The sense of antiquity yielding with poor grace to the succeeding ages remains a powerful image. The famous opening in the ruins of the Roman forum colours the whole book. This six-volume history (first published between 17) is now read more by scholars of the Enlightenment than by Roman historians, but no one has told Rome’s story with more style and relish. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon The following are some of the best volumes in a long and still expanding literature.ġ. It also explores the echoes of Roman empire through the ages. My book Rome: An Empire’s Story, the second edition of which has just been published, describes that long arc of history from Iron age villages on the Tiber to Byzantium, embattled on the Bosphorus as its Syrian and African possessions were falling to Arab armies. The Roman fasces, an axe enclosed in a bundle of rods, were not only brandished by Mussolini and Hitler, but continue to adorn the US House of Representatives and the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford. Its Eagles soared over the empires of Austria, France and Mexico. The Slavic title Czar is a distant echo of Caesar. The imperial monarchy established by Augustus at the turn of the millennium became a model repeatedly imitated into the 20th century.
The largest state ever to exist in Europe, Rome’s empire began with the conquest of its Italian neighbours in the last centuries BC, and endured, in one form or another, for more than 1,000 years.
T he Roman empire’s USP has always been its survival.
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