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Maybe you feel like you’ve had your fill of world-historical days of dread and foreboding recently, but today is the anniversary of a true classic of the genre. The assassination of Gaius Julius Caesar on the 15th of March in 44 BCE has long been the focal point of unending fascination surrounding Rome’s transition from democracy to autocracy, and the figures who led it or lived through it (or didn’t).

So, whether you’re a longtime reader of the Romans, or have been brought to the subject by more recent concerns, here’s a list of books that will grandly edify (and, as a bonus, they make an attractive column).

Classicist Mary Beard’s most recent book is about that historic fascination, and how a two-millennia-long game of telephone has warped our understanding of the first men to rule the Roman Empire. Beard focuses on contemporaneous images and descriptions: minted on coins, carved into stone, and written in one of the most popular texts of the European Renaissance. The result is a book filled with beautiful images that touches on art, symbolism, history, and human understanding of ourselves and our past.

What was that book from the Renaissance that you pointedly left unnamed in the previous blurb, you ask? Why, it’s Suetonius’s account of the Roman emperors, pulled from the imperial archives and personal observation. This is one of the foundational books of history, literally.

Part of the sustained renown of Julius Caesar is that he was a writer, and here is another primary source. Caesar’s terse account of his own skill and ruthlessness in war is a telling document about how military success can be converted into fame and power.

This more recent survey of the Caesars by bestselling historian and professor Barry Strauss covers a wider timeframe, ranging from Augustus to Constantine. Strauss’s book has been lauded for its accessibility and ability to convey all the delightful details of the palace intrigue that often resulted in regicide; so many Caesars had short reigns.

Of course, they weren’t all short reigns. Augustus’s was the first and the longest, extending from 27 BCE to 14 CE. It’s generally thought that the republic died with Julius Caesar, but it took the formation of the Second Triumvirate and years of civil war before Octavian could best his rivals and “restore” control to the Senate, all the while consolidating power before taking the name Augustus. The first emperor has always been an enigma, but Adrian Goldsworthy does a masterful job at mapping Octavian’s actions and motivations, and rendering a clear picture of one of the most consequential humans ever to live.

Not everyone can be consequential by birth — or by adoption to a famous general, in Octavian’s case. Take Alaric, a Goth denied Roman citizenship in a time of intense xenophobia, who demonstrated great military prowess that went unrecognized (he should have written a book!). Alaric eventually got even by consolidating a Visigoth army, trying to play the two halves of the Empire against each other, and when the Romans could stop couping each other, he sacked Rome in 410. That plunder was the signal event in the fall of the Western Empire, and Douglas Boin shows how corruption and internal division can open doors for the marginalized and the martial.

Speaking of the fall of the Western Empire, this is the book. Or at least I’ve always been told that it is. I admit that I’ve never read it — and am too intimidated to even contemplate starting it — but as is the way with us indoor kids, I have a vicarious relationship to this book from other books. Most recently in the vivid descriptions of Gibbon writing it in Leo Damrosch’s The Club, or Winston Churchill reading it while deployed in India in William Manchester’s The Last Lion: Visions of Glory.

Julius Caesar 
by William Shakespeare

Like many products of the American school system, I was taught Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in high school. Fortunately for me, I had already discovered Shakespeare, largely thanks to Seattle’s robust Shakespeare in the Park network. I always feel bad for those for whom this was their introduction to one of history’s greatest writers, because I have long regarded this as one of his worst plays. Oh sure, there are unsurpassed heights of rhetoric, and I have repeatedly been dazzled by how effective the competing funeral orations of Brutus and Marc Antony are in performance, but it opens with incomprehensible puns about cobbling and the second half is an interminable slog. To be clear, I think you should definitely read significant portions of this play, and I always recommend the Folger Library editions for brushing up on your Shakespeare.

S.P.Q.R: A History of Ancient Rome 
by Mary Beard

I usually try to avoid repeats on these lists, but I had to include Mary Beard’s S.P.Q.R. Here, she deftly covers the span of centuries while explaining quotidian details of everyday life that help bring her grand vision into focus. Suetonius may have created the genre of history, but Beard has brought it to near-perfection, and given us a book that will last — and that’s saying a lot, given this list’s timescale.