A History of Rome

Mommsen's nineteenth-century history of Rome, first issued in the 1850s, narrates the city's rise from early Italy through the Republic's wars of expansion to the fall of the republican constitution and Caesar's dominance. He covers the struggle of the orders, the Punic Wars, the conquest of the Hellenistic east, and the Gracchan and civil-war crises that wrecked senatorial government. The emphasis is political and constitutional: how assemblies, magistrates, and army commands concentrated power. (The work as usually read does not carry the story through the later emperors in the same form.) It is analytic narrative, written from the sources, not a popular anecdotal portrait of daily life.

Quarter-bound in brown leather with blue cloth sides blocked with a gilt image. Dark brown slipcase.