Rubicon - Triumph Tragedy Roman Republic - Tom Holland

Read by Steven Crossley | 13 cds | 15.7 hrs | unabridged |
Clipper Audio | 2005
42 mp3


0101 _ Clipper Audio _ Rubicon, Last Years of the Roman Republic _ Tom Holland
0102 _ Preface _ 49 BC _ Narrated by Steven Crossley
0103 _ Preface _ The Die is Cast
0108 _ Ch 01 _ The Paradoxical Republic _ Ancestral Voices
0115 _ Ch 01 _ The Paradoxical Republic _ The Capital of the World
0201 _ Ch 01 _ The Paradoxical Republic _ Blood in the Labyrinth
0207 _ Ch More...

This historical period is so fascinating that writing a History that reads like a novel doesn't sound like a big deal. But where many provide dry accounts, Holland excels with his sterling prose. Even if you already know the story, this book will give you new insights and a fast paced account of the Roman Republic that is always fun to read.

The narrative is structured in a zoom in/out fashion. The author quickly covers in the first part of the book from the beginnings of the republic until the More...

I am a big fan of Roman history & have really enjoyed television shows such as HBO's Rome & STARZ's Spartacus and historical fiction by Simon Scarrow and Conn Iggudlen. For years I've had a collection of Roman history books such as Livy, Plutarch, Suetonius, Polybius, etc. I've had a difficult time really getting into the works by older historians because I find their prose & narratives long winded & difficult to read.
Rubicon being the first contemporary scholar's work I read on More...

I recently finished reading Rubicon by Tom Holland, which tells the historical tale of the Roman Republic from it's inception until its ultimate demolition at the hands of Augustus, when the Republic was formally and forever transmuted into the Roman Empire. A rich and highly engrossing read, it primarily focuses on the Republic after the rise of the great generals who, through foreign conquest, and the unprecedented wealth and prestige it bestowed upon them, became such formidable power brokers More...

It is a shame of my education that I did not learn more thoroughly about the classic battles of Pompey the Great, Julius Caesar, and Crassus, let alone the decline and fall of the Roman Republic. I can’t say if it’s a product of the fact that America’s education system no longer focuses on the classics or whether it’s because I just missed it, but I the final days of Rome’s Republic should be mandatory reading for all Americans, since it shares so many similarities to ours.

In that vein, Tom Holl More...

I first wanted to read this book after listening to the Hardcore History podcast series on the fall of the Roman republic. The host, Dan Carlin, recommended Rubicon for a more in-depth treatment of the subject matter, even though the podcast came in at around six hours.

Carlin was right, Rubicon treated the topic exhaustively, but the narrative flow was superb. At times it was like reading a political soap opera. The characters were amazingly well-rounded. No one came off as a total villain or sa More...

Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic is a well-written fact-filled narrative interpretation of the end of the Roman Republic. Interpretation? Of course - all history books are the author's interpretation. Holland has his biases, but it does not distract from the power of the book. With the exception of a slow bit in the middle, this is an entertaining read and worthy to sit on the shelf next to other histories of Rome.

I wholeheartedly recommend this one for enthusiasts (his spin on thi More...

For dramatic events and titanic personalities, how many centuries can compete with the hundred years from the Gracchi to the settlement of Octavian? It would be hard to write a dull book that features figures like Caesar and Pompey, Antony and Cleopatra, Marius and Sulla, and Octavian and Cicero, and Holland has, in fact, written a very lively and compelling one. This is narrative history aimed at a general audience -- there's little by way of rigorous argumentation or careful analysis -- althou More...

On August 3th I finished reading for the second time Tom Holland's book 'Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic'. I wanted to find out why Julius Caesar (100 - 44 BC) crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC. The river Rubicon marked the boundary between the Roman province of Cisalpine Gaul to the north and Italy proper to the south. Any Roman general was by law of the Roman Republic (509 - 44 BC) obliged to disband his army before crossing the Rubicon. Otherwise both he and his men were guilty of hi More...

Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic

I picked up this book on a recommendation from Goodreads.com from a list of “best history books”. Since I’ve never read much about Rome before, and the book had a cool title (Rubicon it turns out is the name of a river) I decided to check it out.

The one thing I’ve learned about great history books is that they have superb writers. (I'm talking about history books that look like slightly oversized hardcover novels, not those terribly written t More...

Holland's book is one of the best on the topic. It is both very well researched (and his use of quotes from classical sources is exceptionally helpful) and very readable to a general audience. What makes his book unique is that it is not a biography of individuals but the story of the republican system, its people, and its descent into collapse. As he says in his introduction, it is a story about citizens in Rome and what they lost politically in the last century BC/BCE.

Much of Holland's narrati More...

Rubicon is Holland's account of the collapse of the Roman Republic. I enjoyed Persian Fire so I was interested to read his work on Rome. I was bored with this one pretty quickly, but decided to stick with it for 100 pages because many reviewers seem to enjoy it.

I can see why some like the book. It tells the story of some of the most important characters of the classical world. Many reviewers write that the last third of the book is the most exciting, but I couldn't get through the first few hund More...

When you go into a book with almost three pages full of rapturous praise for it filling the opening pages, you tend to get high hopes for a book.

What I found was a book that seems very much aimed more at people with an in-depth level of historical knowledge rather than someone looking to learn about the intrinsics of the history.

There is no glossary included in the book so you're expected to automatically memorise multiple assorted specific Latin terms for all manner of things, mentioned just on More...

I know this books wasn't really meant to be read by someone with a classics background, but would it have killed Holland to write a popularized history with a bit more recent historical research in it? I will commend him - and nearly give him a 3 for - presenting the republican romans as the superstitious and religiously conscious lot they were, but that is pretty much (ok, and the raunchy details they would have left out) where this book diverges from something that could have been written in t More...

The Good : Holland has an impressive understanding of Ancient Rome and the institutions of the Republic. What's more, this understanding was apparently acquired under the influence of a passionate enthusiasm for all things related to the Mistress of the Mediterranean; and this, combined with his novelist's skills and grasp of language, allows him to whip through the centuries without ever getting hung-up upon minutiae or buried beneath the weight of the various personalities who boldly and energ More...

This is narrative history at its best. Hollend excels at portraying the people and events of the late Roman Republic like none other. This is page-turning history, people. Not only are the events and people alone fascinating. In a few generations you have people like the populari Marias, the dicator Sulla, Pompey the Great (aka 'Teenage Butcher'), Clodius, Cataline, Cicero, Cato, Caesar, Marc Antony, etc. You also have a time that was wrought with corruption and violence as competing egos fought More...

I'm no historian, so I just have to assume that Tom Holland did his research and knows what he was talking about. I felt that this book was great at giving me a sense of how Roman culture worked. Instead of feeling like these were people "just like me", I felt like Tom Holland presented Roman culture as it would've been: with very different values and identities than we would recognize today. It keeps the characters involved, however, thoroughly human. I found it fascinating.

The book was a bit d More...

Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic (2003) by Tom Holland is a non-fiction book covering the events in Rome of the first century B.C., and is a wonderful introduction to the fall of the Republic. If you don’t normally read non-fiction, don’t let the fact that it is put you off. It is a fantastically written book--the prose keeps the complex narrative moving while always injecting bits of wit or personal accounts from ancient sources. This is no dry history book—it reads more like a nov More...

The era of the fall of the Roman Republic has not had the press that the fall of the empire has received - at least not in recent centuries. Holland's volume is a very good introduction to that fascinating historical period. The narrative advances at a good pace, the characters are sharply drawn, and complicated events and currents are clearly explicated. Some readers have complained that Holland omits critical parts of the story and invents other parts. But Holland anticipated these criticisms More...

Rubicon treads familiar ground as a narrative history of the last six decades of the Roman Republic. The title is slightly misleading in its focus on Julius Caesar, whose story begins only halfway through. Here, Holland is at his strongest providing insights into the civil war that irrevocably destroyed Rome's republic with solid analysis tinged with modern political science jargon. His writing is fluid, perhaps because he filches from the classics without telling his reader. The final passage d More...

Interesting history but somewhat overly dramatic and revisionistic, in my opinion. Reads at times more like a Harold Robbins novel. It makes me sad when people write books that do nothing but disparage every single thing of which they are writing about. It became tedious toward the end. For a better picture of the "scandalous" goings on in Rome at around that time, I would suggest Suetonious instead. Further, while I am no great Cicero fan I hardly think the portrayal of him in this book as bein More...

I like reading fiction about this time period in Roman history, particularly mysteries, so reading Tom Holland's Rubicon was sort of like having friends over for dinner, and then having someone describe the dinner party after watching it through the window - another perspective on people who are essentially a blank slate. Holland himself writes right off the bat that "one day perhaps, when the records of the twentieth century AD have grown as fragmentary as those of Rome, a history of the second More...

I crossed the Rubicon with this book, hoping it would be a glorious history of Rome and its last days as a Republic, before the Empire began. It is a decent retelling of basic history but really nothing too stalwart. Given the cast of characters and the swirling battles from the days of Tarquin to Caesar, there should be an elevation of prose and heightened enlightenment, but it reads as a thesis from a college student. The book is meant to be popular history for those who don't know Romulus and More...

I'm not a classicist by any stretch, so I really can't give any scholarly judgment on Tom Holland's account of the "The Triumph and the Tragedy of the Roman Republic" (as my copy is subtitle - presumably "The Last Years of the Roman Republic" is the US publisher's subtitle?). I can, however, say it was a great read, with potentially dry classical history moulded into a vibrant piece of narrative writing.

If you ever thought contemporary politicians and people in power were meretricious, mendacio More...

Rubicon is a riveting recounting of the last years of the Roman republic from about 100BC to 14AD. Tom Holland does an exceptional job of bringing history to life and turning what could be a dry accounting of history into a compelling page turner. Its the kind of book you finish almost with remorse as the characters you've come to know love and hate like Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Cato,
Brutus, Caesar and many others will no longer populate your days. I recommend it to anyone who has always wanted t More...

A solid account of the fall of the Roman Republic, RUBICON recounts a tragedy in a literal, Shakespearean sense: the collapse of republican institutions was was Rome's own doing. In the end, the Republic's self-immolation was the product of inflexible political institutions that proved unable to adapt neither to new-found empire nor to the ambitions that such an empire fostered in men.

The ancient Romans were never a people who had any clear sense of "non-zero sumness" -- broad-based economic gro More...

An excellent popular history read. This is the first book I'd read by Tom Holland, and I also knew very little about Ancient Rome. The book is about the Roman Republic, mostly the last 50 years of the Roman Republic, 100BC to 50BC (roughly). It reads somewhat like a novel - it's certainly a page turner. The author, as he indicates at the beginning, makes hardly any mention of sources etc in the main text - these are mainly endnotes and the occasional footnotes - which aids the narrative flow. It More...

This book has a great hook in the first paragraph - a general standing at the Rubicon, about to cross. Then you have to wait until the end of the book and all else is history leading up to that point. It is hard to follow because Holland jumps around from period to period rather than a straight chronology, so it would help to know this history before reading the book, but he has a dry wit and not many historians will express their humor. Beware, it is very bloody. Gosh, I like a slaughter now an More...

Rubicon is an entertaining narrative history of the breakdown of the Roman Republic, from Sulla, Marius, and the Gracchi down to Caesar, Mark Antony, and Octavian. It's skillfully written, witty, and highly readable, with excellent narrative drive and characterization which make it as easy to read as a novel.

Holland is sometimes careful to specify where he's speculating due to lack of evidence, sometimes not, and he uses quotations from sources like Suetonius without making it clear that Sueton More...

Rubicon is a very enjoyable narrative history covering the last 400 years of the Roman republic. The story moves along at a good pace and kept me engaged. I read it last month while traveling to and from Utah for my son's wedding. Generally speaking I wouldn't undertake a historical or political text under those conditions as I'd have to start and stop at perhaps inconvenient times in the narrative. Not so with this, it was easy to pick up and become engaged without having to reread to pick up d More...