Rome: how one river town became the world. A slow, unhurried reading of the longest climb in history — from the mud huts of the Palatine and the twins and the wolf, through the kings and the Etruscan shadow, to the day the city chose a government without a king. Two consuls who could not outlast each other, a hundred senators who could not be bought, a tribune who said the word that still means 'no', and the first written law, posted in the forum where anyone could read it. Then the long walk: the league of Italy, the war across the water, the elephants at the Alps, the crescent at Cannae, the gift of Greece, the roads that still carry the trucks of Europe, the eleven aqueducts and the half-million-cubic-metre day, the concrete that got stronger in the sea, the city of a million people who could drink, bathe and vote. And at the end, the quietest and the longest legacy of all: the law, in the codes of the nations and the words we still use, and the peace that was bought with the provinces' grain and the provinces' sons — and the fall that did not erase the building.
A slow, unhurried reading, for the edge of sleep. About 2 hours and 29 minutes.
Sources (a selection): Livy, Ab Urbe Condita; Plutarch, Lives (Romulus; Pyrrhus; Cato; Antonius); Polybius, Histories; Caesar, Commentarii de Bello Gallico; Suetonius, Lives of the Twelve Caesars; Cassius Dio, Roman History; Frontinus, De Aquaeductu; Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia; Justinian, Corpus Iuris Civilis (Digest, Codex, Institutes). T. J. Cornell, The Beginnings of Rome (Routledge, 1995); N. Terrenato, The Archaeology of Early Rome (2019); Posth et al., "The origin and legacy of the Etruscans," Science Advances 7 (2021); A. T. Hodge, Roman Aqueducts and Water Supply (1992); C. Bruun, The Water Supply of Ancient Rome (2013); A. Wilson, Building Rome (2008); DeRosa, Grattan-Ballantine et al., "Seawater-hardening of Roman marine concrete," American Mineralogist (2018); F. Millar, The Emperor in the Roman World (1977); A. Goldsworthy, The Complete Roman Army (2003); W. S. Hanson, Roman cities gazetteer (2016); Grafton & Swerdlow, "Technical Chronology and Astrological History in Varro," Classical Quarterly (1985); ERC, "The Roman Empire of 2000 Cities" (city-count project).
