Book Review: "The Triumph of Empire: The Roman World from Hadrian to Constantine"
Michael Kulikowski's book is a concise but sweeping history of a pivotal period in Roman history.
It’s sometimes difficult to find a popular history book that manages to seamlessly combine erudition and rigor with elegance and [ease of understanding], but that’s precisely what Michael Kulikowski has accomplished with The Triumph of Empire: The Roman World from Hadrian to Constantine. In a fast-moving 300 pages, Kulikowski, a professor of history at the Penn State University, gives us a remarkable economic, social, and political history during a pivotal period in its development.
He begins his story with the reign of Hadrian, demonstrating how this devout Hellenophile began to transform the Empire over which he ruled, pulling in its boundaries, abandoning the recent conquests made by Trajan. We then move into the reigns of several subsequent monarchs, including the Antonines (Marcus Aurelius and his ill-fated son Commodus), the Severans (Septimius, his sons Caracalla and, briefly, Geta, as well as his great-nephews-by-marriage Elagabalus and Alexander Severus), and then the many emperors that ascended to the throne during what has been called “The Crisis of the Third Century.” There are a dizzying array of figures, and it’s often difficult to know much about them, but Kulikowski, drawing in particular on numismatics, is able to tease out more than we might expect.
What’s more, he also takes us deep inside the Roman state and society to see the dramatic changes that took shape during this period. He spends a significant amount of time, for example, examining the process of equestrianization, by which members of the equestrian class—as opposed to the Senate—became key to the functioning of the imperial bureaucracy and the government of the provinces. Indeed, it was precisely this process that allowed the empire to not fall apart in the wake of so many political crises.
Unfortunately, even the well-established and competent imperial bureaucrats couldn’t entirely keep the chaos at bay. It wasn’t until the rise of Diocletian and the Tetrarchy that the headlong careening into absolute dissolution was arrested, and it wasn’t until the rise of Constantine that a truly universal empire was brought back into being. However, as Kulikowski compellingly argues, this was an empire that was fundamentally changed from the one that had emerged under Augustus. Gone were even the trappings of the old Republic, replaced by a true autocracy that made no bones about what it was and how it worked. Say what you will about Constantine—and he emerges from these pages as a ruthless ruler who pursued his vision of a unified emperor with a zeal that was unmatched, and he was largely successful.
The book’s title is slightly misleading, as Kulikowski actually takes us just past Constantine into the reigns of his sons (Constantius II, Constantinus, and Constans) and finally Julian the Apostate, whose efforts to turn back the clock and restore paganism to the Empire were doomed to fail even before his defeat and death at the hands of the Persians. That being said, The Triumph of Empire is a remarkable book, and I’m frankly a little in awe at how skillfully he managed to cover so much complex information while not losing a sense of narrative propulsion. What’s more, I was surprised at how well he managed to show us at least a bit of the personalities of the later emperors (no small thing, considering how scattered the sources are for the period).
What’s more, he also manages to convey the economic and social changes of the period. These parts of the book were (for me) the most difficult to get through, but that says more about my own investments as a reader of history than it does about the book itself. Fortunately, however, Kulikowski doesn’t allow himself to get too mired in the details, and he gives the reader just enough information so that they emerge with a stronger understanding of how the empire’s economy changed as it moved through the centuries.
I also appreciated that Kulikowski helps to situate the Roman Empire in the broader Eurasian world. The “barbarians” of the north certainly put in their appearances, but for my money the more fascinating discussion was of the Sassanid Persians and their neighbors to the East. After the fall of the Arascid dynasty in the 3rd century, the Sassanids would become one of the Roman Empire’s most stalwart foes, with one of their kings even managing to take a Roman emperor, Valerian, captive after defeating him in battle. The two great empires would continue to clash with one another over their border provinces (the Middle East has always been a cauldron of geopolitical conflict).
As some reviewers have observed, I did find it a bit strange that Kulikowski spends very little time talking about one of the major developments of this period, namely the growth of Christianity. However, it seems that this will be a stronger presence in the sequel to the book (entitled The Tragedy of Empire, published in 2019). Their most prominent appearance comes in the chapters dealing with the rise of Constantine and his efforts to enforce a unitary vision on the now-prominent faith.
Kulikowski usefully delineates the types of sources that we have for this period. While some of it is textual, there are limits to what we can glean from the historians of the era. He doesn’t have many nice things to say about the Historia Augusta (though that’s hardly a minority opinion among historians of the ancient world). He does, however, lean very heavily into coins, which he convincingly demonstrates can tell us a great deal about rulers, including whether they were able to attain any sort of stable political authority (minting one’s coins was an assertion of power).
All in all, I found The Triumph of Empire to be, well, a triumph. It’s everything that I have come to expect of sound popular history. Perhaps most importantly, I actually learned a great deal. I can think of no better way to praise a work of history. I cannot wait to read the sequel volume, in which we will witness the dissolution of the mighty Roman Empire.