Stories from Ancient Rome

About This Audiobook

David Angus doesn’t just retell ancient Roman tales—he crafts them into glittering soundscapes of bravery, betrayal, and divine whimsy. These stories spring from the same fertile soil as Greece’s myths but pulse with Rome’s colder ambition: Aeneas fleeing burning Troy with his father’s gods on his back, Romulus and Remus suckled by wolves, or the eerie silence when the Vestal Virgins’ sacred flame gutters and Rome itself trembles. Each tale crackles with the kind of peril that makes young listeners grip their blankets tighter. Angus pares away scholarly dust to leave only the marrow: a shepherd girl facing off against Carthage’s war elephant, a slave boy outwitting a gloating general, the exact moment a she-wolf decides the future of an empire. The pacing never drags; every sentence feels like another step into a past both foreign and familiar, where the gods cheat and heroes often lose.”

"The narration duo of Kate Gielgud and David Jarvis splits the storytelling like a well-oiled theatrical company. Gielgud’s voice has the warm authority of a fireside storyteller, her vowels stretching just enough to taste the Latin roots. She makes the dry names of Roman gods sound like characters you’d trust to bake you a cake. Jarvis, meanwhile, channels every snarling she-bear and trembling augur into a voice that could curdle milk one sentence and soothe it the next. Their chemistry is seamless; when Gielgud’s Aeneas sighs across the Mediterranean, Jarvis’s mythic narration doesn’t just follow—it dives in with him. Angus’s source choices lean into the weird: fewer battles, more strange omens and desperate bargains. The result is an audiobook that feels less like history homework and more like eavesdropping on Rome’s most electrifying gossip.