User:Ifly6/Useful sources (Rome)

Some useful sources on Rome and the Roman republic follow.

Magistrates of the Roman Republic
A truly magisterial work. You can find it online here. I am pretty sure that MRR is now in the public domain because its copyright was not renewed when required and it was published before 1963. But, of course, I am not a copyright lawyer.

The OCD abbreviation is simply MRR (or "Broughton, MRR"). People usually cite in a form like "MRR 2.321" meaning volume 2 page 321. (In this case, Marcus Junius Brutus' praetorship in 44.) Created substitution templates.

Alternatively, you can look at the relatively new Digital Prosopography of the Roman Republic which combines a number of different databases including MRR into a single searchable interface. For example:
 * For someone famous...
 * For someone obscure...

Oxford Classical Dictionary (4th ed, 2012)
Note that the contributors in the book are given initials. There are lots of contributors; I can't list them all. Here are a few important ones. EB is Ernst Badian. MHC is Michael Crawford. AWL is Andrew Lintott.

Alternatively, if multiple entries are used:



This version reproduces the standard convention in classical scholarship to indicate editions with a superscript. Eg CAH2 for the second edition of the Cambridge Ancient History in

Cambridge Ancient History

 * CAH2 vol 7 pt 2 (1989)


 * CAH2 vol 8 (1989)


 * CAH2 vol 9 (1994)






 * CAH2 vol 10 (1996)

Realencyclopädie
I don't like citing the RE, if only because I can't read it and it isn't easily translatable when it hasn't been OCR'd or manually entered. Some of the earlier entries are showing their age. However, most of it is now online. You can find it on Wikisource.

There are two citation styles I'll provide. The first is a template for cite wikisource and the second is to the encyclopaedia directly. I think it's best if you provide the URL to the scan if possible. The RE doesn't like to show up on English web searches.

Trials
A list of trials in the late Roman republic. The OCD abbreviation is "Alexander, Trials". You may also see it cited as TLRR.

Adfinitas
If you ever wanted to know more than you ever wanted to know about Roman family trees, Zmeskal did it already. This is also one of the sources used for DPRR. It's in German, but the vocabulary of "Sohn", "Vater", "Bruder", "Tochter", and "verheiratet" is small enough to be easily understood.

General late republican
Flower, Roman republics (2010). Advances a new paradigm for periodisation of the Roman republic.

Gruen, Last generation of the Roman republic (1995). Classical reference work on the fall of the republic.

Mouritsen, Politics in the Roman republic (2017). Explanation of the Roman republic's political practice and culture.

Beard, SQPR (2015). Short single-volume history which touches very briefly on (almost) all the major topics.

Mackay, Breakdown of the Roman republic (2009). Well reviewed textbook-style introduction to the late republic.

Steel, The end of the Roman republic (2013). Single-volume history about the end of the Roman republic. The best portions of it are related to Sulla's dictatorship – there is a bit of a lacuna as to the chronology of the proscriptions – and the Gracchan period. Narrative on Pompey is fine; for sections on Caesar, defer to Morstein-Marx, Caesar (2021).

Lintott, Constitution of the Roman republic (1999). Description of Roman republican political institutions.

Reprinted 2009.

Miscellaneous
Drogula, Commanders and command (2015). Explanation on the nature of Roman imperium.

Sumner, Orators in Cicero's Brutus (1973). He tells you approximate birth dates for a whole bunch of people.

Archaic Rome
Cornell, Beginnings of Rome (1995). A narrative of archaic Rome which takes the ancient literary tradition and sources seriously, synthesising it with archaeological finds.

Forsythe, Critical history of early Rome (2005). A narrative of archaic Rome which (somewhat inconsistently) does not take the ancient literary tradition seriously. Recommended by Beard, SPQR (2015), which mentions Cornell 1995 not at all.

Lomas, The rise of Rome (2018). A more recent book on archaic Rome which includes some review of where the scholarship has gone since 1995 and 2005. I would prefer this to the earlier books largely due to Lomas' ability to have read and learnt from both of them.

Collections
Companion to the Roman republic (2006). This companion is the better of the two; it contains rather important chapters on scholarly controversies; therein, it explains the debate over Italian population counts (people now accept a mid-count) and also the very long debate over the fall of the republic (Brunt vs Meier vs Gruen).

Cambridge Companion to the Roman republic (2nd ed, 2014).

Ancient sources
I don't like citing the ancient sources. This is because they are unreliable, often contradictory, and – frankly – not very historical. They also are annoying to cite because of the multitude of translations etc. Below, I prefer the (now public domain) translations hosted on LacusCurtius or Perseus because they are both books and accessible on the Internet.

Note also, if you are moving from a classical studies book which cites these sources (out of necessity usually), you should familiarise yourself with the various widely-used abbreviations. I try to avoid using the abbreviations because they are unnecessarily confusing for the lay-reader (if you know nothing about the classical world, what on earth is a Plut. Luc. or Cic. Sest.?). But citations can be overly wordy and unhelpful ("Plutarch 1920" is perhaps less informative than "Plut. Mar."). Yet, at the same time, it can also be helpful to mark, using a modern-ish year, that something is a translation rather than quoted verbatim. There are arguments on both sides, if we really want to "both sides" this.

They should not be cited to based on a specific translation's page. Almost all modern translations or reprints will include the canonical paragraph numbers. Those paragraph numbers should always be preferred and are in fact what is preferred in classical scholarship; page numbers are not consistent in the same way paragraph numbers are.

Gallic war
""Gaul is a whole divided into three parts".."

Civil war
"Recourse is had to that extreme and final decree of the senate..."

Cassius Dio
(Nine volumes.)

(Nine volumes.)

Dionysius of Halicarnassus
Roman Antiquities

Livy
History of Rome

Periochae

Everyone but the Gracchi

 * Plut. Ant.


 * Plut. Brut.


 * Plut. Caes.


 * Plut. Crass.


 * Plut. Mar.


 * Plut. Pomp.


 * Plut. Sull.

Gracchi
'''Plut. Ti Gracch (also TG).'''

'''Plut. C Gracch (also CG).'''

Suetonius

 * Suet. Aug.


 * Suet. Iul.

Valerius Maximus
The man of many tales himself. I imagine he would win every taberna trivia night... probably because the person posing the questions is reading from his book.

Recommend using Template:Sfn for this with the loc parameter to produce citations such as