SPQR

From a wolf-suckled myth on the banks of the Tiber to the fall of Constantinople two thousand years later: the complete story of Rome in one illustrated volume.

SPQR tells the whole arc, not just the highlight reel. It follows the Republic that conquered a sea, the emperors who inherited it, and the slow, uneven collapse that followed, then keeps going to trace the Eastern Empire that carried the Roman name for another thousand years.

You will meet Romulus, Hannibal, Scipio, Cicero, Julius Caesar, Augustus, Nero, Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, Diocletian, Constantine, Justinian and the last emperor of Constantinople. You will follow the fall of the kings, the wars with Carthage, the death of the Republic, the golden age of the second century, the crises and comebacks of the third century, and the long ending in both West and East.

This is also a book about how Rome actually worked. Separate chapters cover the legions and their equipment, roads, aqueducts and the engineering that held an empire together, coinage and the economics of collapse, the Circus Maximus and chariot racing, gladiators, medicine, art, the women of the imperial house, and daily life in the provinces.

Every chapter keeps analysis separate from the record. Behind the Sources boxes explain what the ancient evidence does and does not tell us, and The Historian's Verdict boxes are clearly marked as the author's own interpretation, so you always know which is which. Illustrated throughout with original artistic reconstructions, with four orientation maps, a glossary of Latin and Greek terms, a cast of characters beyond the emperors, an emperor-by-emperor appendix and a timeline.