Review: The Roman Empire: From Augustus to the Fall of Rome by Gregory S. Aldrete, The Great Courses

August 22, 2022 • Benjamin Keninger

After finishing The Mongol Empire I was in the mood to learn more about other the great empires that once dominated the Earth. As the Roman Empire is arguably the most well-known, I decided to continue my journey through The Great Courses series and purchased The Roman Empire: From Augustus to the Fall of Rome. Here are my thoughts:

As mentioned in the my review of the The Mongol Empire, the Great Courses series is designed for audiobooks and in doing so accounts for the ways in which listening to audiobooks differ from conventional reading. This results in a relatively smooth experience compared to a lot of other audiobooks. The narrator, Gregory S. Aldrete, does a serviceable job though he does have the tendency to talk extremely slow (I had the book on 1.6x speed the entire time). Aldrete also often tries to make the text "conversational"; he regularly asks questions for the reader to ponder on and while I understand the purpose of this, in practice these questions just end up ruining the pacing of the text.

As the book's subtitle suggests, its contents primarily cover the Roman Empire from Augustus's victory over Mark Antony and subsequent succession as the first Roman Emperor to the fall of the Empire in the 5th century AD. Obviously this means that the history of Rome's rise during its time as a kingdom and a republic are not covered, and only a single chapter is spent discussing the surviving eastern half of the empire following Rome's collapse.

Like all Great Courses books, The Roman Empire serves as an introductory text that does a good job of explaining the basics of Roman history. At times the book even delved a little into Rome's culture and deeper societal structure, to my surprise. This does unfortunately leads to some awkward structuring of the book, however, as you will go 7 hours of straight history before abruptly getting a chapter entirely devoted to chariot racing and gladiators. This isn't a huge issue, though, and upon re-listening I just simply skipped the chapters focused on Roman society.

Overall The Roman Empire is a decent audiobook, but I do think there are better alternatives - even within the Great Courses' catalog. The History of Ancient Rome is arguably better in every regard and I definately recommend picking this book up first before trying The Roman Empire. You can save money this way too, as The History of Ancient Rome covers the entirety of Roman history instead of breaking it up into two halves.