Shortest History of Ancient Rome

Ross King is the author of The Shortest History of Italy and The Shortest History of Ancient Rome, along with many bestselling books on Italian art and history, including Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling and Brunelleschi’s Dome. He lectures widely on Renaissance art at museums, is a regular participant in Italian Renaissance seminars at the Aspen Institute such as at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Frick Collection, and the National Gallery.

• The City on the Hills: The Origins of Rome“The Favor of Heaven”: The Rise of the Roman Republic“Men of Violence”: Decline of the Roman RepublicPax Romana: The Age of AugustusThe “Bad Emperors”: Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius“Let the Earth Be Consumed by Fire”: The Age of Nero“Savage Victors”: The Height of Empire“Revere the Gods, Save Mankind”: The Age of the AntoninesThe Empire in Crisis“There Will Never Be an End to the Power of Rome”

"King achieves an uncommonly dense work of compression, telescoping events and fashioning brief character studies in surveying the arc of ancient Rome . . . from the mythic folktale of Romulus and Remus to the fall of empire. Literary tradition tells one story, archaeology another. We get the emperors and chroniclers, generals and legions, builders and artists, stabilizers and insurrectionists, the mad and the bad responsible for rise and ruin—all written with a historian’s attention to detail and the fluid storytelling of a novelist. His is also a fascinating etymological tour of modern words derived from Latin. . . . Brisk but immersive."