Veni, Vidi, Vici: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Romans But Were Afraid to Ask Paperback – May 1, 2016

This book was a fun and fast read. The book is a chronological history of the Roman empire but the micro-stories are self-contained and easy to follow. I read a few pages at a time but never got lost.

This book is very easy to read. It covers all the major events in the history of Rome, more or less in chronological order, but adds a lot more as well. The detours along the way include things like gladiators and the games, architecture, food, romance and the life of the slave. Never dull, it serves as a great introduction to Roman history. While Simon Baker's 'Ancient Rome' is the best introduction to the narrative history of Rome, this book fleshes out the social history. Read together, they give a comprehensive picture of the ancient civilisation to bring it alive in a very readable way.

This is a history book that is for people who don’t want to read a long, dry, complex book on Roman History. Kind of a “working man’s “ Roman history book if you will.Not to be confused with “Roman history for Dummies”, it’s much better.The author writes in a way that makes it interesting, and easily followed.Highly Recommend!

A wonderful book which presents the facts (and stories) with a unique blend of humour. A thoroughly enjoyable read - I couldn't put it down till I finished it!

I am a Roman history buff for the last 50 +years.Thought I had read everything about the Romans.this book proved me wrong.

Totally awesome ... told very entertainingly ...

This is just not for anyone over 12 or 14 years old. I bought it before traveling to Italy and was disappointed. If you have middle school aged kids who want to learn Roman history, go for it. Educated adults, nah. Keep looking.

They left the world stage almost two thousand years ago, but the ancient Romans left their marks all over the world and continue to do so. Our calendar, for instance, is theirs, and then there are the legal systems, vocabulary, architecture, and what is more, all those gladiator movies. If you didn’t get enough Roman history when you were in school, or even if you did and you want to be entertained by the vast subject, get _Veni, Vidi, Vici: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about the Romans but Were Afraid to Ask_ (Atlantic Books) by Peter Jones. He is an emeritus professor of the Classics at Cambridge University, but this fact-packed volume is informal and fun, the sort of history that even people who don’t like reading history can find enlightening. Jones’s chapters are basically chronological, from the myths of the foundation of Rome to those Huns who brought it down. Within each chapter are nuggets of a page or less on an important, trivial, but always interesting historical fact, told with enthusiasm and punning good humor.The Roman system of religion was exceedingly strange. There was the usual pantheon of gods and goddesses ruled over by Jupiter, of course, but then there was a bafflingly huge number of gods to take care of all sorts of minutiae. Just in the agricultural realm, there was a specific named god of ploughing, of weeding, of protection from mildew and rust, and a god of spreading excrement on the fields. Cloacina was the goddess of the sewers. Terminus was the god of boundary stones. Rome was built upon slavery. About 25% of the population at the end of the Republic were slaves, and there was never a shortage of them. There was never any abolition movement. No one questioned that some people ought to be slaves; it was accepted as a natural state. When there were slave rebellions, the slaves were in revolt over specific bad treatment; they never presumed to act against the institution of slavery. One thing that everyone knows about gladiatorial combat is that a crowd, or a single judge, might be called upon at the end of combat, if the combatants had not finally destroyed one another, to be asked, “Thumbs up” or “Thumbs down” in judgement of whether they should live or die. Yes, the thumb signs happened, but the meaning is equivocal. “There is a slight balance,” writes Jones, “in favor of the belief that ‘thumbs up’ actually meant ‘kill’ (i.e., drive the sword into him) and ‘thumbs down’ meant ‘let be’ (i.e, turn the sword away).” On the final page, Jones reflects that the of all the things the Romans handed down to us, “the enrichment of the Anglo-Saxon language is their most inescapable legacy.” There are languages descended from Latin, but English comes from Anglo-Saxon, with a lot of Latinate words brought into England by the Norman French and other sources. So Jones often explains interesting word origins. He tells you how you can foretell the future just like the Romans did, standing to observe birds and seeing if the birds occupied a good side or bad side of the field of view. In other words, you could be an amateur _auspex_, a Latin word that comes from _auis_ “bird” and _specio_ “I inspect.” And from this we get the word “auspicious.”Academics and those familiar with the history of Ancient Rome may object that Jones’s book is choppy and in such short segments that it cannot present a coherent history. This is not the book for them. For those of us who just want to be informed and entertained, there is at least one bright fact to be found on every page of this well-informed but unstuffy history.