By: Adrian Goldsworthy
Narrated by: Derek Perkins
Length: 18 hrs and 27 mins

On to the next book by Adrian Goldsworthy. Some context, I started “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” by Edward Gibbon several years ago and have yet to complete that tome. This much more manageable and up-to-date version by Goldsworthy was, like his previous, quite enjoyable.

An element that I found fascinating this time around was how little we knew about the later emperors compared to the details we know about other times during the Roman Empire, for example, we know a lot about Caesar and comparatively less about Julian the Apostate.

In both of these books, I found three major pressures on Rome noteworthy: the Germanic Barbarians, the Persians/Parthians, and internal conflicts within Rome itself. The Germanic tribes, though disorganized, possessed a fierce and formidable nature. Meanwhile, the Persians and later the Parthians exerted a consistent influence from the East, their power fluctuating over time but always maintaining a steady pressure on Rome. Lastly, Rome’s most formidable adversary was its own internal strife. Often, the most formidable opponent a Roman army encountered was another Roman army.

Watching the evolution of warfare was captivating. After Marcus Aurelius, often regarded as the last of the good emperors, the Roman army’s size slowly started to dwindle, accompanied by the waning personal authority of its generals. Ultimately, the army’s true strength lay not in the individual prowess of its commanders but in the collective might of its soldiers. Though generals retained some authority, it paled in comparison to revered figures from earlier eras, such as Julius Caesar, Scipio Africanus, and Pompey the Great. In essence, the Roman army transformed into something resembling a selective democracy, where the power of the ordinary soldier became instrumental in eroding Rome’s endurance.