Kategoria BISAC: History >> Ancient - Rome

Like Guy Fawkes in early 17th-century Britain, L. Sergius Catilina was a threat to the constitution imposed on Rome by Sulla in the mid-1st century BC. His aim at first was to reach the consulship, the summit of power at Rome, by conventional means, but he lacked the money and support to win his way to the top, unlike two contemporaries of greater means and talent: the orator Cicero and the military man Pompey the Great.

Defeated for the third time, Catiline took to revolution with a substantial following: destitute farmers, impoverished landowners, discontented Italians and debtors...

Ancient Rome was an imposing city even by modern standards, a sprawling imperial metropolis of more than a million inhabitants, a "mixture of luxury and filth, liberty and exploitation, civic pride and murderous civil war" that served as the seat of power for an empire that spanned from Spain to Syria. Yet how did all this emerge from what was once an insignificant village in central Italy? In S.P.Q.R., world-renowned classicist Mary Beard narrates the unprecedented rise of a civilization that even two thousand years later still shapes many of our most fundamental assumptions...

• Offers a broad survey of the Punic Wars from a variety of perspectives
• Features contributions from an outstanding cast of international scholars with unrivalled expertise
• Includes chapters on military and naval techniques, strategies, logistics, and Hannibal as a charismatic general and leader
• Gives balanced coverage of both Carthage and Rome

Leisured Resistance examines the varied ways in which cultured Roman aristocrats, of very different periods, used their country estates as a political and literary tool. While for some the villas were retreats in which to compose literature and to escape from politics, others adapted this same tradition of cultured otium (or deliberate retirement from everyday politics) to present radical and competing visions of society and literature alike.
Examining in-depth sources from both prose and verse from the time of Cicero to the last centuries of the Roman Empire in the west, the...