The Roman Template: How Ancient Rome Shaped English Historical Fiction

Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The tradition of serious English historical fiction about Rome begins, in its modern form, with Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii in 1834 — a novel that invented the sub-genre of Roman disaster narrative, established the template of the virtuous Christian and the corrupt pagan Roman, and sold in numbers that established ancient Rome as a commercially viable fictional setting for the Victorian reading public. The novel is not much read today and deserves to be read less. Its historical importance is entirely distinct from its literary quality.

Historical Fiction on Ancient Rome

The Roman Template: How Ancient Rome Shaped English Historical Fiction