Book #142 of 2019:
The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic by Mike Duncan
A deep dive into a fairly short span of Roman history, from the defeat of the enemy city-states Corinth and Carthage in 146 BCE to the death of the general Sulla in 78 BCE. This is a period often glossed over in favor of the transition to empire under the caesars which followed it, but author Mike Duncan shows how the instabilities of that later era can be traced back to their origins here. It was a time of widespread income inequality, partisan divides, political brinkmanship, and the sudden flouting of long-standing but unwritten rules among civic leaders — “an age when a lie was not a lie if a man had the audacity to keep asserting the lie was true.”
America isn’t Rome [he reassured himself, nervously], but the parallels are interesting, and the writer’s point in the introduction that this would be the comparable moment to our present one rather than any subsequent dictatorships or ultimate collapse is well-taken. Even setting aside the issue of historical precedent, however, this volume is an informative look at the decades in question. Although sometimes a bit jargon-heavy and perhaps overly focused on military conflict, it’s a solid overview of an understudied yet pivotal stage in the arc of this ancient civilization.
★★★☆☆
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