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A review by iozziar
Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World by Mary Beard
4.0
Seeing the reviews for this book shocked me quite a bit, as the majority of people seem to prefer SPQR over this one, but I'm definitely not one of those people.
The way Mary Beard takes a non-conventional approach at the Roman Empire is absolutely fascinating. She peels back the curtain on aspects of Roman life that are not touched upon, and make these past figures of history feel alive. I never thought I would want to know how exactly an emperor would eat at the dinner table, or what he would read when waking up in the morning, but it was those small details that kept me hooked the most.
The book was long, sure, but the various sub-headings within each chapter made it easy to pick it up and put it back down in short bursts. There is a wealth of information here jam-packed into these chapters that the length never really ended up bothering me. If anything, by the time I got to the end I wanted more!
However, the flaw with this book, like SPQR, is that I don't think it should be marketed towards people who are not already familiar with Roman history. I do not think the novelty of knowing what Trajan would eat for breakfast would be quite as interesting for someone who does not know who he was in the first place.
If you have some knowledge about Rome, and are even remotely interested on knowing how the empire functioned as a whole, and what the man at the top actually did, you should definitely pick Emperor of Rome up!
The way Mary Beard takes a non-conventional approach at the Roman Empire is absolutely fascinating. She peels back the curtain on aspects of Roman life that are not touched upon, and make these past figures of history feel alive. I never thought I would want to know how exactly an emperor would eat at the dinner table, or what he would read when waking up in the morning, but it was those small details that kept me hooked the most.
The book was long, sure, but the various sub-headings within each chapter made it easy to pick it up and put it back down in short bursts. There is a wealth of information here jam-packed into these chapters that the length never really ended up bothering me. If anything, by the time I got to the end I wanted more!
However, the flaw with this book, like SPQR, is that I don't think it should be marketed towards people who are not already familiar with Roman history. I do not think the novelty of knowing what Trajan would eat for breakfast would be quite as interesting for someone who does not know who he was in the first place.
If you have some knowledge about Rome, and are even remotely interested on knowing how the empire functioned as a whole, and what the man at the top actually did, you should definitely pick Emperor of Rome up!