When I was about 12 years old, my father came home from work with a Roman coin he’d bought for me. It was very worn, with a barely visible profile of a Roman emperor’s head on one side. But I was totally fascinated by the sudden realisation that this coin had existed for a length of time I was struggling to imagine. It belonged to a truly amazing world of emperors, vast buildings, epic wars, villains, and heroes. And I could hold a part of it in my hand!
Roman history is a hotch-potch made up from every, or indeed, any source that historians and archaeologists have been able to get their hands on. There’s no one-stop ancient source of Roman history, no great Roman text-book that we can pick up and start with. Even the Romans were more than a bit hazy about how their world had come together. They had historians, but most of what got written down hasn’t survived. Even the works we do have are usually incomplete. What we do know is that the further the Romans looked back into their past, the more they had to fill in the gaps with myth and hearsay.