Ancient Europe

The Persian Empire was the world's first hyperpower, with territory stretching from Central Asia to Northeastern Africa and from Southeastern Europe to the Indus Valley. It was the dominant geopolitical force from the later sixth century to its conquest by Alexander in the 330s BCE. Much of the empire's territory was conquered by its founder, Cyrus the Great, who reigned from 559-530 BCE.

The rise and fall of the Roman Republic occupies a special place in the history of Western civilization. From humble beginnings on the seven hills beside the Tiber, the city of Rome grew to dominate the ancient Mediterranean. Led by her senatorial aristocracy, Republican armies defeated Carthage and the successor kingdoms of Alexander the Great, and brought the surrounding peoples to east and west into the Roman sphere. Yet the triumph of the Republic was also its tragedy.

Byron and Hitler were equally entranced by Rome's most famous monument, the Colosseum. Mid-Victorians admired the hundreds of varieties of flowers in its crannies and occasionally shuddered at its reputation for contagion, danger, and sexual temptation. Today it is the highlight of a tour of Italy for more than three million visitors a year, a concert arena for the likes of Paul McCartney, and a national symbol of opposition to the death penalty. Its ancient history is chock full of romantic but erroneous myths.

Athens presents one of the most recognizable and symbolically potent panoramas of any of the world's cities. It is hard not to feel the hand of history in such a place. The birthplace of democracy, Western philosophy and theatre, Athens' importance cannot be understated. From the reforms of the lawmaker Solon in the sixth century BCE to the travails of early twenty-first century Athens, as it struggles with the legacy of the economic crises of the 2000s, Clark brings the city's history to life, evoking its cultural richness and political resonance in this epic, kaleidoscopic history.

"A hugely entertaining Roman world Romantasy—with a hilarious heroine and smoldering hero.”—ELODIE HARPER, bestselling author of The Wolf Den In the last days of the Roman Empire, a desperate princess and a brutal Gothic warlord forge a dangerous alliance. Julia, only daughter of the...

How did we get here, to this time and place in history? Are we repeating history's mistakes because we did not learn about the pivotal events that shaped the modern world? This three-book history course helps you quickly understand the nuances and the impact of three crucial periods portrayed in countless films: the Crusades and of the rise and fall of two great empires, the Roman and British.

Lays of Ancient Rome is an 1842 collection of narrative poems by Thomas Babington Macaulay. Four of these: Horatius, The Battle of Lake Regillus, Virginia and The Prophecy of Capys cover heroic episodes from early Roman history. They have brief introductions that treat the legends from a scholarly perspective. Two others deal with more recent historical events: Ivry, a Song of the Huguenots, deals with French history, and The Armada: A Fragment, is about the Spanish fleet sent to subdue England.

If you want to discover the captivating history of Romania and Vlad the Impaler, then pay attention.

In The Rule of Empires, Timothy Parsons gives a sweeping account of the evolution of empire from its origins in ancient Rome to its most recent twentieth-century embodiment. He explains what constitutes an empire and offers suggestions about what empires of the past can tell us about our own historical moment. Parsons uses imperial examples that stretch from ancient Rome, to Britain's "new" imperialism in Kenya, to the Third Reich to parse the features common to all empires, their evolutions and self-justifying myths, and the reasons for their inevitable decline.

Find out how the people of this country fought against nature to cultivate land below sea level. Discover how they survived wars, invasions, and natural disasters and developed a trading nation that would become the envy of Europe. Uncover the truth behind bloody battles fought between medieval royalty, warlords, and rebellious guilds of Dutch workers, all of which shaped the country we know today.

America began, we are often told, with the Founding Fathers, the men who waged a revolution and created a unique place called the United States. We may acknowledge the early Jamestown and Puritan colonists and mourn the dispossession of Native Americans, but we rarely grapple with the complexity of the nation’s pre-revolutionary past. In this pathbreaking revision, Daniel Richter shows that the United States has a much deeper history than is apparent - that far from beginning with a clean slate, it is a nation with multiple pasts.

The very idea of empire was created in ancient Rome, and even today, traces of its monuments, literature, and institutions can be found across Europe, the Near East, and North Africa - and sometimes even further afield. Historian Greg Woolf expertly recounts how this mammoth empire was created, how it was sustained in crisis, and how it shaped the world of its rulers and subjects - a story spanning a millennium and a half of history.

The pope wanted it, Montesquieu used it, and the Nazis pilfered an Italian noble's villa to get it: the Germania, by the Roman historian Tacitus, took on a life of its own as both an object and an ideology. When Tacitus wrote a not-very-flattering little book about the ancient Germans in 98 CE, at the height of the Roman Empire, he could not have foreseen that the Nazis would extol it as "a bible", nor that Heinrich Himmler, the engineer of the Holocaust, would vow to resurrect Germany on its grounds. But the Germania inspired - and polarized - people long before the rise of the Third Reich.

By the end of Diocletian's reign in the opening years of the fourth century, the pagan world had collapsed into the arms of a multicultural religious movement which had spread from the eastern Mediterranean. These were the "mystery religions" which had been in competition with one another for a century. By the time of Constantine, they had spread everywhere within the empire. But one of these religions, Christianity, was chosen by the young emperor.

The importance of Rome cannot be argued. Its history is not the history of Italy or its people. Rome is a part of the foundation of Europe, just as Athens is. Without it, the world as we know it today wouldn’t exist. In History of Rome: A Captivating Guide to Roman History, Starting from the Legend of Romulus and Remus Through the Roman Republic, Byzantium, Medieval Period, and Renaissance to Modern History, you will discover topics such as the founding of Rome, the Roman Republic, the third and early fourth centuries, the Renaissance, modern history of Rome, and more.

Como culminación de cincuenta años de estudio e investigación sobre la antigua Roma, Mary Beard, profesora de la Universidad de Cambridge, nos ofrece una magistral visión de conjunto de su historia: una historia que, nos dice, «al cabo de dos mil años, sigue siendo la base de nuestra cultura y nuestra política, de cómo vemos el mundo y nuestro lugar en él».

The fall of the Roman Empire has long been considered one of the greatest disasters in history. But in this groundbreaking book, Walter Scheidel argues that Rome's dramatic collapse was actually the best thing that ever happened, clearing the path for Europe's economic rise and the creation of the modern age. Ranging across the entire premodern world, Escape from Rome offers new answers to some of the biggest questions in history: Why did the Roman Empire appear? Why did nothing like it ever return to Europe? And, above all, why did Europeans come to dominate the world?

Livy's splendid adventure of Rome's rise to dominance comes to a close in this concluding volume of his magnificent history. Sadly, the work abruptly halts near the completion of book 45, which concerns events in Greece in the year 168 BC. The missing portions, numbering 107 books, have never been found. The original text of this monumental history, which came to 142 books when he completed it, carried the story to 9 BC.

Journey on the Silk Road, and discover trade, cultures, and adventures from the ancient world! Step onto the fabled Silk Road, an epic network of ancient trade routes that spanned thousands of miles and linked the East and West for centuries. In The Silk Road, embark on a captivating voyage through time and terrain, where cultures converged, goods flowed, and history unfolded.

One of the most significant works on our evolutionary ancestry since Richard Leakey's Origins, The First Signs is the first-ever exploration of the geometric images that accompany most cave art around the world—the first indications of symbolic meaning, intelligence, and language.