The Eternal City: A History of Rome by Ferdinand Addis
Review of The Eternal City: A History of Rome by Ferdinand Addis
The Eternal City: A History of Rome by Ferdinand Addis (2018). Published by Pegasus Books.
Once upon a time, I took an Italian class in high school and began to fall in love with Italy.
Unfortunately for ninth grade me, the county ended up cutting the Italian language program and I was forced to take online Mandarin again (which I loved Mandarin, so it wasn’t too disappointing, but it was sad to cut my newfound career in Italian language so short).
I never did forget the magic of the glimpses we got in the films we watched in that class and within our 1990s Italian textbooks, so when I saw this book on my library shelf many years later, it caught my interest immediately.
This is a very thick book, clocking in at six-hundred and thirty-two pages, and it covers the bulk of the history of Rome, starting from its mythological beginnings all the way up to the cinematic depictions of it in the 1960s.
We quite literally dissect what made Rome, well, Rome, and the Italian and foreign mythology built around this vast, historical city. It’s a very fascinating book! With that being said, I feel like this is a proper intro, so let’s get into this review.
Content
Before we get into the meat of this review, if you’re expecting a textbook about how Rome was viewed with all of the nuances and nuts and bolts, then this isn’t the book for you.
In six hundred pages, you can only really scrape the surface of what it meant to live in Rome, and often the chapters focus on a specific person or political event going on at the time, such as the life of Julius Caesar, or the plays of a particular Roman playwright alive during the time of Hannibal. It is this political event or human that leads us to skip hundreds of years in the future or the past, providing a holistic view of Rome’s history.
I found the inclusion of history through the eyes of creatives in some chapters to be the highlight that motivated me to keep going. As a writer myself, it’s quite interesting to back into one city’s history through the eyes of a film, poem, or play. I mention the time of Hannibal being included as an event included in this book, but it’s specifically told interwoven with the tale of a playwright during that time.
As mentioned in the book, most people in Rome had a son or husband lost during one of Hannibal’s pillages of the republic, and so a dark shadow was cast over the city for some time. And so this playwright, Plautus, chose to capitalize on the moments that were being created outside of the city.
He wrote a play about Carthaginians and Greeks, depicting them as the way that Romans tended to see them, and exacerbated stereotypes that were prominent during the time. He also wrote a play about a father and son, separated by the madman Hannibal’s antics, being tearfully reunited, moving the audience to weep.
There’s also a lot of content covered in this book, which can be overwhelming at times and you’re going to need to take it slow. There are so many characters that are big names pivotal to the creation of the myth of Rome, so when you see them all together in this one book, only separated by decades and centuries, it’s a lot.
The writing itself isn’t tough to read; Addis knows how to write history in a way that’s engaging for someone who may not be an avid reader of history books, so I can see how this can appeal to someone who doesn’t even like history as much.
You won’t even believe that some of these events actually occurred, because there’s so many big and wack things occurring just in this one city. As an American born into a colonial town, stepping foot into a place with so much history seems unreal, another world away.
Overall Thoughts
It’s a fun read, something that I wouldn’t expect to read within five sittings because of how dense the content is. It’s enjoyable, it’s informative, and it would be something anyone interested in the arts, politics, and setting of Rome would want to read. I don’t think I’d purchase a copy of the book for my personal collection, but I will instead check it out at my local library whenever I want to be able to access the goldmine of information that it provides.
