The Roman Revolution - Nick Holmes

    2022; 245 pages.  Book 1 (out of 2) in “The Fall of the Roman Empire” series.  Full Title: The Roman Revolution: Crisis and Christianity in Ancient Rome.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : World History; Rome; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

 

    Quick, think back to that World History class when you were in Junior High, High School or college.  What year marked the end of the Roman Empire, according to your instructor?

 

    I was taught it happened in 476 CE, when the German warlord Odoacer forced the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus, to abdicate and installed his own lackey on the throne.

 

    But that was just the end of the Western Roman Empire.  The Eastern Roman Empire, with its capital city of Constantinople, was still doing fine, and decided not to go retake the city of Rome from the barbarians.  So you could say 330 CE was the end for Rome, as justified in the second excerpt, below.

 

    The Eastern Roman Empire, later renamed the Byzantine Empire, survived another millennium, until the Ottomans finally destroyed it in 1453 CE.  So that’s another possible answer.

 

    Nick Holmes proposes a different date, 718 CE, and plans to present his case for that year in a four-volume series chronicling Rome’s demise.  The first volume covers the rise of Rome’s fortunes, and presages the debacle coming in 476 CE.  Its title is The Roman Revolution.

 

What’s To Like...

    After a brief overview via an Introduction, Nick Holmes divides The Roman Revolution into five parts (Title, Year Start, Kindle %), namely:

    Republic:  ~ 500-1000 BCE  (5%)

    Empire: 44 BCE  (18%)

    Decline: ~ 170 CE  (27%)

    Crisis: 248 CE  (36%)

    Revolution: 268 CE  (52%)

 

    Those titles give you a hint of what was going on.  Nobody is sure just exactly when Rome was founded, but they had a couple kings to begin with, then switched to being a Republic.  Julius Caesar’s death marks the start of the Empire.  The Decline is a gradual phenomenon and is due to Germanic invaders and a pandemic plague.  Crisis sees another plague, more invading Germans, weak emperors, Persians tearing up the eastern border of the Empire, and climate change messing up the food supply.  Revolution sees a couple strong emperors, most notably Constantine and Diocletian, revitalizing the empire, at least temporarily.  The text wraps up with Constantine’s death in 337 CE.

 

    The book is written in English, not American, so you get spellings such as armoured, outmanoeuvred, artefacts, jewellery, despatched, and judgement.  Spellchecker nixed all but one of those words (artefacts), but frankly, if you’re from America, it reads just fine.

 

    I liked the “tone” of Nick Holmes’s text.  The Roman Empire is neither presented as a glorious ideal, nor as a cruel tyranny.  There are reasons why it thrived among other peoples (such as the Etruscans, the Greeks, and the Carthaginians) and why, as all empires must, it eventually declined and fell.

 

    I also appreciated the author’s efforts to demythologize Roman history.  The wolf-suckled twins, Romulus and Remus, never existed.  Caesar never said, “Et tu, Brute” (Shakespeare did).  Constantine’s “vision of the cross” was a story invented later on by others.  And the degree of persecution of the early Christians in the empire varied from place-to-place and time-to-time, and was most likely, in most cases, overstated.

 

    It was fun to see some of the pagan religions—Druids, Mithras, Zoroastrianism, et al.—get some ink.  The footnotes worked flawlessly, which is a notable feat in Kindle e-books.  There are also some useful and interesting maps and images, about a dozen or so of each.  They worked almost as smoothly as the footnotes, although occasionally the link would drop me off at, say, image #1, when it was supposed to be redirecting to, say, image #12.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.4/5 based on 406 ratings and 22 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.34/5 based on 248 ratings and 15 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    There was no survival of fundamentalist Gallic beliefs that could seriously undermine Roman rule.  The best example is that of the Druids, who had always been the most powerful religious and cultural challenge to the Romans, but in Gaul they simply melted away.  By the first century AD, it was simply not cool to be a Druid any more.  But it was cool to be a Roman.  (loc. 724)

 

    [Constantine] turned to the cheering people.  They fell silent.  Then he addressed them.  He declared he would now dedicate this new city.  Henceforth it would no longer be called Byzantium but Constantinopolis, ‘Constantine’s City’.

    The date was 11 May 330.  Little could the thousands of people gathered in the Forum of Constantine, including Constantine himself, have realised that for centuries to come this date would be seen as a historic turning point, the marking of a new era.  For it is now seen as the beginning of the second age of the Roman Empire.  The age when power passed from Rome to Constantinople.  (loc. 2577)

 

Kindle Details…

    Right now, The Roman Revolution sells for $2.99 at Amazon.  Book 2, The Fall of Rome, goes for the same amount.  Nick Holmes offers a third e-book at Amazon, also in the History genre, The Byzantine World War; you can pick it up for a mere $0.99.

 

“Monarchy degenerates into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into savage violence and chaos.” [Polybius] (loc. 286)

    As you’d expect from a nonfiction History tome, profanity is almost nonexistent – just a single “hell”, in the whole book.  Surprisingly, this was the author’s own utterance, not a quote of someone else’s vocabulary.  I only spotted one typo: Mark Anony/Anthony, which means the editor did a great job.

 

    The “Christians” in the book’s subtitle don’t show up until about 76% (chapter 36 out of 41), and frankly, unlike what you may have been taught in school, get very little blame here for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.  However, there’s more than a century to go before the 476 CE Doomsday, so it’s possible they’ll shoulder more of the blame in Book 2.

 

    The Roman Revolution was an educational and enjoyable read for me, but it helps that I'm a lifelong history buff.  I was amazed that Nick Holmes could condense a millennium’s worth of history into 245 pages and still make it feel like a comprehensive treatise.

 

    I’ve got the Book 2 in this series on my Kindle and am looking forward to reading about the next one hundred years of Roman history, which I was taught ends in disaster for the capital city.  I have not picked up Books 3 and 4 yet, which are briefly previewed in the “Find Out More” section in the back of The Roman Revolution.  But that’s because they haven’t been published yet.

 

    9 Stars.  We’ll wrap this up on a lighter note taken from The Roman Revolution.  The acronym SPQR has long been associated with the Roman Empire.  You’ve been taught it stands for “Senatus Populusque Romanus”, Latin for “the Roman Senate and People”.  But modern Italians will jokingly tell you that it means “Sono pazzi questi Romani”, which translates into “They’re crazy, these Romans’.