For students, teachers, or just people interested in history, there's no better time than now to see how to learn about Ancient Rome. This How-To will point out some of the best sources and methods for teaching (or teaching yourself!) the basics of this amazing civilization, which, along with Ancient Greece, has provided some of the foundations on which the Western world was built.

In Step 1, we'll examine some of the best primary sources that you can find online; that is, these will be Latin literature in translation, which have been typed out or scanned onto the Internet. Save yourself a trip to the library and check these out instead!

In Step 2, we'll look at some amazing secondary sources online; these are websites or articles about Rome and certain aspects of Roman culture and history, which usually rely heavily on the primary sources.

Finally, in Step 3, we'll run through some suggestions of books in print that may be of interest to the student of Ancient Rome. These will most likely be available online via your favorite bookseller like Amazon, ABEbooks, or Powells or, you can probably find them in your local library or university library.

You won't need anything special to follow along with this How-To, just an interest to explore Rome from her legendary foundation in 753 BC to her eventual (Western) fall in 476 AD.http://www.exovedate.com/ancient_timeline_p1.html http://www.exovedate.com/ancient_timeline_p1.html

One of the best things that a budding historian - or someone writing a research paper - can do is to visit the original sources of history. For Rome, we are lucky to have relatively complete works by the major historians (who were both Greeks and Romans). And, luckily, there are numerous websites which host these works in English translation.

First, you can find many works at the Internet Classics Archive.http://classics.mit.edu/ This formidable site hosts works by several Greek and Roman authors.http://classics.mit.edu/Browse/index.html You will want to check out pieces like Livy's "History of Rome", Augustus' "Deeds of the Divine Augustus" (also called the Res Gestae), Lucan's "Pharsalia", and even Caesar's "Gallic Wars" and "Civil War."

Another wonderful compilation of sources is the Lacus Curtiushttp://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/home.html which hosts some of the same authors as the Internet Classics Archive, but also has some more obscure and rare texts like Cato's "On Agriculture," Vitruvius' "On Architecture," and others. However, there are lots of works to choose from here as well, with extensive footnotes and references. Latin and Greek language translations are also available. And, if you really are interested in farming, this site hosts works by Columella and Varro on the subject, in addition to Cato!

The final recommended site is one of the largest and most comprehensive, The Perseus Project from Tufts University.http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/ This site hosts numerous authors, just like the others, but with much more in the way of cross references, footnotes, and notes.

This step will explore excellent secondary sources on Rome, including specific aspects of Roman history and culture. Of course, you could always try sites like Google Scholarhttp://scholar.google.com/schhp?hl=en&tab=ws and JSTORhttp://www.jstor.org/?cookieSet=1, but those are best left for students with more of a grounding (since the articles returned are usually written for an audience already quite familiar with what they're looking for).

The first recommendation is Crystalinks' page on Rome which offers brief discussions of myriad parts of ancient Roman life, from gladiators to monuments to religion and all in between. http://www.crystalinks.com/rome.html

A well-written and well-researched page about gladiators (which comprises much of the interest in ancient Rome, it seems) is found at a University of Chicago site called "Notae".http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/gladiators/gladiators.html Going back to the main site will uncover more links of interest about ancient Rome. http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/gladiators/gladiators.html

Finally, "Roman Empire" has a vast collection of links to all aspects of Roman civilization, but is especially notable for its sections on the Roman Legions and lots of photographs and illustrations about the army and also the emperors.http://www.roman-empire.net/ Also, this site has a kids' section (may be useful for certain school projects!) and a page of hyperlinks to other resources online.

There are, to be sure, lots of other websites out there, but these are some of the better (and more accurate) ones. Of course, as you get more familiar with Roman history, you will probably want to try out the options mentioned above (Google Scholar, JSTOR, etc.)

Below you'll find some recommended texts about Rome that you can buy online, and some may even be available to view or preview via Google Books.http://books.google.com/bkshp?hl=en&tab=wp

First, one of the standard recommendations is Edward Gibbon's The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. This book is, to be sure, a mammoth of a read, but one of the most comprehensive works on Roman history to be undertaken in modern times.

The author Anthony Everitt has written two excellent biographies, one on Cicero entitled (simply) Cicero and one on Octavian/Augustus Caesar called Augustus. These books will shed light on the lives and careers of two of the most important players in Roman history. Robin Seager's Pompey is also a fine biography on Pompey the Great, and Anthony Birley's series of biographies are written for a wide audience - his biography of Marcus Aurelius fills a sorely-needed gap in the literature for this famous emperor.

Tom Holland's book Rubicon is an excellent overall view of the Roman Republic, especially focusing on the last few years of that form of government and its eventual decline into the Empire. In a similar vein, Lily Ross Taylor wrote an old standard called Party Politics in the Age of Caesar that will help illuminate (perhaps a bit more technically) the people and events explored by Holland in Rubicon.