Colleen McCullough published The First Man in Rome in 1990 and over the following fifteen years completed six more novels covering the late Roman Republic from Marius and Sulla through the assassination of Caesar. The Masters of Rome series is the most extensively researched work of Roman historical fiction in English, the most narratively ambitious attempt to dramatize the Republic’s collapse in any medium, and the most reliably frustrating reading experience for anyone who comes to it wanting something other than a seven-volume commitment to historical immersion.

Robert Graves published I, Claudius in 1934, followed immediately by its sequel Claudius the God, and the two novels together constitute the most successful fictional treatment of Roman history in any language. They have never been out of print. They were the basis for the BBC television series that remains the finest dramatization of Roman history ever made. They are cited by historians as substantially accurate in their broad outlines while being recognized as works of fiction that invented freely within the framework the sources provided. They are also, simply, very good novels — constructed with the discipline of a scholar and the freedom of a storyteller.

Steven Saylor began publishing his Roma Sub Rosa mystery series in 1991 with Roman Blood, a novel centered on one of Cicero’s actual legal cases — the defense of Sextus Roscius against a charge of parricide — and has continued through more than a dozen novels, each using a historical crime or legal proceeding as the vehicle for an exploration of late Republican Rome. The series’ detective, Gordianus the Finder, operates as an investigator for hire in a society that had no professional police force, appearing at the margins of the major political events of the period and providing a ground-level perspective on the world that the official historical record’s focus on senators and generals does not supply.

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.