Rome lasted for more than a thousand years, from a village of shepherds on the Tiber to an empire that stretched from Scotland to Syria. Along the way, it produced some of history’s greatest drama: the fall of the Republic, the murder of Caesar, the madness of emperors, and the legions holding the frontiers against the world.
This list picks 23 of the best novels about ancient Rome, from the classics that defined the genre to modern favorites. It moves through Roman history in order, from the legends of Rome’s founding to the last great general of the Roman East. Every entry is a novel set in the Roman world, and every summary is spoiler-free.
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Quick Picks
| If you want… | Read |
|---|---|
| The greatest Roman novel | I, Claudius |
| The fall of the Republic in full | The First Man in Rome |
| A political thriller | Imperium |
| A disaster thriller | Pompeii |
| A witty mystery | The Silver Pigs |
| Legions and battles | Under the Eagle |
| A literary masterpiece | Memoirs of Hadrian |
| A woman’s view of Rome | Cleopatra’s Daughter |
| Roman Britain | The Eagle of the Ninth |
| A fast, easy start | The Gates of Rome |
For the wider ancient world, including Greece, Egypt, and the Near East, see our ancient world historical fiction hub.
Legend and the Republic (Before 27 BC)
For nearly five centuries, Rome was a republic, ruled by elected magistrates and a Senate of great families. The last hundred years, when ambitious generals tore the system apart, have produced more great historical fiction than almost any other period.
1. Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin (2008)
Setting: Latium, in the legendary age before Rome
In Virgil’s Aeneid, Lavinia is the Latin princess whose marriage to the Trojan hero Aeneas will found the Roman people, and she never speaks a word. Le Guin gives her a voice. Lavinia tells the story herself, from her childhood in her father’s kingdom to the arrival of the Trojan ships, and she knows she exists partly because a poet will one day write about her.
This is the most unusual book on the list: a novel about Rome’s founding myth that is also a meditation on storytelling. It won the Locus Award, and it is a beautiful way into the world the Romans imagined for their own beginnings.
Perfect for readers who love: myth retold from a woman’s point of view, lyrical prose, and the Aeneid.
2. The First Man in Rome by Colleen McCullough (1990)
Setting: Rome and its wars, from 110 BC
Gaius Marius is a brilliant general from the countryside whom Rome’s old families will never accept. Lucius Cornelius Sulla is an aristocrat so poor he cannot enter politics. McCullough follows both men as they rise, and as their ambitions begin to bend the rules of the Republic.
This is the first of the seven Masters of Rome novels, which together tell the story of the Republic’s last decades in more depth than any other fiction. The books are long and detailed, with maps, glossaries, and McCullough’s own drawings, and readers who commit to them rarely regret it. See our Masters of Rome reading order for all seven books.
Perfect for readers who love: political depth, long series, and the Republic’s great rivalries.
3. The Gates of Rome by Conn Iggulden (2003)
Setting: Rome in the early 1st century BC
Two boys grow up together on a country estate outside Rome: Gaius, the son of the house, and Marcus, a boy of unknown family. Trained by a veteran gladiator, they are drawn into the violence of Roman politics as Marius and Sulla fight for control of the city. Readers will soon realize who Gaius is going to become.
Iggulden changes history freely for the sake of the story and says so in his historical notes, and the result is one of the most gripping Roman adventures around. It opens the five-book Emperor series. See our Emperor series reading order and our Conn Iggulden author page.
Perfect for readers who love: coming-of-age stories, fast pacing, and Julius Caesar.
4. Roman Blood by Steven Saylor (1991)
Setting: Rome in 80 BC
A young lawyer named Cicero has taken on a dangerous case: defending a man accused of murdering his own father, at a time when the dictator Sulla rules Rome by fear. Cicero hires Gordianus the Finder, a man who makes his living uncovering secrets, to find out what really happened.
The case is real, and Cicero’s actual speech for the defense survives. Saylor turns it into a sharp mystery and the first of his Roma Sub Rosa novels, which follow Gordianus through the last decades of the Republic and end with The Throne of Caesar. See our Roma Sub Rosa reading order for the full series, and our Steven Saylor author page.
Perfect for readers who love: detective stories, real trials, and Rome’s dark underside.
5. Spartacus: The Gladiator by Ben Kane (2012)
Setting: Southern Italy in 73 BC
A Thracian warrior who once served Rome is sold into slavery and sent to the gladiator school at Capua. Kane follows Spartacus from the training ground to the breakout that began the most famous slave revolt in history, with the Roman legions marching south to crush it.
Kane was a veterinarian before he became a novelist, and he writes Roman warfare with a love of detail and a real sense of what it cost. The story concludes in Spartacus: Rebellion. See our Ben Kane author page for his other Roman series.
Perfect for readers who love: gladiators, underdogs, and battle scenes.
6. Imperium by Robert Harris (2006)
Setting: Rome from 79 BC
Cicero is a brilliant lawyer from a small town, with no famous ancestors, no army, and no fortune. All he has is his voice. The story is told by Tiro, his secretary, who records every speech, deal, and betrayal as Cicero sets his sights on the highest office in Rome.
Harris turns Roman politics into a thriller, and the courtroom scenes are as exciting as any battle. Imperium opens a trilogy that continues in Conspirata and Dictator. See our Cicero trilogy reading order and our Robert Harris author page.
Perfect for readers who love: political thrillers, courtroom drama, and clever underdogs.
7. The Memoirs of Cleopatra by Margaret George (1997)
Setting: Egypt and Rome, 69 to 30 BC
Cleopatra tells her own story, from her childhood in the palace at Alexandria to her alliances with the two most powerful Romans of her age. George presents her not as the seductress of legend but as a clever, educated ruler trying to protect her kingdom from a Rome that wants to swallow it.
At nearly 1,000 pages, this is a big commitment, and it offers a completely different perspective on the fall of the Republic. For more novels set in Egypt and the Near East, see our list of the best ancient Middle East historical fiction.
Perfect for readers who love: powerful queens, first-person epics, and Egypt.
8. The Ides of March by Thornton Wilder (1948)
Setting: Rome in the months before March 44 BC
Wilder tells the story of Caesar’s last months entirely through letters, diary entries, reports, and poems, written by Caesar himself, his friends, and his enemies. Clodia, Cicero, Catullus and Cleopatra all have a say, and together they build a portrait of a man at the height of his power.
Wilder openly rearranges the timing of real events to suit his story, so this is a novel of ideas more than a history lesson. It is short, elegant, and very different from anything else on the list.
Perfect for readers who love: letters and diaries, character studies, and literary classics.
Augustus and the Julio-Claudians (27 BC to AD 68)
Augustus turned the Republic into an empire while claiming to restore it. His family ruled Rome for the next century, and their story of power, ambition, and poison has fascinated novelists ever since.
9. Augustus by John Williams (1972)
Setting: Rome and its world, 44 BC to AD 14
A sickly eighteen-year-old learns that his great-uncle Julius Caesar has been murdered and has named him his heir. Williams tells how that young man became Augustus, Rome’s first emperor, entirely through letters, memoirs, and documents written by the people around him, and finally in his own voice.
Williams is best known today for Stoner, and Augustus shows the same quiet, precise style on a much bigger stage. It shared the National Book Award for Fiction in 1973.
Perfect for readers who love: literary fiction, multiple voices, and portraits of power.
10. Cleopatra’s Daughter by Michelle Moran (2009)
Setting: Rome from 30 BC
After the fall of Egypt, Cleopatra’s young twins, Selene and Alexander, are brought to Rome as prisoners of Octavian. They grew up in his sister Octavia’s household, surrounded by the family that destroyed their own.
Moran shows Augustan Rome through the eyes of an outsider, a clever girl from a conquered kingdom learning to survive. It is an accessible, fast-moving story that works well for older teenagers and adults alike.
Perfect for readers who love: young heroines, the aftermath of Cleopatra, and court intrigue.
11. Eagles at War by Ben Kane (2015)
Setting: Germany in AD 9
Arminius is a German chieftain who has served in Rome’s army and knows its methods. The Roman governor Varus trusts him completely. Kane follows the Roman soldiers and their commander as they march into the forests of Germania toward one of Rome’s worst defeats.
This is the first of Kane’s Eagles of Rome trilogy, and the story of the Teutoburg Forest has rarely been told with more tension.
Perfect for readers who love: military fiction, betrayal, and the Roman frontier.
12. I, Claudius by Robert Graves (1934)
Setting: Rome from about 10 BC to AD 41
Claudius stammers, limps, and twitches, and his own family treats him as an idiot. That turns out to be the best protection in a family where ambition and poison can end anyone’s life. Written as Claudius’s secret history, the novel covers the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius, and Caligula.
Graves drew on the Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius, and nearly a century later, I, Claudius is still the novel most readers name as the best ever written about Rome. Its sequel, Claudius the God, covers Claudius’s own reign. The pair won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and became the celebrated 1976 BBC series I, Claudius with Derek Jacobi. Both novels are available together in one volume.
Perfect for readers who love: palace intrigue, dark humor, and unforgettable narrators.
13. Ben-Hur by Lew Wallace (1880)
Setting: Judea and the Roman East in the early 1st century AD
Judah Ben-Hur is a Jewish prince in Jerusalem whose childhood friend, Messala, returns as a proud Roman officer. A single accident turns their friendship into enmity and sends Judah on a journey that takes him from the galleys to the great chariot race at Antioch.
Subtitled A Tale of the Christ, Ben-Hur was one of the best-selling novels of the 19th century. The 1959 film Ben-Hur won 11 Academy Awards. The prose is old-fashioned, but the story still works.
Perfect for readers who love: revenge stories, epic adventure, and classic literature.
14. Under the Eagle by Simon Scarrow (2000)
Setting: Germany and Britain, AD 42 to 43
Cato is a bookish young recruit who joins the Second Legion as an optio, an officer rank he has not earned in the field. Macro is the tough veteran centurion who has to train him to become a soldier. As Emperor Claudius prepares to invade Britain, the unlikely pair is sent on a secret mission.
This is the first of Scarrow’s Eagles of the Empire series, which has run to more than 20 books. It is fast, funny, and full of action, and Macro and Cato are one of the great double acts in the genre. See our Eagles of the Empire reading order and our Simon Scarrow author page.
Perfect for readers who love: army life, friendship, and long action series.
15. The Confessions of Young Nero by Margaret George (2017)
Setting: Rome, AD 37 to the early years of Nero’s reign
History remembers Nero as a monster. George lets him tell his own story, starting with a childhood full of danger in which his mother, Agrippina, is both his protector and his greatest threat. The novel follows him as he grows up in Claudius’s palace and comes to the throne at seventeen.
George makes Nero a sensitive, artistic young man trapped in a family where everyone is a threat. The story continues in The Splendor Before the Dark. For a different take on the same emperor, see our reading order for Conn Iggulden’s Nero Trilogy.
Perfect for readers who love: unexpected points of view, dangerous mothers, and imperial families.
The Flavians and the High Empire (AD 69 to 180)
After the Julio-Claudians fell, a new dynasty restored order, and the empire reached its greatest size. These novels move from the streets of Rome to the frontiers of Britain.
16. The Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davis (1989)
Setting: Rome and Britain in AD 70
Marcus Didius Falco is a private informer who lives in a sixth-floor walk-up, owes rent to a terrifying landlord, and would rather not work for the new emperor, Vespasian. A case involving stolen silver ingots sends him to the lead mines of Britain and brings him into the path of Helena Justina, a senator’s daughter.
Davis’s Falco novels mix witty first-person narration with detailed research about everyday Roman life, and The Silver Pigs is the first of 20. Falco’s adopted daughter later takes over in the Flavia Albia series. See our Falco reading order, our Flavia Albia reading order, and our Lindsey Davis author page, or visit Lindsey Davis’s official website.
Perfect for readers who love: humor, hardboiled detectives, and daily life in Rome.
17. Pompeii by Robert Harris (2003)
Setting: The Bay of Naples in AD 79
Marcus Attilius Primus is a young engineer sent to take charge of the great aqueduct that supplies the towns around the Bay of Naples. The water is failing, the previous engineer has vanished, and the ground under Mount Vesuvius is behaving strangely.
Harris builds the tension hour by hour, and he makes Roman engineering fascinating. Readers know what is coming, and that only makes the countdown more gripping.
Perfect for readers who love: thrillers, disaster stories, and Roman engineering.
18. Mistress of Rome by Kate Quinn (2010)
Setting: Rome in the reign of Domitian
Thea is a Jewish slave girl owned by a spoiled young heiress. Arius is a gladiator who has become the idol of the Colosseum. When their paths cross, they attract the attention of the most dangerous man in Rome, the emperor himself.
Quinn’s first novel is full of drama, romance, and danger, and it opens her Empress of Rome series, followed by Daughters of Rome and Lady of the Eternal City. See our Kate Quinn author page, and for more novels led by women, the best historical fiction with female leads.
Perfect for readers who love: gladiators, romance, and tyrants.
19. Medicus by Ruth Downie (2006)
Setting: Deva (Chester) in Roman Britain, early 2nd century AD
Gaius Petreius Ruso is an army doctor who has come to Britain to escape his debts and his divorce. Within days, he has bought an injured slave girl he cannot afford, and he has started asking questions about the deaths of local women, questions that nobody wants answered.
Downie writes with a gentle, dry humor, and Ruso’s grumbling decency makes him great company. This is the first of a long series, and it shows Roman Britain from the doctor’s tent rather than the battlefield.
Perfect for readers who love: funny mysteries, medicine, and Roman Britain.
20. The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff (1954)
Setting: Roman Britain in the early 2nd century AD
Years ago, the Ninth Legion marched into northern Britain and never came back. Marcus Flavius Aquila, whose father commanded it, is a young officer whose own army career has ended. With Esca, a British former slave, he travels beyond Hadrian’s Wall to find out what happened to the legion and its lost eagle standard.
Written for young readers, Sutcliff’s novel has been loved by adults for 70 years. Her Roman Britain is full of mist, heather, and quiet tension, and the friendship between Marcus and Esca is at its heart. It was filmed as The Eagle in 2011.
Perfect for readers who love quests, cross-cultural friendship, and the edge of the empire.
21. Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar (1951)
Setting: The Roman Empire in the 2nd century AD
Hadrian, now old and ill, writes a long letter to the young man who will one day become the emperor Marcus Aurelius. In it, he looks back over his life: his education, his travels, his wars and his peace, his love for the young Antinous, and what it means to rule the world.
Yourcenar spent decades on this book, and it is one of the great novels of the 20th century, written in prose of rare beauty and wisdom. In 1980, she became the first woman elected to the Académie française. Of all the books here, this is the one to read slowly.
Perfect for readers who love: literary fiction, philosophy, and the inner life of historical figures.
The Late Empire (AD 180 to 565)
In its final centuries, the empire split in two, converted to Christianity, and fought for survival. The Western Empire fell, but the Eastern Roman Empire fought on for a thousand years more.
22. Julian by Gore Vidal (1964)
Setting: The Roman Empire in the 4th century AD
Julian grew up a prisoner in the Christian court of his cousin Constantius, the survivor of a family massacre, and secretly devoted to the old gods and to Greek philosophy. Vidal tells his story through Julian’s memoir, with sharp comments from two old friends who knew him.
This is a novel about religion and power at the moment Rome turned Christian, told with Vidal’s trademark wit. It is one of the best novels ever written about the late Roman world.
Perfect for readers who love: ideas, religious conflict, and clever narrators.
23. Count Belisarius by Robert Graves (1938)
Setting: The Eastern Roman Empire in the 6th century AD
Belisarius is the most talented and loyal general of the emperor Justinian, fighting to win back the lost western half of the Roman Empire. At home in Constantinople, he has to deal with an emperor who is jealous of his success.
Four years after I, Claudius, Graves turned to the other end of Roman history, and the result is an epic of war, loyalty, and court politics that is too often forgotten. It makes a fitting final chapter for the story of Rome.
Perfect for readers who love: great generals, Byzantium, and I, Claudius.
Honourable Mentions
- The Throne of Caesar by Steven Saylor (2018): Gordianus investigates in the days before the Ides of March. The chronological end of Roma Sub Rosa.
- The Forgotten Legion by Ben Kane (2008): Roman soldiers lost in the far east of the known world, after the disaster at Carrhae.
- A Day of Fire (2014): Six authors, including Kate Quinn, tell interlinked stories of Pompeii’s final day.
Love the Greek World Too?
These novels are set in ancient Greece rather than in Rome, but readers of Roman fiction often love them.
- The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (2011): The Trojan War through the eyes of Patroclus. See our Madeline Miller author page.
- Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield (1998): The Spartans at Thermopylae. See our Steven Pressfield author page.
Where to Start
If you are new to Roman fiction, start with Pompeii or The Eagle of the Ninth. Both are short, gripping, and easy to follow. If you want politics, try Imperium before taking on the Masters of Rome. For mystery, start with The Silver Pigs or Roman Blood. And once you know the period, read I, Claudius and Memoirs of Hadrian, the two great classics of Roman fiction.
Many of the novels above open long series. Our guide to the best historical fiction series can help you pick your next one, and our historical fiction for beginners guide is a good place to start if the genre is new to you.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best historical fiction book about ancient Rome?
I, Claudius by Robert Graves is the novel most often named as the best ever written about Rome, and it is still widely read more than 90 years after it was published. Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar is its great literary rival. For the Republic, The First Man in Rome by Colleen McCullough is the most detailed.
What is the best Roman historical fiction series?
Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome is the most complete fictional history of the late Republic, told across seven long novels. For mysteries, Lindsey Davis’s Falco novels and Steven Saylor’s Roma Sub Rosa are the favorites. For army life, Simon Scarrow’s Eagles of the Empire is the longest-running military series.
Are Roman historical novels accurate?
It depends on the author. Colleen McCullough and Robert Harris stay close to the historical record, and Robert Graves drew heavily on the Roman historians. Conn Iggulden changes history more freely for the sake of the story and explains his changes in his historical notes. Most good Roman novels end with a note separating fact from invention.
What is the difference between Roman Republic and Roman Empire fiction?
Republic novels, set before 27 BC, focus on elections, the Senate, lawyers and rival generals, with figures such as Marius, Sulla, Cicero and Caesar. Empire novels, set after Augustus took power, focus on emperors and their families, palace intrigue, and the armies on the frontiers.
What are good Roman novels with female main characters?
Try Cleopatra’s Daughter by Michelle Moran, The Memoirs of Cleopatra by Margaret George, Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin, and Mistress of Rome by Kate Quinn. Lindsey Davis’s Flavia Albia mysteries also feature a woman investigator in Domitian’s Rome.
What Roman historical fiction is set in Britain?
The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff, Medicus by Ruth Downie, and The Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davis are all partly or wholly set in Roman Britain. Simon Scarrow’s early Eagles of the Empire novels follow the Roman invasion of Britain.
Is I, Claudius hard to read?
Not really. It uses many Roman names, and a family tree helps, but Claudius is a chatty, funny narrator, and the story moves quickly. Readers who enjoy family dramas and political intrigue usually find it gripping.
What is a good Roman novel for teenagers?
The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff was written for young readers and suits them best. Cleopatra’s Daughter by Michelle Moran and The Gates of Rome by Conn Iggulden are also popular with older teenagers.