Where I Like the Author but Didn't Enjoy the Book. Don't Rat Me Out

Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic by Tom Holland
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I didn't love it.

I can't speak to the scholarship. Tom Holland (still not Spider-man) seems to know a great deal on the topic. He says a lot of smart things. I just didn't like reading this very much. (And I have enjoyed other books by this author in the past, like Persian Fire.) I found it a slog. Still, I made myself finish, a few pages a day, over a long stretch. And here we are.

The story here is narrowly focused on the fortunes of individual politicians (a cast of thousands, actually, most of them with names starting with C, like Crassus, Catulus, Cethegus, Caesar, Cato, Catiline, Cicero, Clodia, Clodius, Curio, Caelius, Cinna, and others--and though I can't blame the author for this, it really was poor planning by History) and who's up today, who's down, who's making an alliance, who's double-crossing an ally, and so on. It may be real life, but as far as the the story goes, it reads like summary of a soap opera. I mean that in the "I can't follow this story" kind of way. The "I can't remember who Clodia was" kind of way. (As well as the "Weren't they enemies?" kind of way.)

For me to understand the story better, I needed to see a bigger picture, get more of a bird's-eye view of events and less of a nose-against-the-TV view. However, as always, YMMV.

And yet, despite all that, despite my bad attitude, I still learned a lot about Rome and its people and society. In fact, in terms of knowledge about Rome, I'm probably a lot closer now to where I should have been before I attempted the book.

I suspect those with greater background knowledge will enjoy reading this more than I did.

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