Nearly a thousand letters written by Cicero survive, along with approximately ninety letters addressed to him from other correspondents. They span the period from 68 BC to his death in 43 BC and constitute the most intimate documentary record of any figure from the ancient world. They were not written for publication. They were written to friends, family members, political allies, and enemies, in the urgency of specific moments, and they reveal a man whose public persona — the great orator, the defender of the Republic, the statesman who executed the Catilinarians — was inhabited by someone considerably more anxious, vain, inconsistent, and human than the published speeches would suggest.

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.

In 8 AD, Augustus exiled Ovid to Tomis on the Black Sea — modern Constanța in Romania, the edge of the civilized world as Rome understood it — for reasons he described cryptically as a poem and a mistake. The poem was the Ars Amatoria, a didactic work on the art of seduction published nearly a decade earlier, which Augustus had apparently decided was a contribution to the moral looseness he had spent his reign trying to suppress. The mistake is unknown and has generated scholarly speculation for two thousand years. Ovid spent the remaining ten years of his life on the Black Sea shore writing poems of exile — the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto — that constitute the most sustained literary response to political persecution in antiquity, and he died without recovering the imperial favor he spent those years petitioning for.

Pliny the Younger wrote two letters to the historian Tacitus describing the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, and they are the only eyewitness account of one of the most significant natural disasters in recorded history. Pliny was seventeen years old when the eruption occurred. He watched from Misenum, across the Bay of Naples, as the cloud rose from the mountain. His uncle, Pliny the Elder — the naturalist and admiral who commanded the fleet at Misenum — sailed toward the eruption and died in it. The younger Pliny stayed behind, survived, and thirty years later wrote the letters that documented what he had seen with a clarity and precision that would have done credit to a trained scientist.

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.

Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus wrote the Lives of the Twelve Caesars — biographies of Julius Caesar through Domitian — probably in the early second century AD, and the work has been read continuously ever since, generating controversy about its reliability that has not diminished its influence by the slightest degree. Suetonius was the secretary of the emperor Hadrian before being dismissed, apparently for inappropriate familiarity with the empress, and he had access to the imperial archives during his service. Whether he actually used the archives, and how judiciously, is a question classical scholars continue to disagree about.

Tacitus is the most important historian the Roman world produced and one of the most important historians in any tradition. He is also, unmistakably, a man writing under conditions that shaped his account in ways he could not always control and occasionally did not try to. He was a senator who served the emperors he despised, a man who had survived Domitian’s reign by keeping his head down and who never entirely forgave himself for it, and who wrote history as an act of witness and accusation that the dead and the living were equally subject to. His prose style — compressed, ironic, capable of saying in a subordinate clause what lesser writers would require a paragraph — has influenced historical writing ever since and is the primary source for everything popular culture believes about Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, and their courts.

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.

Virgil died in 19 BC having asked that the Aeneid be burned. He had spent eleven years on it, had not finished it to his satisfaction, and left instructions that the manuscript be destroyed rather than published incomplete. Augustus overruled the request. Two of Virgil’s literary executors, Varius and Tucca, published what existed. The unfinished poem became the foundational text of Western literature, the work that every subsequent European writer of ambition had to read and respond to, the poem against which Dante measured himself when he chose Virgil as his guide through Hell. The work Virgil thought too imperfect to survive has survived everything.