I love this series. It is so historically accurate yet fictional. McCullough is gifted in her making Rome come alive

Historical fiction is a big term, and it can be many things. I love it when it's a real history lesson - with all the correct names and dates and battles and alliances and family lineage - with the addition of living, breathing characters. The First Man in Rome is just that kind of book - something that adds life to an important and fascinating piece of our world's history. Colleen McCullough has done her homework, and in so doing, has made ancient Rome real and memorable in a way my high school world history teacher never could. The historical fact was the shining star here; the character interactions were fictional and therefore were given less attention.

The book begins before the very famous Julius Caesar is born; we get to know his grandparents and meet his father at a young age. Its primary focus is the height of the career of Gaius Marius. This is the first book in a series, so some story lines were left hanging, and to see what happens to some key characters, including the infant Julius Caesar, the reader needs to continue the series.

I enjoyed learning about the Republic, how the vast territories were governed, how politicians were elected, how wealth was achieved, how family dynamics worked, the corruption, the architecture, the mustering of an army, etc. It's fascinating to take a look at the workings of a functioning (thriving!) democracy 2000+ years ago. In addition to Gaius Marius, we have some wonderful characters: Lucius Cornelius Sulla is fascinating, Aurelia (the mother of Julius Caesar) is a strong, modern worman, and Publius Rutilius Rufus provides a charming and funny voice to the story.

The downside of this kind of fiction, and this book in particular, is that there are one zillion characters, each has 3-4 (or even 6) Latin names which are all similar to everyone else's 3-4 Latin names (did you know that all of the Julius Caesar families' daughters were named Julia?), and while some of the characters are great men (or great villains), others are not so interesting. The battle scenes can be very exciting - and very long. The politics, while intriguing and pertinent to our political environment today, are complex and often confusing. And while many things of historical impact happened, not all of them are necessarily interesting to read about. Colleen McCullough included every scrap of detail regarding this 10-year period in the book:

Overall, this was interesting, pertinent, entertaining. I liked it a lot. And I skimmed a lot.

"O Primeiro Homem de Roma" é o primeiro livro da série "Os Senhores de Roma" (8 livros), escrito pela australiana Colleen McCullough, e também o primeiro livro que li desta escritora.
É um "grande" livro em toda a acepção da palavra, por um lado é um volume de 900 páginas (na gíria, um "tijolo"), mas por outro é um livro fabuloso - uma obra prima!
Eu sou talvez suspeito, pois o romance histórico é o meu tipo de livro preferido. Mas para um amante de História, não posso deixar de me sentir fascinado pela riqueza que este livro contém.
A pesquisa feita pela autora foi descomunal e eu aprendi imensas coisas que desconhecia sobre a História de Roma, e mais especificamente sobre o último século da chamada República.
O tema do livro está baseado essencialmente na relação Mário e Sila, que eu recordava ter sido minimamente abordada nos meus tempos de estudante.
Mário (Caio Mário) e Sila (Lúcio Cornélio Sila) foram dois importantes chefes militares dessa época, dois amigos - nos tempos a que o livro se refere, e dois cunhados, que chegaram ao poder por métodos diferentes, como diferentes eram as suas origens.
Além do relato empolgante dos seus êxitos militares, também seguimos as suas carreiras políticas (neste livro essencialmente a de Mário), as suas vidas familiares, e de uma forma mais geral de toda a gente importante daquela época, e não só romana...
Mas é Roma, a cidade que deu nome a uma civilização e a um império, que nos é mostrada ao pormenor, nos seus mais diversos aspectos e de uma forma que não me canso de exaltar.
Um livro absolutamente colossal.

I’m no scholar but I wanted to learn more about Roman history. This was a perfect solution. The writing isn’t great but the book is packed with lots of validated history about Gaius Marius and the period between 110 BC and 100 BC. It’s a hefty book but very readable. Unfortunately there is no unabridged audio so I read it the old fashioned way.

I've read the entire Man in Rome series - TWICE. 900 plus pages per book. My all-time-favorite books. I'd read them all yet again should I feel so compelled. I tried to get them all in hard-bound so I could keep them for my grandson to read. I'm only missing the one I loaned out. (Dang, I shouldn't do that!)

In my opinion there is not a more definitive, comprehensive, and well researched set of novels written about the Roman Empire, Caesar in particular. Love history? Read, read, read!

The first installment in McCullough's masterpiece series set in the late Roman Republic, The First Man in Rome is absolutely brilliant historical fiction, perhaps the best such set in ancient Rome. This volume chronicles the rise of Gaius Marius, and of his friend and eventual rival, Lucius Cornelius Sulla. An absolute must-read for fans of ancient Rome.

I have read this 7-part series almost in one go and loved it! The books closely follow the actual events just before, during, and after Julius Caesar’s reign, while bringing it to life with imagined dialogues and character traits. It thus offers a great way to learn about Roman life in a format I found hard to resist, despite its unnecessary detail and unrefined prose.

At long last.

Whenever I decide to give a new author a shot, I tend to stay away from the doorstoppers. Nothing against long novels, but the possibility of a very long mediocrity isn't appealing with my to-read list bobbing at 60. That said, I have a deep fascination for late Republic/early Empire Roman material, fact or fiction, and so I was willing to throw the dice on this one, and the results as you can see were mixed.

From a story perspective, this is a tough review. Parts of the novel were terrific and others were more boring than church. Problem is, the characters like Sulla who were dynamic and interesting in the beginning shriveled and soured as chucks of pages flew by, resulting in wildly inconsistent execution. There were long stretches where it was difficult to discern what if anything the scene before us had to do with anything. And sure enough, after awhile, it became painfully clear that Colleen McCullough had zero idea what was necessary for the story and what wasn't. There are only so many ten-page letters an author can insert detailing the monotonous dealings of the Roman senate which don't so much as budge the cast one way or the other before the reader is skipping lines. And to my horror––my absolute dismay––I found that there was not a single solitary (real) battle sequence in this book, or any of the kind of historical detail and attention Ms. McCullough gave the personal and political aspects. The history of the world is written by the edge of a sword; had I known that this oversight was going to happen, I wouldn't have bothered.

Technically speaking, there were a couple of issues. First, McCullough could be charged with a felony for reckless overuse of the exclamation point. If there were a vote on it, I would cast mine for its removal from all American keyboards. Even relegating it to the Shift-1 position is too kind. Nothing turns ancient Rome into Leave it to Beaver faster, and there are plenty of effective ways to add emotion to dialogue without resorting to this. See? See? SEE. SEE!!!

As another reviewer pointed out, the dialogue is, I dare say, rather a little Victorian. None of the characters exhibit anything that sets them apart from one another, and aided by names like Marcus Metellus Numidicus Flavius Africanus Macedonicus, the secondary cast is especially indiscernible.

But the bottom line is simple. The book is long and after five hundred pages the word 'slogging' will suddenly be in vogue in your vocabulary. For a work so massive, there's far too little immediacy, and it takes on the characteristics of a novel more concerned with historical accuracy than storytelling. A hard balance to strike, yes, but you know it when you see it, and the results are typically as exciting as they are informative. I had a hard time rating this book. At times it was a four and others a one. But because I did feel as though I learned something, I can't be too harsh. Three stars.

Now that I have finished this hard work novel, I have mixed feelings about it. At times, it was so laborious that I almost could not keep going. However, the parts of the story that I enjoyed and the characterization kept me going. I gave it an overall four stars, even though I complained in the reviews I wrote as I was reading. I have the sequel, The Grass Crown, but I will not begin it anytime soon.

I just didn't care much for the book, not because I'm not interested in ancient Rome, but it just seemed like a not very literary pot-boiler. Compared to a book like Robert Graves' I Claudius, it becomes invisible.

One of my favourite HF novels. Introduction to the end of the Roman republic, two fascinating characters -- Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla (one of my favourite baddies who so great he's good!), and the Julius family, among others. A great read, lots of details, and helped to go a long way for me to understand ancient Rome -- and modern politics. Seriously.

For the complete review, please go here:
http://www.epinions.com/content_28655...

This wasn't originally on my list, but I've now made it my March read for my year-long Tome Topple challenge, because... #yolo.

This book is slow, highly-political, extremely intense, and loooooong. It’s clearly not for everyone. But I, for one, loved it.

Keep in mind that I went into this novel knowing nothing about this period of Rome – the rise of the general Gaius Marius, who was consul a record seven times – with back-to-back terms, and even some performed in absentia. Keep in mind that there was originally a law in Rome that you had to wait at least ten years between consular terms, and although this had been broken prior to Marius, he was the one who really bent this law and set a dangerous precedent – not just for politicians, but also for Roman generals.

Marius is also famous for being a ‘New Man’, that is, he came from a family that didn’t have an ancestor who had held the position of consul, and as such, was a highly divisive figure in Roman politics of the time (the novel spans the period from the 110s to the 90s). With Gaius Marius, we also start to see the rise of the power that Roman generals accumulate in the late republic, which of course culminates in Julius Caeser (who is, coincidently, Marius’ nephew).

Not just focusing on Marius, ‘First Man in Rome’ also concentrates on the rise of Lucius Cornelius Sulla – again, an unknown figure to me prior to reading this novel – another powerful figure during this period of Rome. Sulla actually plays a much bigger political role in the sequel to ‘First Man’, ‘The Grass Crown’, but that doesn’t mean that his character is downplayed in any way in this novel. McCullough writes his character extremely well – a highly complicated character, who engages in some incredibly shady activity (*coughcough* murdering family members) without batting an eyelid, but yet you still somehow end up really liking the guy?

As well as Marius and Sulla, there are also a number of other characters that frequently recur – senators, and other highly prominent political figures of the day – and if you’re a newbie to this period like me, then I highly recommend keeping a pen and paper on hand to make notes of who people are and what their offices and roles are. McCullough does her best to distinguish her characters in some way that makes them individualised, but with so many prominent families who all have the same – if not similar names – it can still make your head spin and result in a bit of confusion in the early stages of the novel.

Being such a long novel (my kindle edition clocks in at over 1100 pages, although admittedly around 200 of these are glossaries, character lists and explanations of ancient sources), this novel is extremely slow paced. While there are a few battles – eg. the Jugurthine War in North Africa, the expulsion of the Germanic tribes who tried to invade northern Italy – the main part of the novel deals with Roman politics and the social situations during the decades that the novel covers. There is a lot of information that McCullough packs into her book, and those who are familiar with the Late Republic Period may find it very info-dump and many descriptions lengthy and unnecessary. While initially I felt similarly very early on, once I settled into the novel I really appreciated all the extra information that was added. Plus, McCullough tries to do all her really info-dumpy stuff in letters sent between characters. The character of Publius Rutilius Rufus, for one, a great friend of Gaius Marius, is often used by McCullough as a letter writer, informing both Marius and the reader about important events that have taken place in Rome and the Senate simultaneously to the campaigns against North Africans and the German tribes – events that we would not otherwise be privy to. The method does work for the most part, considering that the events are told by Publius Rutilius Rufus in an informal and somewhat gossipy manner, and also works to break up the text, however these letters can sometimes be pretty long, and I can definitely see how some readers might find them annoying – or even unnecessary.

Nevertheless, despite the length of this novel and the extremely intense subject material that it covers, I still found this highly enjoyable, and (while I can’t speak to the exact level of accuracy of McCullough’s Ancient Rome and her main characters of Marius and Sulla) I learnt an incredible amount from my reading experience. It’s so richly immersive, that you can’t help but be drawn in to the world that has been created. Immediately after I finished ‘First Man’ I downloaded its sequel, ‘The Grass Crown’ (which I’m currently reading at the time of writing this review), and this is definitely a series that I think will become one of my favourites as it develops throughout the rest of the installments.