Rubicon — Tom Holland

The last decades of the Roman Republic have been narrated so many times that the outcome can feel inevitable. Holland's method is to resist that — to return the politics to the men who made them, and to restore the contingency that participants actually felt. Caesar and Cicero are here, but so are the structural forces, the debt, the armies, the mob, that made the Republic's final convulsions something other than a simple story of ambition.