F.'s colossal history of the Roman world points to trends both new and old in academic publishing. With Romulus and Muhammad bookending the survey, the project reflects current tendencies in scholarship to emphasise continuities over ruptures in late antiquity following the fifth-century ce disintegration of the Roman West – in this case, looking to the seventh-century Muslim expansion across north Africa as a more decisive terminus of Roman power. At the same time the title's focus on the ‘great men’ of history conjures an older, elite-driven style of survey that is often borne out in the book's narrative and thematic choices. Further, even as F. pushes the scope of Roman history, he still does so on the basis of a conventional, albeit vastly expanded, grand narrative of ‘foundation to fall’, which other similar projects, such as Rome: an Empire's Story by G. Woolf (2012) and SPQR by M. Beard (2015), have sought to complicate with their own thematic revisions. The outcome is a sweeping and sometimes inconsistent account; though I have reservations about its overall accessibility, I applaud F.'s ambition, and I have no doubt that I will return to his work as a useful reference.

F. is well placed to reconfigure the scope of Roman history to include the trajectory of the Eastern Empire after the collapse of the West in the fourth to seventh centuries ce. A historian of the ancient Middle East, particularly late antiquity, he is the author and editor of several works on the region (including Rome, Persia, and Arabia: Shaping the Middle East from Pompey to Muhammad [2020] and Arabs and Empires before Islam [2015]). He organises the project into fourteen chapters from Roman prehistory to the Muslim conquest of Egypt and the siege of Alexandria in 642 ce, when ‘the Roman empire ceased to exist as a Mediterranean entity’ (p. 638). Though chapters follow a recognisably standard periodisation of Roman history, F. makes some distinctive choices within this framework. The final, violent failure of the Roman Republic begins with Pompey's victories in the East in 63 bce, rather than, say, Sulla's dictatorship or the crossing of the Rubicon; the era of the Julio-Claudians ends in 74 ce rather than the death of their final emperor Nero in 68 ce, since F. places greater importance on the First Jewish Revolt and its suppression in accounting for the change in dynastic regime. Both these choices underscore F.'s dynamic reorientation of the Roman Empire eastwards, and this makes for a provocative (if understated) reframing of the evolution of Roman imperial power at the intersection of complex global networks. A subsection in Chapter 10, for example, connects Rome's command of trade routes around the Arabian peninsula to the Templum Pacis as an ideological expression of imperial power under the Flavian dynasty (pp. 351–9); it makes an engaging case for F.'s point of view.

The emphasis of each chapter is on narrative history, although F. includes digressions on key monuments, archaeological sites and the enduring legacy of Roman power beyond antiquity. As a narrator, F. provides generally judicious abridgements of Roman historiography, and he has a good eye for eccentric and colourful anecdotes in the ancient sources. After Octavian's subjugation of Egypt after the Battle of Actium in 31 bce, for example, F. notes parenthetically and without comment that Octavian then visited the Tomb of Alexander, touched the corpse and accidentally broke off its nose (p. 219, from Cassius Dio 51.16). These details keep the narrative bobbing along, as do occasional references to modern reworkings of the Roman past, like the obligatory nod to Gladiator, when we reach the reign of Commodus (pp. 401, 427), and the ‘claw of Archimedes’ episode of Discovery Channel's Superweapons of the Ancient World, which put Archimedes’ device through its paces (p. 89). Throughout, F. illustrates the text with a handsome collection of images in colour and grayscale, making good use of the growing archive of high-quality images under Creative Commons license as well as the author's own personal collection of photos from sites in the Middle East. Given the scope of the project and its voluminous resources, it would be a task for a panel of seasoned experts to fully assess the accuracy of F.'s work, but I nevertheless noticed very few typographical or factual errors, a credit to F. and his editorial team.

In the midst of his reporting, F. makes very few references to contemporary scholarship; while this is a norm for the history survey as a genre, it raises some occasional problems for consistency, accessibility and balance. For example, F.'s decision to organise the book around the ancient historiographical tradition means that he has less to say about social and cultural history, and rather more about political and military affairs. While this programmatic focus may be a practical necessity in a volume of this size and scope, it can also make the stakes of politics and wars less easy to grasp. Things get particularly complicated as the gravitational pull of imperial order begins to shift in the late second and third centuries ce away from the imperial metropole of Rome, and chapters increasingly chart the minutiae of military upheavals throughout the empire. At this point, the constant rotation of emperors and generals, invaders and bureaucrats – to say nothing of ecclesiastical disputes in the burgeoning Christian church – makes it difficult to follow the plot. F. conveys a sense of his own exhaustion cataloguing this information as he reaches the collapse of Roman power in the West, calling it a ‘monotonous litany of intrigue, in-fighting, and corruption’ (p. 579). Given the frenetic pace of events unfolding across the empire, I would have welcomed slightly less detail at the level of narrative and more interventions from F. to provide context and perspective. Of the Eastern emperor Leo (401–474 ce), for example, we are told that he ‘was sympathetic to the anti-Eutychian views of Flavian, the patriarch of Constantinople, and he was supported by both Pulcheria and Anatolius, Flavian's successor in 449’ (p. 572). I may technically have read about these figures when they were first introduced 5, 10 or 20 pages earlier; but if I did, it did not do me much good unpacking this new information without thumbing the index, nor did I have much space to gather my thoughts before moving on to the next round of courtiers, officials and ecclesiastical controversies.

This limits the accessibility of F.'s extraordinary undertaking, which is a shame in light of its ostensible goal of illuminating Roman power and its legacy in later periods of antiquity. In other similarly expansive surveys of the ancient Roman world, historians have sought out unifying themes to provide narrative cohesion for newcomers: Woolf, for example, draws on a comparative study of empire to understand Rome's place in geopolitical history, while Beard explores the evolution and importance of Roman citizenship. Each approach may have its relative merits, but they provide a clarity of narrative, scope and significance that would have served F.'s project well, especially in the absence of a general introduction, epilogue and notes to account for the decisions that guided F.'s composition. The work provides a staggering amount of information, and that is a great service, but as to what to do with that information, readers are often on their own.