In the fifth century BCE, Herodotus placed his own (programmatic) thoughts on the rise and fall of power into the mouth of the Persian King Xerxes. Some two and a half centuries later, another Greek historian, Polybius, also found occasion to ponder the instability of power. The chronicler of the unprecedented (he thought) rise of Rome to imperial heights recounts how Scipio Aemilianus gazed at the debris of Rome's longstanding but then, in 146 BCE, conquered rival Carthage. He then cried over his enemy out of the fear that Rome too would one day suffer the same fate. History would eventually prove him right, of course.

Scipio at Carthage is in several ways a seminal scene in Julia Hell's ambitious, wide-ranging, and stimulating history of the precarious Roman Empire and its many reimaginations and revivifications, when those who set out to conquer “looked back in time … and in the course of [their own] conquest … developed imaginaries centered on Rome's ruins as signifiers of the empire's power and its death” (11, my emphasis). It is a seminal scene, not just because Polybius ponders the Roman Empire's inevitable and inevitably ruinous end at the very moment of the demonstration of its power, but also because he develops what Hell calls (a few times too often, perhaps) the “rubble (or: ruin) gazer scenario” (41). Her fresh look at the Roman Empire's oft-studied afterlife focuses on the centrality of its ultimately ruinous state in its epigones’ imagination: how Neo-Roman mimesis is always already aware of its model's end and what strategies are developed to defer the inevitable. Hell's own gaze is comprehensive: it encompasses literature, architecture, politics, and academia, and it ranges from Charles V and his conquest of Tunis in 1535 all the way to the twentieth century with Italy's conquest of North Africa and the Third Reich's rapid expansion especially eastward.

Hell's study comprises three parts: a substantial introduction that serves as a theoretical exposition; a study of Greco-Roman reflections on the empire's soon-to-be-ruinous state; and a series of chapters on instances of what Hell calls Neo-Roman mimesis.

The introduction develops, in addition to “the law of ruins” and “the ruin gazer scenario,” the significance of the stage (and theatrics more generally), especially in the Rome of Augustus as well as later re-creations, the concept of imperial time (as the time span until the empire's inevitable downfall), and a triangular model of imperial conquest wherein the imperial conqueror stands in opposition to the conquered Other (the “barbarian”) and in line with the Roman predecessor. There is much food for thought here, but I missed a discussion of the tragic concept of the peripeteia, the reversal of fortune, which makes its presence felt in all major ancient historians beginning with Herodotus himself (or, to give another famous example, Thucydides’ dramatization of the Sicilian expedition (415–413 BCE).

Among the Greco-Roman reflections on the empire's rise and fall, which Hell follows from Polybius to Pausanias and Tertullian, chapters 2 and 3 on “The Scenographic Architecture of the Augustan Era” and “Virgil's Imperial Epic and Lucan's Pharsalia” are of fundamental importance. Hell proposes that “the architectural remodeling of imperial Rome in the age of Augustus coincided with the invention of its ruins” (10, my emphasis, the evidence for which is well worth studying even if it may not ultimately support Hell's thesis. But her careful reading of ruins in the Aeneid––her hasty aside “As Virgil had promised in his Georgics, Octavian/Augustus is at the center of the epic poem” (72) notwithstanding––complements well the widely accepted interpretation of “darkness visible” in the Augustan poem (W. R. Johnson, Darkness Visible: A Study of Virgil's Aeneid, 1976). There are many more instances of imperial unease in Augustan culture, and it seems futile, not to say unfair, to complain about absences. But I would have liked to read Hell's thoughts on one of Horace's famous Roman odes, more particularly his gnomic uis consili expers mole ruit sua, “Power without good sense comes crashing down under its own weight” (3.4.65, translated by N. Rudd). The political context of this ode gives this line an ominous tone.

Hell begins her history of Neo-Roman mimesis with Charles V in Tunis, where he “pitched camp beside the walls of Carthage once illustrious, today again a village of small cottages” (as a contemporary commemorative tapestry elaborates, which Hell quotes on page 117). A work like Hell's is necessarily fragmentary, but the absence of Charlemagne and his Carolingian empire with its widely propagated resurrection of the Roman Empire, sanctified in 800 when Charlemagne was crowned emperor in Rome, and subsequently morphing into the Holy Roman Empire, should perhaps have been addressed (the influential theory of translatio imperii [i.e., the historiographical theorem that history is a sequence of empires, each ‘inheriting’ power from its predecessor] surely merits mention too). On her way to the twentieth century, Hell studies “Cook's exploratory voyages to the South Pacific, the French invasion of Egypt in 1798 and conquest of Algeria in 1830; [and] the Kaiserreich's brief period of colonial ventures at the end of the nineteenth century” (12). Alongside the usual suspects, including Edward Gibbon, who “was not immune to the ‘edifying spectacle of ruin and desolation’” (171, quoting Gibbon), and Oswald Spengler with his enormously influential The Decline of the West, many less familiar names (at least to this reviewer) feature in this rich and erudite study.

Hell's discussion of the National Socialists’ Neo-Roman mimesis, whence “the problematic of Rome's ruined stage” emerges as “an organizing subtext of [both Adolf Hitler's and Heinrich Himmler's] thinking about the future Germanic World Empire” (323) is particularly rich. Hell examines the regime's unprecedented multi-medial communications, as orchestrated by Joseph Goebbels, Leni Riefenstahl, and Albert Speer; continuing her practice in previous chapters, she pays close attention to many Nazi intellectuals, classicists in particular (339–43), and their reflections on the nature of the Roman Empire, its end, and the lessons to be learned. Carl Schmitt and, to a lesser extent, Martin Heidegger receive detailed discussions in separate chapters.

Hell occasionally loses sight of her specific topic when she documents the presence of the classical past(s) in the Third Reich more generally—I am just as fascinated by Riefenstahl's Disc Thrower (depicted on page 352), a slow surreal metamorphosis of a Greek statue into an Aryan athlete, as she seems to be, but does it belong here?—and is, on occasion, too ready to suggest the pertinence of Rome's ruins when the Roman Empire is not even mentioned (as is the case in Himmler's infamous 1943 speech in Poznán). Nevertheless, she brings out clearly how the Germanic empire was cast as fighting the (now primarily racially defined) barbarian enemy just as the Roman Empire had done, how widespread the awareness of Rome's ultimate end among leading National Socialists was, and how Adolf Hitler in particular obsessed over Rome and (its) ruins and their significance for the Third Reich until the very end when, in his Political Testament, he appears to cast himself as “the Carthaginian queen [Dido], who burned herself alive in her palace, calling out to Hannibal as her avenger” (395).

The Conquest of Ruins bespeaks its author's lively, learned, wide-ranging engagement with her materials on every page. It might have been edited more tightly, the odd omission surprises, and its style occasionally veers into jargon, but anyone interested in the afterlife of the Roman Empire, the pervasiveness of the rise-and-fall matrix in the Western tradition, or the paradoxical allure of ruins will find something to learn and think about.