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Notes -
I'll chime in to say that one of my favorite series of novels, Masters of Rome by McCollough, does a far more faithful rendition of Sulla. I remember consulting Wikipedia and LLMs about the veracity of several of the claims made about him, and was pleasantly surprised. Sure, several aspects, such as his rumored affair with his step-mother or the murder of his wives for gain, or potential affection for younger boys, might be slander by his political successors, but he was generally portrayed as an understandably flawed human, only larger than life in the way that people who make their marks on posterity tend to be.
Caesar? I suspect it's more of a mixed bag, and I haven't looked into it that much. McCullough presents him as a prodigy from birth, charming but principled, a favorite with the ladies, but that doesn't strike me as being a poor description of Caesar. Once again, just look at his more well-documented deeds.
Even if McCullough might lean to a more flamboyant interpretation of their lives, she's highly respected for her scholarship. You can tell that the lady Thought of Rome more often than all but the most ardent Romaboos today, counting myself in their numbers. She almost never makes anything up from whole cloth, and substitutes period-accurate guesses for aspects of daily life with verisimilitude. Further, I think that for historical characters as distant as Caesar and Sulla, any novel that isn't just a history textbook must take liberties with the truth, or at the very least, choose which historical interpretation to assume. There are tiers to this, and sliding scales for historical fidelity. I don't consider her behavior to be ahistorical at all, and historical fiction does have more leeway than an actual history.
I heartily endorse all the books, the first two are absolutely up there with the best fiction I've read.
Edit:
Given the discussion below on how truly historical depictions wouldn't be tolerable for modern audiences, I think the novel is an existence proof to the contrary. The Romans were simultaneously extremely modern in their sensibilities (we did try and intentionally resurrect quite a bit of their culture, every wonder why it's called a Senate?), but they were also alien. The book doesn't shy away from showing absolute brutality taken for granted by the people of the time, nor does it lie about their attitudes to physics and metaphysics being very far from our own. But the peoples of the past are still human, many of their prides, joys, sorrows and ambitions are recognizable to us today. And the novels do a better job at selling that than anything else I can name.
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