Current nonfiction reading is The Roman World War: From the Ides of March to Cleopatra's Suicide by Giusto Traina (Princeton UP, 2026; originally published in French in 2022). Traina's stated goal is to apply the concept of global histories to the last years of the Roman Republic, looking beyond the Romans themselves to the peoples on their borders -- Gauls, Numidians, Dacians, and Cappadocians, among others. He's particularly interested in restoring the Parthian Empire to its proper role in history as a major geopolitical player, not just a loose confederation of nomads for Rome to campaign against. It's an admirable goal, but not an easy one to attain: our literary sources for the period, both in Latin and in Greek, regard non-Roman peoples as "peripheral" in both a spatial and an evaluative sense. Traina counters this tendency by drawing on the widest possible range of literary sources, both the obvious (Cicero's letters and speeches; the Res Gestae of Augustus) and the largely untapped (Nicolaus of Damascus; Pompeius Trogus).
For the most part, the work is successful. Traina is a capable prose stylist, with a particular knack for illuminating the careers of supposedly "minor" figures like Sextus Pompey. One wishes, however, that he had looked beyond texts a bit more often. While he occasionally draws on inscriptions and coins, archaeological evidence is conspicuously lacking. Granted, Traina himself is not an archaeologist, but he might at least have touched on the vast and ever-increasing body of scholarship in that field. In the absence of written records from most of the peoples with whom Rome came in contact, material culture is often the best window we have into their way of life. (To see just what can be done from this perspective, check out The Barbarians Speak by Peter Wells.)
Still, Traina is to be commended for rejecting the established paradigm and refusing to treat Roman politics in isolation from its broader Mediterranean context. His book occupies an honorable place in historiography's recent "global turn".
