'The Eternal City' chronicles Rome's inimitable history
The city of Rome has been inviting epic histories considerably longer than it has actually warranted them, and the historians involved have a whole gamut of approaches. Ennius wrote the story in execrable verse; Livy worked most of his life on a stirring prose portrait of "the life and beliefs of the state, the men and manners through which wars were won and culture widened;" Flavio Biondo combined larger theoretical questions with painstaking analysis of original sources. Edward Gibbon combined a wariness of Christianity with
