this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2026
24 points (100.0% liked)
askchapo
23234 readers
83 users here now
Ask Hexbear is the place to ask and answer ~~thought-provoking~~ questions.
Rules:
-
Posts must ask a question.
-
If the question asked is serious, answer seriously.
-
Questions where you want to learn more about socialism are allowed, but questions in bad faith are not.
-
Try !feedback@hexbear.net if you're having questions about regarding moderation, site policy, the site itself, development, volunteering or the mod team.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm only a Rome nerd as far as I'm a Catholic (and to that end I don't really care too much about the 1st century BCE, I leave that to St Augustine) but I enjoyed this book.
It's not purely about the history of the Roman Republic, although that's the meat of the book. He also went into how class power and bourgeois historiography has distorted our understanding of the history of the late Roman Republic. He makes a pretty elegant point that bourgeois historians neglect to analyze the class inequality in antiquity because they don't want to engage in 'presentism' but their presentist bourgeois analytical lens is what gives them the tunnel vision to only look at history from Cicero's eyes. There's a lot of valuable historical materialist analysis in the book that can be taken and applied to the present.