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I'm about halfway through Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic by Tom Holland and am loving it.
It is narrative history, and suffers the deficiencies of that genre (notably, it has to gloss over gaps in the record and tends to jump to conclusions on mood and such) but Holland is very up front about it.
If nothing else, the first chapter which goes into great descriptive detail about what life was actually like in Rome is wonderful. Classical history was my least favorite era back in college. As Holland says, imagine writing a history of World War II based on a few of Hitler wartime broadcasts and 40 random pages from a Winston Chruchill biography.
It may dry up in the second half, so far it is a good read.
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