100 Books Like Julian

It’s not Hadrian’s love affair with the beautiful boy Antinous that swept me off my feet, nor the way Hadrian makes him a god after his mysterious death and builds a city dedicated to worshiping him.

That’s only a small part of a book overflowing with the emperor’s interior life, his fears and doubts and dreams. Yourcenar spent most of her life on and off writing this book, her life’s work. Filled with the exhilaration and perplexity of achieving absolute power and then holding onto it, we experience Hadrian as a profoundly paradoxical genius from the inside out. 

Mixtli, an elderly Aztec lord captured by the Spanish, is reluctantly questioned by a Catholic bishop charged with reporting to the king of Spain about the customs and mores of his new unwilling subjects. The bishop is repulsed and appalled by the violent history and, to his mind, sexual looseness of the Aztecs while blind to the violent depredations of the conquistadors who protect him. But the story that outrages the bishop is for the reader a spectacular tragic saga of the end of the Aztec empire from the point of view of the conquered and a telling of what was lost.

I was drawn to this book, a ripping and irreverent yarn about Vikings, by the foreword to its new edition written by Michael Chabon.

Our sea-faring hero finds himself in endless scrapes everywhere a Viking ship could go, often brought about by his own foolishness. Of special note are his adventures in Islamic Spain.

And I discovered as I was writing this recommendation that the novel was (sort of) made into a 1964 movie, a British-Yugoslav coproduction starring, among others, Sidney Poitier. You’ve got to love that.

I thought it was great to have Circe herself narrate her love affair with Odysseus.

The first half of the novel interestingly shares her tribulations growing up as a child in a family of gods. I found that this establishes a theme of immortality vs. mortality that the book explores in profound ways. Especially fascinating was Circe’s personal story of her love affair with Odysseus.

I was surprised and delighted that Miller included the resulting child, Telegonus, who is not in Homer but is in ancient myth. Even more surprising to me was Circe falling in love with Telemachus, Odysseus’ son by Penelope (also not in Homer!). This relationship allows the novel to end on a positive note as Circe learns to live like a mortal in her new life with Telemachus.

Ever wonder how in the world Hannibal got elephants across the alps? Ross Leckie’s violent and graphic account answers that question and more as it plunges the reader into the mind of the Carthaginian general driven to avenge his father’s defeat and this country’s humiliation in the first Punic War. The book revels in the fascinating details of ancient military campaigns and battle tactics. It’s a blood-drenched fever-dream of a novel that’s not for the squeamish, but a compulsive read for the rest of us.

I became enthralled by Claudius through the TV drama starring Derek Jacobi, but later came to the novels.

A stammering, reclusive young man dismissed as a fool, the bookish Claudius is all of us who watch from the wings, hoping not to draw attention to ourselves. He manages to outlive others, including Tacitus and Caligula, to succeed to the imperial purple.

Graves is a noted historian who drew on Plutarch, Suetonius, and Tacitus for his portrayal. His books on ancient cultures and religions were among many that I devoured in my research.

Bryher's historical novels, once acclaimed, are out of print. I think Bryher deserves re-discovery. I like how The Coin of Carthage, set during ancient Rome’s war against Carthage, concerns everyday people: traders, farmers, common soldiers. And no Rome. Rome is a glimpse from a hill. I like this ̶ a true peasant’s sense of distance, where very near is still far. We follow the workaday lives of Italian-Greek traders Zonas and Dasius, from Naples docks to Carthage streets, to bucolic Tivoli, farms, markets, courtyards, piers, ships, mule-trains. Setting Italia, characters commoners, heroes Italian-Greeks, the periphery, usually silenced, is given voice. A curiously moving book.

In an ancient Roman Britain garrison town, Roman army physician, Ruso, and his native wife, Tilla, investigate a series of murders. Worse, Emperor Hadrian is coming. Ratcheting tension. The central issue in Semper Fidelis is the rivalry between Roman legionaries and Briton conscripts. The crime is solved, but the story doesn’t end. Briton conscripts riot, and, Hadrian absent, his empress, Sabina, must intercede.

The empress Vibia Sabina (posthumously deified), is my favorite character. Neglected, bored, sarcastic, calculating, duplicitous, funny, she is the perfect spoiled patrician matron.  What I like best is how everybody lies to everybody in Semper Fidelis, a tour-de-force of mendacity. An interesting, different, more-than-just-murder-mystery historical novel.

This enthralling evocation of the long life of Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, uses fictional letters and other invented documents to tell his story, from the point when, as a teenager, he found himself the heir of the assassinated dictator Julius Caesar, to his final days as sole ruler of a vast empire. Emerging as victor from a protracted civil war, Augustus managed to impose a degree of stability across the Roman world, though at a cost. Could the bloodthirsty youth have really turned into the modest statesman? His contemporaries found him hard to read. Williams charts with subtlety and insight the phases in Augustus’ self-reinvention, shining a particular spotlight on his fraught relationship with Julia, his daughter, whom he found himself obliged to send into exile, as a conspicuous offender against his flagship legislation on adultery.

Boldly venturing into territory already claimed by Robert Graves, Allan Massie gives us the life of Augustus, the first Roman emperor. Full of authentic detail, both witty and serious, bawdy and censorious, this book makes ancient Rome thoroughly believable to modern readers. Augustus vividly describes his ruthless rise to power following the assassination of Julius Caesar, and reflects on his life and achievements, justifying his schemes, deceptions and crimes. Would we have done the same in his place? Maybe, if civilization depended on it.

I particularly like the two Prefaces, in which author, citing fake scholars and non-existent institutions, persuades us that this work of fiction has been translated from an ancient manuscript found in a monastery. I have used the same trick myself.