Rubicon

The book gallops along, with prose that is compelling and deftly joins threads of narrative to keep its reader engaged as it tells its story. That very success is what undermines it as a historical text, for it highlights those things that are convenient to its story, and insinuations are made freely and motivation is ascribed and people characterized where scant evidence exists. This isn't to say that opinions and conjectures have no place in history but that a scholarly work ought to delineated them; when given equal weight to strongly-established fact and not highlighted as speculation, the author's biases or need for a coherent story makes it more difficult for the reader to understand whether what they have read can reasonably be called a reliable account. Whether or not some of these suppositions and interpretations are reasonable is beside the point—the end result is a narrative that tries to sell certain feeling over debatable truth, one that does not trust its reader to draw their own conclusions.

Holland channels many of the authors he has surely read such as Suetonius and Herodotus who— first and foremost—wanted to tell a story that characterized important rulers or explained general developments. Chronicling events as they happened or sticking to what provable was, at best, a secondary consideration. Their books, like this one, certainly have value, but ought to be examined in conjunction with other sources that are less concerned with neat narratives, easy-to-follow plots, and storytelling.