Books like The Last Legion — picked by fans

The end of the Empire has had me gripped since I was a boy.

Eagle in the Snow catapults you right into the dying state and right to its edge. I found myself walking the imperial borders in snowbound Germania, wondering if and when the Roman world was about to collapse beneath my feet.

It is one of those novels that leaves you feeling like you’ve lived another life, and that feeling has stayed with me ever since. A magical piece of historical fiction.

This account of history gives wings to the late Roman Empire and Byzantium.

Don’t expect: a dry list of dates and details of each event that happened in sequence. Do expect: to be unable to sleep as you read Norwich’s graphic descriptions of some of the most hair-raising twists of the Byzantine court.

I kept turning the pages all night, and during the day I couldn’t wait to get back to bed in the evening and delve back into that world. It’s enthralling and educational all at once!

What if Rome never fell? That was enough to sell me this book, and into a vastly changed, modern-day Roman state I ventured.

The story tugs and tests your expectations – for much of the Roman world has become, by necessity, similar to our own, governed by technology, bureaucracy, and dominated by worldwide trade. But at its kernel, the age-old facets of imperial Rome remain – Praetorian Guards, devious intrigue… and crucifixion!

Rome fell to the barbarians. Did it? I have always enjoyed examining this and other suggested reasons for the empire’s fall, and have never quite been able to pinpoint any one cause.

In this book, the aptly named Barbero dissects the reality of what we mean by ‘barbarian’, and paints a rich picture of time and geography to chart out the emergence, movement, and net effect on imperial Rome of tribes like the Visigoths, the Vandals, the Franks, the Alans, the Huns, and many, many more.

I found that the investigation raised more questions than answers, and that only made the puzzle of Rome’s fall even more intriguing.

Nobilissima swept me into a time of historical upheaval--the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire. And I watched events unfold through the eyes of a real historical figure, Placidia, sister to the outrageously incompetent Roman emperor, and an influential leader in her own right. This fast-paced, well-researched novel begins with the city of Rome encircled by Germanic invaders. Soon, Placidia is abducted by the Goths, with astonishing consequences. Bedford portrays Placidia as a warm person, loyal to her friends and followers, but also as a leader capable of making hard decisions, and I cheered for her as she steered a survival course for her beloved Roman Empire. By the end, I couldn’t help wishing that history might have turned out differently.

While researching the fifth century for my first novel, I found a trio of powerful women who became the protagonists in my historical novel series. Roman Princess Galla Placidia was taken hostage by the Goths when they sacked Rome in 410. She returned to court to rule during the twilight of the Western Roman Empire. Empress Placidia held the empire together against rebel generals and ravaging hordes of barbarians.

Her long life was filled with romance, danger, political intrigue, and inevitable loss. Her tale is chronicled in this “biographical essay” which is over 300 pages of readable scholarly work. This book is close to my heart because I had to physically go to the New York Public Library and take notes before I found a used print copy. Thank you NYPL!

Peter Heather’s work is one of the broadest in scope on the topic of the European ‘Barbarians’, while still retaining enough detail to keep the reader’s attention pinned. A great starter for this period of history, encompassing the entire first millennium AD, the time when the heart of European civilization gradually moved from the Mediterranean South to the cold Barbarian North. It reads like a novel – but is supported by years of painstaking research. If you can only read one book on Barbarian Europe, this is the book.

No other book has inspired my own work as much as this one, although it is about far more than the history of Sicily.

McCormick found extensive evidence for travel and communication in the early medieval Mediterranean—a period in which it was previously thought that long-distance trade had all but stopped after the decline of the Roman Empire.

McCormick’s method was to collect every tiny anecdote he could find about something or someone that went from one place to another across the Sea. All these tidbits of data added up to something huge, and showed clearly that travel and exchange across the Mediterranean did not end when the Roman Empire did. To the contrary, the Mediterranean Sea in these centuries was teeming with people of all faiths, carrying coins and packages of trade goods on ships sailing between Christian and Muslim controlled regions.

His method, of collating masses of data… show more.

When I was finally allowed to specialize in Ancient History in the third year of my BA degree, this included a survey of Ancient Greece, supervised by no less a figure than Professor (later Sir) Moses Finley.

One of his recommendations for reading was Adkins' book, listed here, a key point of which is that virtue is not absolute but depends on a society's socio-economic development level. In Archaic Greece, the "good" man was not the one whom later Greeks, and ourselves, would call "good" by virtue of moral rectitude but the one who could, by brute force if necessary, protect his family and community in troubled times: a telling corrective to historical "presentism."

I don’t read historical fiction as a rule, so this one is a departure for me; and it’s not a traditional crime-fighting story either, but it hooked me from the first page.

I loved the concept of a matriarchal Roman Empire transported to Middle Europe and pulled forward into the twenty-first century. Then I discovered a main protagonist who has been brought up in America and has to come to grips with the fact that she is a member of the ruling family and a soldier at that. The crimes she and her sister officers fight against are political and conspiratorial, but they are crimes nonetheless.

A fascinating approach to history and a great way to reverse the stereotypes and make strong women the norm.