2018 hardcover edition – the edition I own

(8) KYLE HARPER –

THE FATE OF ROME: CLIMATE, DISEASE & THE END OF AN EMPIRE (2017)

“We are only mortal

but being mortal

can defy our fate.

We may

by an outside chance

even win!”

Or maybe not in the case of the Roman Empire, although it gave a good red-hot go of it with one of humanity’s best pre-modern winning streaks, for a couple of centuries at least.

Although as this book points out, while the Roman Empire’s winning streak was impressive, it is less impressive than it might have otherwise seem given that it coincided perfectly with the optimal environmental circumstances for it – the warm climate period literally named for it as the Roman Warm Period and the absence of high mortality pandemics that were the most lethal invasions of the Roman Empire by far.

While I’m quoting poetry – aptly enough William Carlos Williams’ The Ivy Crown, although it would be more apt as The Laurel Wreath – I’m fond of quoting Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, as that “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, retreating to the breath of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world”.

And rarely have I felt that roar to be so melancholy or overwhelming as in this book, as indeed the fate of the empire. The usual discourse or debate over the decline and fall of the Roman Empire is as to which of those two predominate – that is, internal decline or external fall.

This book falls (heh) on the fall side of the decline vs fall argument but so distinctively as to open up an entirely new third front, a fall to adversaries entirely different and far more destructive than its human ones – the adversaries of natural environment, climate, and pandemic.

“How devastating viruses, pandemics, and other natural catastrophes swept through the far-flung Roman Empire and helped to bring down one of the mightiest civilizations of the ancient world…how the fate of Rome was decided not just by emperors, soldiers, and barbarians but also by volcanic eruptions, solar cycles, climate instability, and devastating viruses and bacteria…from Rome’s pinnacle in the second century, when the empire seemed an invincible superpower, to its unravelling by the seventh century, when Rome was politically fragmented and materially depleted.”

On the role of pandemics, the book is essentially a tale of three plagues, each of which recurred or reverberated for extraordinary lengths of time – the Antonine Plague (hypothesized as smallpox) and which strained the empire’s resilience to breaking point on the eve of the Crisis of the Third Century, the Cyprian Plague (something akin to Ebola) and which fuelled the Crisis, and the Justinian Plague (bubonic plague) which ended the Roman superpower of antiquity (albeit the Eastern Roman Empire endured as a “Byzantine rump state”)..

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)