I'm about halfway through First Man of Rome (hard to tell on a Kindle, mind you) and I'm wondering how historically accurate it is.
It's a good few years since I read Robin Lane Fox's excellent book The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian and I've forgotten a lot.
I might also need recommendations for a good factual book on that time period - possibly from 200BC to AD100 or something like that. Any suggestions?
covering the period. She is a professor of history at Cambridge so the book should also be available in the UK.
I agree with the above comments. The books on Marius and Sulla were the best. I haven't read beyond the fifth book, Caesar.
If you want more history books, Tom Holland's book are good, quick reads on the subject. Meant for the popular audience, which means he is not some dry academic who thinks his book should read only to other dry academics. He wrote Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic and more recently Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar.
The second century BCE is a hard period to write about honestly since the documentation is not as good as it is for the lst century BCE.
And lastly, a more general history of the era, The Birth of Classical Europe: A History from Troy to Augustine is another good place to focus on the chapters on Rome. Chapters 6 and 7 are what you would want.
