What, you might wonder, is the future fate of America? Americans, of course, consider their country different from any other, and with some justification. It was explicitly founded, however, in the shadow of an earlier empire: Rome. To understand the fate and evolution of empires, it pays to try to understand those that occurred in the past.
Rome: An Empire’s Story asks just that. How did the Roman empire survive so long, and do so well, and what lessons does it hold for other empires?
A few key lessons: hybridization is essential. Ideally, empires arise on the margins of another civilization, able to draw lessons from many places while forced to survive. Macedonia was on the edge of Greece: Rome at the margins of Etruscan land. Even the New World was on the fringes of the old. Rome’s key early advantage, though, was institutional: the novelty of imposing obligations on defeated enemies, and then expanding citizenship, helped consolidate their power. Citizens of Rome genuinely identified with Rome, in a way that our nationalist modern world struggles to understand – even after the fall of the West, societies we don’t typically identify with the Romans identified as such and sought to recreate the empire.
Woolf, though, doesn’t believe empires can still work. Constantine, he argued, adopted Christianity in an effort to hold the empire together: as ties to being Roman weakened, he thought adopting a single religion could provide an alternative. Unfortunately, it divided the empire even further, particularly given the incessant squabbling within Christianity. He thus points to the rise of universal religions as the end of the age of empire: it may not have destroyed Rome directly, but it made empires less feasible by creating a new tie to individual loyalty. IS, take note.
The story is not a new one: Gibbon would have agreed. It’s also almost certainly a vast oversimplification – Empires are complicated things, and trying to draw lessons from one for all empires is suspiciously close to anecdotal evidence. Religion and other ethnic, nationalist, and group loyalties do matter, though, and certainly play a role in events today, whether in the Middle East or Russia.
Empire’s Story alternates chapters about the history of Rome with thematic ones on things like slavery and empire, imperical ecology, and other topics. For that reason, it can be tough going unless you already have a background in Roman history: trying to cover so much content means he is necessarily brief on many issues. The issue of what led to the success and stability of the Roman Empire qua empire is an interesting one, but the book doesn’t always deliver on its promise.