THE SHORTEST HISTORY OF ANCIENT ROME

Even the mightiest empires fall.

In this latest installment in the Shortest History series, King achieves an uncommonly dense work of compression, telescoping events and fashioning brief character studies in surveying the arc of ancient Rome, from its origins to its collapse. But he also demonstrates how the facets of empire still inform the West: in our politics, cultures, laws, and self-image. Author of numerous books on Italian, French, and Canadian art and history, King opens with a quote from the second-century-B.C.E. historian Polybius, who wondered how anyone would not want to know how Rome rose to such unprecedented power and reach. The question is just as relevant today, says King, who sets about answering it, from the mythic folktale of Romulus and Remus to the fall of empire. Literary tradition tells one story, archaeology another. We get the emperors and chroniclers, generals and legions, builders and artists, stabilizers and insurrectionists, the mad and the bad responsible for rise and ruin—all written with a historian’s attention to detail and the fluid storytelling of a novelist. His is also a fascinating etymological tour of modern words derived from Latin. Although King is arguably inconsistent when it comes to accepting the evaluations of men’s characters drawn from traditional sources, most often he views these traditions with a skeptical eye. He is well aware of the pitfalls of judging early cultures through the lens of modern sensibilities. The range of contradictory accounts by contemporaries—not unlike today’s polarized biases—underscores just how unreliable is much of the tradition we have of Rome specifically and the ancient world in general. However, the author does his best to parse the probable from the improbable and rarely takes things at face value.

A brisk but immersive historical account.