All Roads Lead to Rome: Why We Think of the Roman Empire Daily by Dr. Rhiannon Garth Jones takes what is nowadays a meme (Men think about the Roman Empire at least once a day!) and turns it into an explanation of how civilizations and states, almost as soon as the Western Roman Empire fell,1 have claimed parts of the mantle of Rome, its heritage, ideas and slices of its nature.
I want to start this review with an excerpt from a Civilization V quote. Civilization V, unlike any of the Civ games before or since, brought a meta self awareness to the role of the leaders and the civilizations you played, addressing you and imploring you to choose that leader and bring back the glory of that civilization. Rome of course is no exception:
“…The blessings of Caesar Augustus be upon you, Emperor Augustus, Emperor of Rome and all her holdings…your people have single handedly shaped [Western Civilization’s] culture, art, law and warfare like none other before or since…and [Rome] remains the envy of all lesser civilizations who have followed.”
While all of these intros puff up their leader and civilization, the Roman one is particularly triumphant, because, as Dr. Garth Jones explores in the book, civilizations from the 6th century onward have tried to capture a slice of that Roman magic, that Roman culture. The interesting thing, as she points out time and again, is that Rome is such a vast and complicated and sometimes very contradictory place, that different cultures have taken different parts and emphasized their link to those parts of Rome. And, sometimes, competing civilizations at the same time thusly have claimed the mantle of Rome, or a part of it.
The book explores the would-be inheritors of Rome from three avenues: Religion, Empire and Culture. Different successors or would-be successors have emphasized one or more of these in their modeling on Rome. Before we get into those details, Dr. Garth Jones first takes pains to point out that conceptions of Rome ever since the end of the West have been through lenses, and those lenses are often distortions of the truth.
Take Neoclassical art and architecture. Columns, domes, all the rest. Plenty of that to see in Washington, D.C., and many other places that have grabbed for a mantle of Rome. Go to any middle to large size art museum and you will find plenty of neoclassical art from the 18th and 19th century, particularly, in marble. And nearly every single bit of this marble, from busts to statues to the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials, is all bright dazzling white.
The Romans, as you know, Bob and Jane, didn’t do it that way;2 polychromy was a fact of life in Ancient Rome and their statues and buildings were a riot of paint and color. We rarely see that in the remnants of statues, but there are plenty of other remnants that show that the Romans were big fans of bright and bold color.3 But again, there is a perception, a misperception, that Roman art and architecture should be white marble, and white marble only. Or if not marble, still unpainted.4 That’s part of the author’s point about claiming the heritage of Rome—or claiming what is perceived to be the heritage of Rome.
And that brings us to religion. While Rome and the Romans had a wide and varied and interesting religious set of traditions, Rome, in the 5th century onwards, came to be identified with Christianity. And so as a result, that became a tangled contest for taking that Roman Christian identity. You might think that it would be no contest, with the Popes in Rome, but you would be forgiven for not remembering Byzantium, Constantinople.5 After all, as the author points out, after the devolution of Imperial power in the west, Rome kept on in the East. She borrows an idea from Kaldellis in calling the remaining area Romanland, because the inhabitants themselves called their world Romania. Until the fall of Constantinople to the Seljuk Turks in 1453, the Patriarch of Constantinople was a full-on rival with the Pope of Rome, although the schisms and breaks eventually ended their competition for the hearts and minds of all Christians.6
And when the Patriarch of Constantinople diminished in power to eventually a small role, the Russian Orthodox Church moved, in concert with Russia itself, to be the Third new Rome and the new seat of Orthodoxy, and protector of Orthodox Christians. Russia under the Tsars would leverage that further and deeper, trying to cement their claims even more definitively as being the true heir of the Romans. In somewhat typical Roman fashion, this cementing was of course, by waging war on the Ottomans.7
The funny part is, as the author points out, upon conquest of Constantinople, one of the titles that the Sultan added to this portfolio was Kayser-i Rum…Caesar of Rome. Mehmed II, conqueror of Constantinople, absolutely thought that he was now the Caesar of Rome and pushed this as official policy. While subsequent Sultans took this seriously to greater or lesser degrees, it was an official title and part of imperial policy. In fact, at the same time in the 17th century, the Ottomans, the Russians, and the Habsburgs (via the Holy Roman Empire) all claimed to be the one and true heirs to Rome, and this helped fuel their rivalries and conflicts with each other. All of them wanted to be seen as the true heir of the mantle of Rome, to hold that magic and power. The Hapsburgs, of course, had their claim through the long but tenuous connection back to Charlemagne and his crowning in 800 AD as Holy Roman Emperor. Inheriting that legacy of Rome was important to the imperial visions of these rulers and their states.
And of course in between was Renaissance Italy and the whole project of reclaiming and reusing the classics to bootstrap what would later be called The Renaissance.8 In the slowly rebuilding Rome of the early Renaissance, what the Empire did and what might be learned from it was a matter of debate, scholarship, and in some places, action. Brunelleschi’s Dome in Florence for the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Flower was a direct challenge to try and recreate a Roman dome a la the Pantheon in Rome.
And then of course there were two additional polities that reached for the mantle of Rome, starting about a couple of centuries later. The first is the British Empire and their claims of a Pax Britannica (c.f. Pax Romana) and an imperial project that was definitely taking vast notes from Rome. Roman and Greek language and literature were core parts of the curriculums of schools and universities, especially those devoted to being feeder schools for the bureaucracy of the Empire. And, don’t forget, Edward Gibbon’s fat, square, thick set of books and the influence they had on their readers, and on the British Empire in general. And what Roman Emperor might not look on in envy at the wide expanse of the project of the British Empire?
And then there is America. Right from the beginning, from the first stirrings of the Republic, America and Rome have been tangled up, at all levels. I’ve discussed the architecture of Washington, D.C.; add to that the use of Roman pen names in the newspapers of the time, especially around the Federalist Papers. Rome was in the room when the outlines of government came to be—the Senate, for one example. There was and has been a real sense from the 18th century to today, that America is the true heir to Rome—but heir to the *Republican* Rome and not the Empire at all. That goes back to the author’s point that successor states and polities that borrow the mantle of Rome only borrow certain parts of it, leaving others for others or not at all. After all, there are no contemporary states that replicate Roman religion pre-Christianity. And, joking aside, there are no gladiatorial death matches, although the shape of an Indy track or a horse race allow for a Circus Maximus shaped stadium.
The elephant in the room, though, when it comes to the mantle of Rome, and the one difficult to talk about, is Fascism. Fascism’s very name comes from fasces, the rods and axes that symbolized the ability to punish one’s subjects. Mussolini and Hitler took up the cause of fascism, as well as the symbols of the Roman Empire. Mussolini’s goal, after all, was to create a “new Roman empire” around the Mediterranean. Not only that, but one thing that is clear when you visit the city of Rome, is that Mussolini did a lot of destructive urban planning to prioritize and privilege Roman sites over art and architecture of later periods of Roman history. Albert Speer’s plans for Berlin, had the Nazis been successful, distinctly also echo Roman art and architecture. The darkest parts of Rome come through in the fascist projects of war, conquest, and the trampling of other history in an effort to highlight a particular stratum of history.9
So what’s the SFF angle on all this? There are a couple angles to explore here. The heritage of Rome is nothing new in science fiction and fantasy. Roman history, directly or with the serial numbers filed off, has been used by authors from De Camp to Asimov to Turtledove. And even without more direct references, when we talk about the Imperium of Man in Warhammer 40k, Imperium is a Roman word and a Roman concept.
I have recently learned a lot of East Asian writers who have written fantasy have had Empires whose “default model” appears to be the Roman one. For better or else, the default Empire in the minds of a lot of writers and readers, when it comes to their worldbuilding, IS the Roman model. So Rome has truly “Gone Global”. It’s all self-reinforcing loop, of course. Writers use it, readers pick up on it, imprint on it, and so more writers use it. There are plenty of other models you can use for an Empire, although some of those of course, will again, point some of their legacy right back at Rome, so it gets translated through a couple of layers of inspiration.
But ultimately at the bottom, they too are heirs of Rome and taking parts (but again, as the author points out, only parts) of Rome, its culture and legacy, for their own purpose. You find plenty of Roman-style legions and Empires, but those legions and empires are much more often modeled on Early Imperial Rome than any other time period.10 And you don’t get pre-Christian Roman Religion, really, either; the models are much more often (maybe are without exception) Christian Rome, even in a fantasy Rome like Videssos.
But the book can make us go deeper than that. Rome itself is the subject of the book, but the thesis of the book, to my mind, is how Rome as an Idea over time can be molded and remolded, have competing claims, and even misunderstood or badly misunderstood. There are authors who do this, like, say, Kate Elliott in The Witch Roads, or the layered history of Martha Wells’ Raksura books and stories. But an awful lot of fiction and writers could stand to take the example of Rome not for the bits of Romanness for their own purposes, but the whole idea of interpreting and reinterpreting a great and glorious past civilization. It’s a deep type of worldbuilding and very much an iceberg affair, but authors and prospective authors will derive value from this book in thinking about how that has worked in Rome throughout history.
So in general, the book points out, not in so many words, that it is no surprise that people think about the Roman Empire daily, because pieces of it are still around us, and like that Civ V quote, civilizations ever since, right to today, seek to be its heirs. Readers who are at all interested in how and why Rome has been an influence on cultures for 2,000 years will enjoy this well written, informative and engaging book. One last bit that was really a highlight in this book was the bibliography at the end. Rather than being a mere list of titles and unengaging in its presentation, it’s a conversational discussion of places to follow up and learn more, and the author takes extra pains to have plenty of podcasts, websites, and other resources for the interested reader to learn more. It’s an excellent spin on the format and my podcast app now has additional podcasts thanks to their presentation this way.
1 Don’t “@ me”, David Perry and Matthew Gabriele, please, You know what I mean and trying to hash out that argument with readers here isn’t possible in the space of a review. Readers interested in that question should read their book The Bright Ages. Dr. Garth Jones too, of course, points out that it is not that simple, either, but Perry and Gabriele’s work is the current definitive popular book on the subject.
2 It is possible you are part of today’s lucky 10,000 in that regard. The cover of Dr. Garth Jones’ book, as you can see, has a classic and well known statue of Augustus that has been imitated many times. However, that image has a very colorful statue of the Emperor.
3 In particular, look at the frescoes of Pompeii. As colorful as they are now, almost two millennia later, imagine how colorful they would have been in 79 AD on the eve of “Volcano Day”.
4 The Parthenon in Nashville comes to mind. It’s made of brick, stone, structural reinforced concrete, and cast concrete aggregate and has a lot less color (although some!) than the original probably had.
5 The author decries the use of Byzantium, which the inhabitants never did, as a way to take away their mantle of Rome so that others could claim it and to devalue their contribution. Working against the denigration of the Eastern Roman Empire has been a project in the last couple of decades. Lars Brownsworth’s Lost to the West, for example. Or the gigantic and imposing The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium by Anthony Kaldellis.
6 There were Five Bishoprics in the beginning: Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria. The Muslim conquests of the last three eventually led to the bipolar world of Pope and Patriarch, fighting for that slice of Roman heritage.
7 President Vladimir Putin has leveraged this “Russia is the new Rome” in his own wars and conflicts, particularly against Ukraine. The author explores the dark side of claiming the mantle of Rome too, in discussing Rome and Fascism.
8 C.f. Ada Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance, which goes into lots of detail as to how Plutarch started a project of trying to improve society by hearkening back to Roman classics and virtues, going all the way through to Machiavelli and beyond. They were after that old Roman magic, too.
9 The author also points out the destruction of sites by ISIS in Palmyra and points out that part of their clear motivation was to draw attention. Terrorizing the local inhabitants, a more visceral and direct crime and horror, did not draw as much condemnation and response from the West as the destruction of Roman and Palmyrene ruins. ISIS understood that and used it. After all, as Dune teaches us, “The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it.”
10 Yes, Videssos, the Turtledove series, is an exception, being modeled on Eastern Rome. You find far fewer SFF books and stories concerned with things you find in later Roman and Eastern Roman history like barracks Emperors and a heavy use of mercenary forces. (Poul Anderson being another notable exception in his Dominic Flandry universe).
