Speaking of TikTok, Haley mentioned the video of a guy saying he thinks about the Roman Empire every day. That strikes me as a little extreme, but I have been thinking about the Roman Empire almost every day lately, too, because I’ve been interested in how we got from the fall of Rome to Europe as we know it, and I have been doing a lot of reading about this transition (and I wrote a column about the fall of Rome a week or two ago).
Herewith, a few book recommendations for anyone who’s thinking about the Roman Empire every day, or wants to.
Adrian Goldsworthy is a prolific and formidable historian of Rome. His How Rome Fell came out a while ago but is thorough and authoritative.
Jim Lacey, who used to write for us back in the day, recently published Rome: Strategy of Empire, which is fascinating and important.
Peter Heather is a highly respected historian who wrote, a while ago, Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe. It is a fairly specialized book pushing back against the new conventional wisdom that barbarian migrations weren’t really barbarians migrations.
Dan Jones, who is an excellent and lively popular historian, recently came out with Power and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages, which starts with the fall of Rome.
And, finally, I’ll mention Walter Scheidel’s Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity. He makes the case that Rome had to fall — and not be replaced by another empire — to make way for modern European economic development.
And there you go. If you are thinking about Rome every day, reading this post alone fulfills your daily quota.