Review: The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic

The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic by Mike Duncan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I took four years of Latin in high school, and I’ve read my Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, so I have a sense of the outline of Roman history. Maybe even more. For what it’s worth, I’ve been a fan of the Gracchus brothers since I first heard about them, and I find the image of a great and ruthless empire – something that figures so deeply in so much schlock fantasy – intriguing.

Mike Duncan shares that sense, and knows his material vastly better than I do. As he tells us in his introduction, he didn’t want to write another history of the dawn of the empire – something that’s been done a lot – but instead wanted to write about the upheavals that made it possible for men like Julius Caesay, Marc Antony, and Pompey to rise to the power that Augustus would eventually claim.

What’s more, he underscores that impulse by inviting us to consider the uncomfortably obvious question of anyone writing such a boo at this historical moment: is this the beginning of the end of our democratic experiment?

I’m glad that Duncan leaves that question in the background; once he plants it, he leaves it to us to answer. And I appreciate the way he weaves as much material together as he does. Still, while I enjoyed this and have found it leading me on to more popular history, I have two concerns.

First, and most concerning to me, we don’t get much sense of where Duncan is getting his material. I believe that the story of telling the story – when the story in question is history – has to be part of the story. I know there are important historians like Appia and Cassius Dio who left records from generations close to these crises, but I want to see how Duncan is drawing on them. There are things he asserts, but I want to know what gives him license to do so.

I listened to this, so it’s possible – even likely, given the general skill of the work – that the written version offers footnotes that would explain such things. Still, as I experienced it, that fundamental question of historiography is an omission.

Second, I think Duncan might have done more to digest this for us. When I shared a failed draft of my own gangster history with an agent, he urged me to rewrite with a sense that someone in the account would have to be a role for Robert DeNiro or Al Pacino. That rankled, but it helped. So I ask here, who would Brad Pitt play in this story?

As it happens, there are two or three possibilities: the Gracchus brothers, Marius, and Sulla in particular. They’re the central individuals here, and each gets multiple chapters of narrative and description.

As Duncan proceeds, though, these “main characters” get tossed alongside many much more minor ones. We’ll hear about their lieutenants or adversaries for a while, but they’ll be relevant mostly in relation to these major figures. I think this might have been more successful, that is, if it were built more around the personalities who rose to the fore rather than around the larger narrative as it moves forward.

Again, though, I did enjoy this. It has sent me to many a Wikipedia article in the last couple days, and I’ve appreciated this deep dive into a history that’s long drawn me.


View all my reviews