The book itself is probably one of the best descriptions of the republic's last years put to paper. There are three main views – they are Brunt, Meier, and Gruen; see Morstein-Marx and Jehne in Companion to the Roman Republic 2006 for a readable summary – in the scholarship. Some people say Gruen's book is dry. That can be true in places. But it turns out that Roman politics are just more complex than people expect or think they are. In the actual Rome, there were no easily conceived of "popular" or "senatorial" parties – the latter is especially nonsense. (Beyond Gruen, here, see Mouritsen, Politics in the Roman Republic, 2017). The actualities of Roman politics have to do with constantly shifting senatorial factions built around individual interests, familial ties, and – at times – ideologies. This necessarily leads to an enormous number of characters building tenuous alliances that change constantly. Hundreds of mercurial egoists all muddling about does not make for a great story like HBO's Rome.
As an aside, a simplified version of "Roman politics" built around progressives, maybe even democrats, and conservatives fighting is much easier for modern people to understand. It is also much easier to dramatise, especially in terms of two overarching and continually conflicting "parties" which mean that the piles and piles of (homonymous) names can be ignored. It also is helped by being easy to write when the ancient historians, who are also tabloid editors, did much of the narrative work for you. It is easy for someone living in the 1st century AD to inject teleologies into the late republic. Eg, Plutarch, who is today roundly criticised for injecting "foreshadowing" into his narratives that Caesar was going to destroy the republic from a young age. The only problem with writing that easy story is that it is historical fiction.
There are a few cases where the book itself seems to be behind the modern scholarship, which is to be expected for a book printed in 1974 and reprinted in 1995. These include, for example, uncritical acceptance of the reasons for Pompey's sole consulship in 52 (Plutarch, inter alia, says it was to deny Pompey a dictatorship but cf Ramsay 2016 in Historia) and non-engagement – at least outside the introduction – with a yet-to-exist Roman democracy thesis put forward by Millar et al starting in the 80s. In other places, Gruen is especially prescient. His dismissal of Caesar-was-afraid-of-prosecution-theory is now increasingly accepted. See eg Morstein-Marx's recent 2021 book, Julius Caesar and the Roman People, which spends twenty pages and an appendix throughly obliterating this notion. Similarly, Gruen's dismissal of the idea that the so-called First Triumvirate was some political superpower is a much-needed correction to this day.
The book is altogether a must-read for someone who wants to understand the fall of the republic in its own terms.
The printing of the book, as it currently stands on Amazon in 2022, however, is not so great. The book doesn't seem to have anything wrong per se with its text or content, but the pages are printed on the wrong sides. That is, the right-hand page is put on the left and vice versa. Thus, the page numbers are now next to the spine; this makes it very difficult to use the (very useful) index. The paperback covering also seems a bit more flimsy than expected. If the book were not such an excellent piece of scholarship, I would deduct a star.
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Top reviews from other countries
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Dinamica dell’attività di Roma nella fase più interessante della Republica
Reviewed in Italy on July 23, 2022carlos santamaria arcos
todo bien. Everything OK
Reviewed in Spain on December 30, 2012