua. The argument is that Roman writers f...

Sources and Historiography Plutarch's Life of Crassus is the primary source and it is, as the arc plan noted, as much a study in the psychology of ambition as a political biography. Plutarch structures the Life around the single vice of avarice—establishing it early, tracing its operation through every episode, and returning to it at Carrhae as the explanation for the catastrophe. This makes t...

Sources and Historiography No contemporary account of the Servile War survives. The two main sources—Plutarch's Life of Crassus and Appian's Civil Wars—were both written more than a century after the events, drawing on earlier works now lost: Sallust's Histories, which covered the war, and Livy's History of Rome, surviving only in summary form for this period. Florus adds detail on...

Sources and Historiography Plutarch's Life of Sertorius is the primary source, but it is itself a secondary source: Plutarch drew principally on Sallust's Histories, which covered the Sertorian War in substantial detail and which survive only in fragments. This transmission chain matters. What we have is Plutarch reading Sallust, and Sallust was a partisan of Caesar and an admirer of Serto...