Review by Thomas R. Martin

In the spirit of Polybius, who famously wondered if anyone could be so bloodless as not to be interested in the amazing story of how Rome grew from an isolated village to the superpower of the Mediterranean world, Greg Woolf, in his own words, “felt the fascination of studying something so vast, an entity that stretched over so much time and space.” Telling the story of ancient Rome’s imperial growth and decay is for him “exhilarating,” and he conveys that sense of enthusiasm for his subject in the thought-provoking Rome: An Empire’s Story. He presents this story not as a survey proceeding strictly from earlier to later times, though the opening chapter offers an extremely concise summary of Rome’s history, from the founding in the eighth century BC to the sixth and seventh centuries AD. Woolf’s goal instead is to ask questions about the nature of the empire of the Romans; he therefore presents his search for answers by topics, enhanced through comparisons to empires in other times and places.

The topics offer multiple answers to the questions of how the originally poverty-stricken Romans grew strong enough to control so many lands and peoples around the Mediterranean, how they created institutions to govern their conquests, how they managed to keep their power for so long despite their violent internecine conflicts, and, especially, how they understood their place in the world through the lens of their ideas about human nature and the divine. With chapters such as “Imperial Ecology,” “Slavery and Empire,” “At Heaven’s Command,” “The Enjoyment of Empire,” “Imperial Identities,” and “War,” Woolf presents lively discussions of the range of scholarly opinion, as well as his own views, on subjects ranging from the emperors’ ideology of rule to their schemes of taxation. The author notes the complex mix of continuity and change in the religious beliefs and practices of the peoples of the Roman world under the Empire. The spiritedness of his take on things comes through in titles such as “The Laziness of the Caesars,” “Desperately Seeking the Romans,” and “Things Fall Apart.”

The concluding discussion is a wonderfully clear analysis of the possible reasons why the Roman Empire lost its strength and territory over time, eventually reduced to a bit player on the world stage. Woolf suggests that the most consequential changes came in the waning of the prosperity, security, and governance of the larger cities on which the Empire depended for stability, a development linked to the loss of the tradition of (self-interested) public service by the upper class that had long dominated these cities in symbiotic cooperation with the emperors. As he well shows, the fascinating search for explanations of the historical phenomenon that was Roman imperial history is far from done. I agree with him that “in our hands the future of the Roman Empire is an exciting one.”