There's a lot of mediocre historical fiction. Here's some of the better type of that genre set in Ancient Rome. (Pix from our 2006 & 2010 visits to Rome)
Eagle In The Snow by Wallace Breem (1970) is an imaginative recreation of the events leading up to the crossing of the frozen Rhine River on New Years Eve of 406 A.D. by a coalition of barbarian tribes including the Alans, Vandals, Suevians and Burgundians, a critical turning point in the history of the Roman Empire. Within three years, most of the major cities in Gaul were sacked, Britain had declared its independence from Rome and raiders had reached into Spain. Within 25 years, the Goths had established a kingdom in Aquitaine, much of Spain and North Africa was lost to Rome and the great city itself had been sacked for the first time in eight centuries. The story is told through Paulinus Maximus, a Roman general who is given the task of pulling together the remnants of the decayed Roman legions and frontier forces in order to stop the barbarians. Breem humanizes his characters even as you know night is descending on them.
The Ballista series (Warrior of Rome) by Harry Sidebottom. An ongoing series with the fourth volume, The Caspian Gates, just published. The first, and still the best, of the books is Fire In The East (2009). Sidebottom teaches Classical History at Oxford but it turns out he's actually an entertaining writer in spite of that. The novels are set in the midst of a particularly murky period of Roman history, the mid-third century A.D. For fifty 50 years the empire went through a rapid series of emperors, usurpers and civil wars and began to regain stability only with the accession of Diocletian in 284. Our knowledge of the period is crippled by the complete absence of reliable contemporary histories. We know much more of 1st and 4th century Rome, because of Tacitus, Ammianus Marcellinus and other writers whose works survived the centuries than we do of the 3rd century.
The fictional Marcus Clodius Ballista was born an Angle, became a diplomatic hostage as a child, was granted Roman citizenship and equestrian status and rose to command positions in the Roman Army. The novels are set in the Eastern part of the Roman Empire (Syria, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor) during the 250s and 260s during the time of the Persian invasions during which the Emperor Valerian was captured. This is wonderful speculative historical fiction in which Sidebottom's storyline is at least passably credible given the garbled sequence of events in the historical sources and conveys a real sense of Roman (and Persian) ways, court politics and the structure of daily life (at least at the elite and military levels). And there's plenty of adventure and fighting.
Sidebottom is clearly a student of historical fiction. Ballista has elements of Jack Aubrey and Ballista's Caledonian slave servant, Calcagus is modeled directly on Killick, Aubrey's cantankerous steward from Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series, the best historical fiction ever written.
The final book is semi-fiction, Ancient Rome On Five Denarii A Day by Philip Matyszak (2007). It's a mock tourist guide to Rome. It has the usual sections to help the traveler, Getting There, Settling In, Out And About, Shopping and, of course, Must-See Sights. Fun to read, it contains some very helpful information:
"Rome is an intensely hierarchical society. Everyone knows their place, sometimes quite literally. Anyone sitting in the Colosseum where they do not belong could end up as part of the entertainment."
and alerts us to some cautionary advice from Juvenal about dining out in the evening:
"Be grateful if nothing worse than a bucketful of slops hits you over the head on the way home. The town is full of violent drunks who can't sleep well until they have beaten someone up."Nuff' said.
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