With its mix of written sources and archaeological evidence, both increasing year by year and both equally contaminated by past and present politics and ideologies, to survey the Empire of the Romans within a single volume is a formidable task. Moreover, to set a geographical limit — in this instance Europe — does not lessen the challenge, but if anything imposes additional burdens. Currently perhaps the most successful compact treatment is the Fontana History of the Ancient World, where Rome is treated in three volumes, by leading scholars with a full command of the evidence (Crawford on the Republic, Wells on the Empire, and Cameron on the Later Empire). Here Rome is assigned one of the eleven volumes in the new series from OUP and the solution has been to assign the task to an editor and a group of specialists from the younger generation. As the series editor observes, this ‘sacrifices unity for the sake of expertise’, but the disadvantages can be diminished if not neutralised ‘under the directing supervision of the volume editor’ and provide ‘short but sharp and deep entry into the history of Europe in the period’.

Despite his professed naivety, the editor has discharged his general duties with distinction, while contributing two of the ten chapters, one (ch. 5) treating Warfare and Army the other (ch. 7) on Religions, the latter an excellent survey hardly likely to have been bettered by the specialist to whom it was originally assigned. The seven other contributors make up a formidable team: Peter S. Wells (Pre-Roman Era, and Peoples beyond the Imperial Frontiers), G.J. Bradley (the Republic), B. Salway (the Empire), Mary Harlow (Roman Society), A. Wilson (Economy and Trade), N. Terrenato (Cultural Implications of Roman Conquest), and W. Bowden (the Fourth Century). The maps, as all too often these days, furnish minimal information in support of the text, while in the matter of references the reader should have better guidance than is furnished by anthologies of modern publications. The less said about the reproduction quality of the three black and white illustrations the better.

As already suggested, the dimension of Europe is an additional challenge that has been engaged by some contributors more than others, perhaps most successfully by Wilson on Economy and Trade (ch. 6), and some have clearly experienced difficulty in addressing the theme of a volume that is in effect ‘Roman History in Europe’. This is prompted by a realisation that, until the nineteenth century, Europe was a geographical expression, rather than a political entity (Political Europe perhaps began after the Crimean War when at the Paris Conference in 1856 Ottoman Turkey was formally accorded ‘status’ in the concert of nations). It is disappointing that the perspective of the volume as a whole offers little on the Danubian and Balkan regions, the focus of imperial history in the third century and the homeland of a succession of emperors, including Aurelian, Diocletian, Constantine, Valentinian and, in the sixth century, of Justinian. It may be the case, as one contributor observes (Bowden), that the eastward shift of imperial power resulting from the New Rome of Constantine ‘sat uncomfortably with the European antipathy towards the Orient more recently highlighted by Edward Said’ (266), but it is hard to escape the conclusion that a not dissimilar view is here reflected towards the history and archaeology of Europe east of the Adriatic. Like ‘Orientalism’, the Western anti-Balkan bias has a considerable pedigree recently explored by Maria Todorova (Imagining the Balkans (1997)).

No less contentious is the ever present debate on the cultural changes wrought by the Roman occupation of large areas of Europe, a theme to which the now discarded label of Romanisation was once attached. This is the subject of the stimulating essay by Nicola Terrenato, which provides an admirable ‘executive summary’ of countless colloquia, conferences and workshops that now determine the course of Roman provincial studies. Let one of an older generation testify to the great value of this new wave in Roman studies that arose in the late 60s and 70s, in part a response to the impact of the ‘New Archaeology’ on prehistory. Yet it does not strengthen the argument when the new ideas are set in opposition to simplified versions of earlier ‘respectful’ accounts of the Roman Empire and its civilizing role, at the expense of proper attention to how the ancients themselves portrayed their actions. It is, for example, hard to imagine a more devastating chronicle of greed, corruption, perverted ambition and vengeful oppression on the part of the Roman authorities than Tacitus’ account of Boudicca's uprising in Britain in a.d. 60 (Annals 14.29––39). A more positive Roman view stressed the inclusiveness of its citizenship as the essential Roman virtue, illustrated in Claudius’ speech on the admission of Gauls to public office or in the address by Petilius Cerealis following disturbances in Gaul in a.d. 70 as reported by Tacitus (Histories 4.74: ‘Stability between nations cannot be maintained without armies, nor armies without pay, nor pay without taxation. Everything else is shared equally between us. You often command our legions in person, and in person govern these and other provinces. There is no question of segregation or exclusion.’). In these and other discussions there surely still remains a place for the themes once explored by Ronald Syme: ‘The strength and vitality of an empire is frequently due to the new aristocracy from the periphery’ (Colonial Elites (1958), 4). In this regard Syme identified as ‘dynamic regions’ Cisalpina in northern Italy, Transalpina in southern Gaul, eastern and southern Spain and made the comparison that: ‘in terms of mediaeval and modern history these regions of wealth and energy could be described as, first of all Lombardy and Venetia, secondly Provence and Languedoc, thirdly Catalonia and Andalusia’ (ibid., 6). Is this perhaps not a theme that should have been more fully explored in a volume devoted to the Roman era in European history?

This is a valuable volume, perhaps more a stocktaking than an introduction. Illustrative anecdotes are few when, it appears, strict limits on space have been imposed. One treasure with some contemporary resonance is unearthed by the editor at the start of his chapter on Warfare and the Army (135): ‘Long periods of undisturbed garrison duty saw the army engaged in non-military activities. Some, like road-building, are predictable. Others are not: the Elder Pliny (Natural History 10. 54) records how some military commanders in Germany got into trouble for sending detachments away to capture geese, whose feathers were in demand to make luxury pillows in Rome’.