Hey, Gary!

Not much, you're not a scholar. Very impressive!

I can't do better than that for depth, so I'm going to give breadth a shot.

The fall of the Republic is probably the most copiously documented series of events in the history of the West before the printing press, because many of the principles were highly literate people. I can suggest the works of Cicero and Julius Caesar, with which students of Latin are still being tortured today ("Gaul is divided into three parts...").

Plutarch, though a Greek, is nevertheless a valuable source of biography for the amazing Romans whose personalities animate the period: the above two gentlemen, Pompey, Antony, Octavian and others appear in Plutarch's Lives. Plutarch is also the best secondary source we have for lost memoirs of figures like Sulla, for he used them in his work. He wasn't a contemporary of any of his subjects, writing during the period of the Emperor Trajan, but he knew elderly witnesses well, including his own father and grandfather.

Livy, an unreconstructed republican during the beginning of the Empire, wrote his beautiful epic history -- we still have 35 of the 142 books -- in the palace of Augustus, his patron.

My favorite isn't an historian at all, though, but a poet: Catullus, whose best work wasn't historical at all but a cry of heartbreak over his unfaithful but adored mistress. Oh, he'll tear your heart out in 20 words.

Michael Grant has written some excellent tertiary sources on the entire Classical period. The Founders of the Western World provides a good getting-your-feet-wet overview of Greece and Rome. Grant also believes in good maps, of which there is a whole appendix, and good bibliographies of both ancient and modern authors.

My Latin is very rusty, and my Greek moreso. Alas, not Classical, but Biblical (Koine Greek). The only way my undergrad professor could get enough students for Greek was to crosslist it in Classics and Religious Studies. Consequently, I can read John's Gospel in its original but can't quite manage Homer.

Best regards--
Mary Anne