The Romans by Edward Watts

The Romans: A 2,000-Year History

By Edward J. Watts

Basic Books 2025

If Edward Gibbon couldn’t write a truly comprehensive account of 1000 years of Roman history in 4000 pages, it’s a safe assumption that University of California history professor Edward Watts can’t do that for 2000 years in 700 pages. This is ultimately liberating; it shifts the discussion from what’s missing (lots will inevitably be missing) to what’s spotlighted.

Delightfully, Watts chooses to spotlight the personal, the dramatic, the individual. He warns his readers at the outset that he firmly believes individuals matter in the course of history, as indeed it would scarcely be possible to argue otherwise, considering the Gracchi, Marius, Sulla, Nero, Caligula, Constantine, and most of all Julius Caesar. Interestingly, he attempts to make the case that although “great, visionary leaders” crop up regularly throughout Rome’s history from village to hemisphere-spanning empire, their appearance is always “a historical accident.” The secret of Rome’s mutability and long survival, he maintains, wasn’t its population of so-called great men, “It was instead that Roman society created systems that minimized the moments when Romans were forced to hope that such a person might materialize to save them,” he writes. “States cannot determine whether they will be lucky, but strong states with strong institutions and cultures of consensus building can minimize the need for exceptional leaders.”

It's an intriguing idea, and thankfully, since nothing is more tedious than an ideological history, it receives almost no elaboration in the course of these pages. Instead, Watts lives up to his own belief about the importance of personality in history by filling his pages with the people of Rome’s long history. And since he’s decided to cover that history from the mythos of Romulus and Remus to the Middle Ages and the fall of a very changed empire in the East, he unavoidably spends a refreshing amount of time writing about periods long after the twelve caesars of Suetonius. He follows the writings of Cassius Dio, for instance, to describe briefly but insightfully the notorious sybarite emperor Elagabalus, whose epicene prancing “forced Romans to confront, in a very visible way, what it meant to live in an empire where the dress, worship, and customs of millions of new Roman citizens could suddenly occupy the very core of public life.” Dio’s main moralizing concern about Elagabalus was that his reign “would weaken the state by blurring the distinction between a powerful, masculine Roman Italy and the effete, feminine Roman East,” and Watts is shrewd about assessing that.

He's skillful throughout at balancing sources with judgement and somehow managing to tell consistently good stories the whole time. Foolhardy as the task is, there have been many one-volume histories of Rome, but there’s scarcely been one in English more page-turningly fascinating than this one.

The story extends all the way to 11th century and beyond, with the author’s narrative verve never flagging. The text is long (and was apparently much longer in draft) but carefully even in its balances, with stories of the much lesser-known Eastern rulers being related every bit as energetically as those of Caligula or Hadrian, as when the old emperor Romanos is found dead in his bathtub in 1034 and a smooth takeover results:

As rumors flew that Zoe had poisoned her husband, she and Michael tried to convince the patriarch to marry them and crown Michael emperor that same evening. When the patriarch “stood there speechless,” wondering whether he could refuse to perform a marriage between two adulterers and potential murderers, John and Zoe offered a bribe of fifty pounds of gold to the patriarch and clergy, a sum large enough to convince them to perform the ceremony. So began the reign of Michael IV.

The Romans abounds with these kinds of very human touchstone moments, giving fallible flesh and savage emotions to broader outlines of slave economies, barbarian invasions, and territorial overreach. An overview this smart and savvy might well make converts to the study of Roman history.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News