The Roman Revolution by Ronald Syme
Published 1939 · 120,000 words · about 10 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is The Roman Revolution to read?
The Roman Revolution scores 66 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 65 out of 100
- Latin historical vocabulary with specialist prosopographical terminology.
- Sentence structure: 68 out of 100
- Abstraction: 70 out of 100
- Political and social analysis at a high level of generalization, grounded in prosopographical detail.
- Information density: 80 out of 100
- Extremely dense; nearly every sentence compresses a significant argument.
- Narrative indirection: 18 out of 100
- The Tacitean irony creates a layer of critical distance from the official record.
- Symbolic density: 14 out of 100
- Analytical, though Augustan ideology and its literary expression are treated as symbolic systems.
- Ironic distance: 22 out of 100
- Syme's Tacitean irony is the organizing principle of the prose.
- Resolution withholding: 15 out of 100
- The argument about revolutionary consolidation is stated with bleak clarity.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- Analytical rather than narrative; organized around social groups and mechanisms of power.
How The Roman Revolution is regarded
The Roman Revolution holds a literary regard score of 48 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.