I liked this book a lot! It's a really engaging narrative history. I hated my world and American history classes in high school because in those classes it was "history = a litany of wars." We'd jump from one war to another, looking at the important generals/politicians, the big battles, the important maneuvers within those battles, and the changing weaponry. If we did get any peek at any wider culture, it was solely in the context of how those occasional cultural threads either caused or resulted from a war. I hated that so much and felt I didn't know anything at all about the actual lives of people in the past.

This book does not do that. It certainly doesn't ignore wars. In this context, doing that would be flat nonsensical. But in this book, the wars and important battles were treated as just one aspect (if a very dramatic one) of Roman culture and the social and political conflicts that arose at this time. Most of the focus of this book was on the nature of Roman culture and its expectations for its citizens and how those things influenced (and were occasionally influenced by) the important figures in these last years of the republic. A lot of the book covers the several decades leading up to the actual collapse of the republic, covering events and important figures who set the stage for the conditions that caused the actual collapse of the republic.

A very enjoyable and well researched book!

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