For the serious student.

Direct documentation of the Roman Empire and its decline is surprisingly sparse. The best sources for the first century A.D., Tacitus and Suetonius, both make grim if informative reading. Tacitus, lauded by many as the best Roman historian for his concision, attention to detail, and reliability, is a must-read for anyone wanting a dispassionate account of Roman culture and politics at the beginning of the Christian era. The surviving portions of Tacitus' two magisterial works on Roman history, The Annals and The Histories, are available complete in a Modern Library Classics paperback edition.

Tacitus' scandalous counterpart, Suetonius, is not for all tastes. Where Tacitus draws a curtain of discretion over the baser acts of his subjects, Suetonius unstintingly describes perversities that would make even some modern pornographers squirm with unease. The reader of Suetonius' The Twelve Caesars, available complete in a Penguin Paperbacks edition, must be prepared for an utterly candid view of diabolical levels of personal corruption. If nothing else, Suetonius is the most devastating testimony ever written of the dangers inherent in unlimited government power.

The last true Roman historian was Ammianus Marcellinus, who chronicled the events of his lifetime, many of which he witnessed. A professional soldier, he participated in Julian's disastrous Persian campaign. He lived to see the virtual destruction of the Roman Empire, and his history concludes with a vivid description of the Battle of Hadrianople. The Penguin Paperbacks edition of his history is nearly complete, but a few passages have been removed for editorial reasons.

Finally, no discussion of Roman sources would be complete without reference to the venerable Edward Gibbon, whose massive History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire remains, more than two centuries after its original publication, the most comprehensive such history, and perhaps the greatest historical treatise on any subject ever written. That said, the authority of Gibbon is often overdrawn. His obvious command of the facts and copious documentation are often overshadowed by his pompous tone, overuse of certain stock words and phrases, and blatant hostility to Christianity. All writers are entitled to their prejudices, of course, but Gibbon attributes the fall of the Roman Empire largely to the rise of Christianity. There is ample reason to suppose instead that Christianity artificially prolonged the life of an otherwise moribund state. It was certainly the case that Byzantium, the heir of the Eastern Empire, lacked any semblance of good government, and was preserved mostly by the vitality of her faith.

Nor was Gibbon any great champion of republican virtue and liberty. He, like many elites of his age, was awed by empire and cared little for the bucolic virtues of early Rome. As a consequence Gibbon, despite the canonical status he now enjoys, was very controversial both in America and in Europe when his work was first published. Many early Americans preferred the now-forgotten world history of the Frenchman Abbe Millot, a less monumental work but infinitely friendlier to republican values than Gibbon. In sum, Gibbon is without parallel as a source of raw information, but less reliable as an interpreter of the events he chronicled.