Review: "Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic"

Now that I’m retired, I’ve gotten back into reading about a book a week, which is impressive considering I now spend half my day trying to remember where I put my reading glasses (so I strategically placed half a dozen readers around the house). 

I’ll be posting reviews whenever I stumble across something interesting, though lately I seem to be drifting heavily into history and historical fiction. Apparently this is normal as someone once told me “When you get to a certain age, you either get into smoking meats or historical wars.” 

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I read Rubicon as a historical companion to Robert Harris’s historical fiction "Cicero" books" (Harris actually recommends Rubicon himself, along with a long list of other works in the appendix). Reading Rubicon I found Harris followed “real” history quite faithfully, adding flavor here and there, of course. (Tiro, Harris’s narrator, was a real historical figure, though very little is actually known about him.) In that sense, this book feels a bit like re-reading the Cicero series (which I highly recommend) in a more condensed, purely historical form.

I do wish Holland had gone into greater detail about the major battles as he tends to gloss over them, so I’ll need to pick up a separate military history book for that. He also delves quite a bit into the psychology of ancient Rome, which, while insightful, is inevitably speculative. I liken it to someone 2,000 years from now trying to reconstruct “American psychology” from a few surviving texts: probably close to the truth, but worth taking with a grain of salt. I found he focused a bit too much on this theme in both this book and the follow-up volume I am now reading, "Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar", which covers Augustus to Nero.

That said, none of this detracts from the overall experience. Holland makes history engaging and enjoyable, enough that I wish a series like this had existed back when I was first learning about Rome in high school.