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bhswanson's review against another edition
Started as a bit of an experiment and it simply isn’t for me.
kimball_hansen's review against another edition
1.0
I feel like an idiot rating this book one star. What did the author I do wrong? The beginning was interesting and I was hunkering down to enjoy a nice long tale then the second chapter just jumped a couple hundred years with new characters to learn all over again. I can't put that much effort into it. So "I'm afraid [it] lost my interest." Also many characters shared the same names in the different timelines. Plus sometimes they'd go by first name then go by their middle name many pages later (looking at you Julius Caesar. Your first name was Gaius?
Even though I've never seen it before, this book seemed to be a mild version of Game of Thrones. IE: Intercourse and violence. Before you knew it, the hero of the story was getting his head cut off or something nasty was happening.
Is Potitius a god?
The end with Julius Caesar was too rushed. Before I knew it they were plotting to betray him. Ironic that I almost finished this book on the Ides of March.
Was the winged nasty phallus amulet the main character of this book? It was the only thing that kept continuing the different stories.
Ugh. Should I read the next one? It has Caligula in it. And it might have Maximus and Commodus, too (the best villain).
Sorry Crusts. "I tried. No one can say I didn't try."
Even though I've never seen it before, this book seemed to be a mild version of Game of Thrones. IE: Intercourse and violence. Before you knew it, the hero of the story was getting his head cut off or something nasty was happening.
Is Potitius a god?
The end with Julius Caesar was too rushed. Before I knew it they were plotting to betray him. Ironic that I almost finished this book on the Ides of March.
Was the winged nasty phallus amulet the main character of this book? It was the only thing that kept continuing the different stories.
Ugh. Should I read the next one? It has Caligula in it. And it might have Maximus and Commodus, too (the best villain).
Sorry Crusts. "I tried. No one can say I didn't try."
eososray's review against another edition
3.0
Multi-generational, thousand year stories do make it impossible to get attached to any characters as they are there for a chapter and then gone. They provide continuity to the history and give a focal point but don't offer much else.
I personally have little interest in pre-history so could have done without the first 3 chapters and I know more about Caesar than such a broad overview could portray, so the last 4 chapters were a bit boring for me as well.
This could be a good way to learn about general roman history but I wouldn't recommend it for the fan who has done some research already.
I personally have little interest in pre-history so could have done without the first 3 chapters and I know more about Caesar than such a broad overview could portray, so the last 4 chapters were a bit boring for me as well.
This could be a good way to learn about general roman history but I wouldn't recommend it for the fan who has done some research already.
inesbeato's review against another edition
4.0
Uma autêntica saga épica! Através de sucessivas gerações de duas das famílias mais antigas de Roma, Pinário e Potício, o autor Steven Saylor transportou-me magistralmente pelos primeiros 1000 anos da história da capital de um dos maiores impérios de todos os tempos, Roma.
Desde a sua criação pelos irmãos Rómulo e Remo até à morte de Júlio César, a obra passa por alguns dos mais marcantes momentos do Império Romano, numa impressionante lição de história romanceada.
Apesar de apreciar mais a série Roma Sub Rosa de Saylor, li este livro com o maior deleite, absorvida pelas personagens e pela forma como o autor conseguiu interligar ficção, lenda e factos históricos, que mostram um trabalho de pesquisa digno de registo.
Espero ler em breve o segundo, Império, tendo ficado a saber recentemente que o autor está a preparar um terceiro livro que dê continuidade aos dois que já existem.
Desde a sua criação pelos irmãos Rómulo e Remo até à morte de Júlio César, a obra passa por alguns dos mais marcantes momentos do Império Romano, numa impressionante lição de história romanceada.
Apesar de apreciar mais a série Roma Sub Rosa de Saylor, li este livro com o maior deleite, absorvida pelas personagens e pela forma como o autor conseguiu interligar ficção, lenda e factos históricos, que mostram um trabalho de pesquisa digno de registo.
Espero ler em breve o segundo, Império, tendo ficado a saber recentemente que o autor está a preparar um terceiro livro que dê continuidade aos dois que já existem.
archytas's review against another edition
4.0
Great ride through some of Rome's most impressive/important historical moments. Love the conceit, and loved that the members of the family whom we meet are flawed, occasionally to the point of murderousness, and not all beacons of hope. Saylor is clearly fascinated by how traditions and societies evolve, and the book is set up to explore that. It's fiction, not scholarship, and uses imagination, not archaeology, but it's fun and smart as a result. Saylor is one of those authors I'd really like to have a beer with.
kake's review against another edition
medium-paced
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
3.5
This was OK, I suppose. The writing, plotting, and characterisation were all pretty simplistic, but I wanted a book that wouldn’t make my brain work too hard and this certainly fitted the bill.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Fatphobia and Rape
Minor: Cannibalism
braydin's review against another edition
3.0
While I much prefer his Roma sub Rosa mystery series, this was still a decent book. Covering the founding of Rome to Octavian being named as Caesar's heir, the book covers a lot of time and follows many different characters over the course of the story. The downside of this being that you do not really get a chance to get deep into a character or even a period of time before the narrative moves on to the next generation. It is still a well written book, but I think breaking it up into several books with some more time spent in each generation would have worked better for me.
smcleish's review against another edition
2.0
Originally published on my blog here in February 2009.
Steven Saylor is best known for his series of ancient Roman detective novels featuring Gordianus the Finder, and his other works have also been crime fiction until now. Roma takes him out of the genre confort zone, being an ambitious attempt to contain the history of Rome from its earliest origins to the end of the Republic, a period of about a thousand years, within a single novel. Saylor makes his task more manageable by structuring the history as a series of episodes around the best known stories, and linking them by a simple device. The central character in each story, who is never the focus from the historical point of view, is the current owner of an amulet passed from generation to generation.
Writing a novel about the development of a great city is not a new idea. Peter Ackroyd's London comes to mind, though it's not a useful comparison for me as I haven't read it, but it shows that Saylor was not the only writer with this idea. But for there's one really important precedent for Roma: the histories of Livy. While not a novel in the modern sense, it is a highly dramatic version of the events covered in Saylor's book (and what went on in between). Livy added pro-Augustan spin to the disregard for evidence and acceptance of the supernatural common to most ancient historians, but makes up for this by the quality of his writing and the interest of his tales. In his acknowledgment of his debt to Livy in the afterword, Saylor describes his histories as "one of the great reading experiences of a lifetime", which is perhaps overdoing it a bit, but suggests just how difficult it would be for Saylor to live up to his source material. And that isn't even mentioning the other writers who have taken stories from Livy over the last two millennia, including Shakespeare, whose play Coriolanus and poem The Rape of Lucrece describe two of the same stories used by Saylor. (Julius Caesar and Anthony and Cleopatra take place off stage from two of the last tales).
The first stories are set before the city existed, and tell of the origin of the amulet. They juxtapose modern ideas of the reasons for the foundation of the settlement (on salt trading routes) with myths associated with the area of the seven hills (a fight between Hercules and the monster Cacus). As with other supernatural events throughout Roma, the latter is rationalised by Saylor, in line with modern sensibilities outside the fantasy genre about magic, monsters and demigods. Then each tale skips a couple of generations to end a millennium later in the reign of Augustus.
There's plenty of action, and the stories are good. Accuracy is another issue, but obviously problems in this area are more due to the sources than to distortion by Saylor, and he actually uses the form of Roma to show how oral history becomes altered within only a few generations, as people in later stories discuss the events that have already been covered more directly, and the timespan between the stories about Romulus and the lifetime of Livy is a lot greater than a century.
While the inspirational quality of Livy's materlel cannot be doubted, Saylor's versions do suffer from the episodic structure he has adopted. He doesn't really succeed in making the reader feel that this is one story, that of the city, rather than a collection of short stories about individual moments which happen to be arranged by their internal chronology, though he does his best with numerous back references and through the device of the inherited amulet. Perhaps reading Roma is best followed by finding a good translation of Livy, who didn't need to fit his work into a pre-existing form; for the restrictions of the novel - particularly those imposed by the length requirements made to fit in a single volume - have led Saylor to produce a gallant failure.
Steven Saylor is best known for his series of ancient Roman detective novels featuring Gordianus the Finder, and his other works have also been crime fiction until now. Roma takes him out of the genre confort zone, being an ambitious attempt to contain the history of Rome from its earliest origins to the end of the Republic, a period of about a thousand years, within a single novel. Saylor makes his task more manageable by structuring the history as a series of episodes around the best known stories, and linking them by a simple device. The central character in each story, who is never the focus from the historical point of view, is the current owner of an amulet passed from generation to generation.
Writing a novel about the development of a great city is not a new idea. Peter Ackroyd's London comes to mind, though it's not a useful comparison for me as I haven't read it, but it shows that Saylor was not the only writer with this idea. But for there's one really important precedent for Roma: the histories of Livy. While not a novel in the modern sense, it is a highly dramatic version of the events covered in Saylor's book (and what went on in between). Livy added pro-Augustan spin to the disregard for evidence and acceptance of the supernatural common to most ancient historians, but makes up for this by the quality of his writing and the interest of his tales. In his acknowledgment of his debt to Livy in the afterword, Saylor describes his histories as "one of the great reading experiences of a lifetime", which is perhaps overdoing it a bit, but suggests just how difficult it would be for Saylor to live up to his source material. And that isn't even mentioning the other writers who have taken stories from Livy over the last two millennia, including Shakespeare, whose play Coriolanus and poem The Rape of Lucrece describe two of the same stories used by Saylor. (Julius Caesar and Anthony and Cleopatra take place off stage from two of the last tales).
The first stories are set before the city existed, and tell of the origin of the amulet. They juxtapose modern ideas of the reasons for the foundation of the settlement (on salt trading routes) with myths associated with the area of the seven hills (a fight between Hercules and the monster Cacus). As with other supernatural events throughout Roma, the latter is rationalised by Saylor, in line with modern sensibilities outside the fantasy genre about magic, monsters and demigods. Then each tale skips a couple of generations to end a millennium later in the reign of Augustus.
There's plenty of action, and the stories are good. Accuracy is another issue, but obviously problems in this area are more due to the sources than to distortion by Saylor, and he actually uses the form of Roma to show how oral history becomes altered within only a few generations, as people in later stories discuss the events that have already been covered more directly, and the timespan between the stories about Romulus and the lifetime of Livy is a lot greater than a century.
While the inspirational quality of Livy's materlel cannot be doubted, Saylor's versions do suffer from the episodic structure he has adopted. He doesn't really succeed in making the reader feel that this is one story, that of the city, rather than a collection of short stories about individual moments which happen to be arranged by their internal chronology, though he does his best with numerous back references and through the device of the inherited amulet. Perhaps reading Roma is best followed by finding a good translation of Livy, who didn't need to fit his work into a pre-existing form; for the restrictions of the novel - particularly those imposed by the length requirements made to fit in a single volume - have led Saylor to produce a gallant failure.
traveller1's review against another edition
3.0
A history of ancient Rome, from the pre-regal period, through the Republic, to the age of Augustus, told through the eyes of successive family members. Key points in Roman history are highlighted.
Overall, not so good. Tells the story, but not in anyway exciting. Saylor's detective stories are far more fun and enjoyable to read.
Overall, not so good. Tells the story, but not in anyway exciting. Saylor's detective stories are far more fun and enjoyable to read.
dashausfrau's review against another edition
1.0
I get that the author is tracing a speculative story of how early people developed religion and other structures, but I can't stomach cannibalism and sexual violence in the same chapter, especially since there's already a pattern of the Surprise Hero pairing up with whatever just-bloomed Woman character of the chapter.