The Reading Plan Revisited

So the first leg of my plan to read through history from the time of Julius Caesar to the present has been completed with the reading of Tom Holland's excellent, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic. Holland paints deftly with broad but tantalizing brush-strokes. You get the sense that there is much, much more to know, but Holland never allows the narrative to bog down in mere details. It's a thrilling read, but it also leaves you wondering about many things, as if you have only scratched the surface of a very fascinating time and place.

Rubicon ends with the rise of Julius Caesar's grand-nephew, Octavius, who would become better known to history as Augustus Caesar. The next book in my reading plan, therefore, is Edward Everitt's Augustus: The Life of Rome's First Emperor.

The plan, in case you didn't know, is to read through history one generation at a time, reading mostly biographies, but also the occasional historical novel or the account of a momentous event (a great battle or natural disaster). For example, I already know that after Augustus I will be reading at least one or two books that keep me in the Augustan era before moving on (it's just too fascinating). I'll read about the spread of Christianity during that period in Wayne Meeks' The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul, and to satisfy my love of military history, Peter S. Wells' The Battle that Stopped Rome.

After that, perhaps a life of Paul, the eruption of Vesuvius (in 79 AD), and a book about daily life in the first century (if such a book exists!). I find that the two best ways to discover books for this series is to browse the library shelves (where you'll find many older, out-of-print books) and to pay attention to Amazon's "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" function. In any case, I'll be lodged deeply in the first century for a while. Wish me luck!