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Hughes provides a good overview of the end of the western Empire in this volume. He does analyze things, and come to conclusions, but the primary focus is providing a chronological outline of events.

That latter is the primary value as it can be hard to find any coherent look at the four decades from the death of Aetius to the death of Odovacer. There’s no central figure, which is part of the point, political power and fortunes were so fractured by this period that no one entirely rises above the other players.

However, Ricimer (who should be more prominent in synopses of this era) does provide the central focus for part of this book (enough so that I wonder if Hughes really should have focused in a little bit more and done a book purely on him). He is generally considered to have been the ‘power behind the throne’ for, oh, maybe fifteen years, and often takes the fall for the instability of the West. Hughes gives good reasons to believe that this is not the case, and that his actions were often in response to other political pressures.

This largely comes down to the Roman Senate, which, like in his book on Stilicho, takes the blame for a fair number of ills without introducing any real evidence. He may reference some pertinent sources in the end notes (which I have not gone through), but there is nothing in the main body. Nobody from the senate is mentioned by name. No description of what the senate was like in the Fifth Century is provided. Now he ascribes the senators as a whole with motives that are likely (protecting their own position, and the safety of their own lands), but there’s nothing here to actually support these assertions, so it’s nothing more than an axiom of the book.

Other than that hole, there’s a lot of interest here. Beyond any problems with the Senate, problems of the division of the Empire between East and West are made manfest. Thanks to a lack of a stable dynasty, and a horde of ongoing problems, in the West, the Eastern Empire has become the senior political partner, which ends up crucially weakening the West. Any time an Emperor dies (too common), there is a wait while the choice of a new Western Emperor is coordinated with the East. If the Eastern court doesn’t care for what’s going on, political and military support can get withdrawn, which leaves the West’s leadership high and dry. Additionally, Marcellinus maintains an almost independent existence as comes rei militaris Dalmatiae for almost this entire period as he’s supported by the East, but refuses to work with Ricimer’s administration of the West.

And of course, at the same time there is growing ‘barbarian’ influence in the territories outside Italy and Dalmatia. The book has about one map per chapter showing the slowly shifting patterns of who had control of what. Now, these groups are settled in the Empire by agreement, and acknowledge it’s authority. Mostly. Even the better actors, like the Visigoths under Theoderic acted largely independently of the administration in Italy, even when pursing the same goals. Meanwhile, Vandal kingdom in Africa raided Italy regularly, and the book shows two attempts to counterinvade that came apart utterly, and likely recriminations did much to make the situation in Italy worse. Hughes figures Gaiseric to be the most able leader and diplomat of the period to explain his long stable reign, and the Empire’s inability to reclaim Africa.

Hughes sticks to a largely chronological format, which means he doesn’t give any one subject his full attention as nothing got wrapped up neatly within one year. Mostly, this is well handled, but with some real long-term trends going on here, I think seeing something concentrating on just one of them would be a real plus. I don’t recommend this one for a more casual read because of this, but it is definitely a great framework for anyone in an interest in the last years of the Western Empire.

This basically a follow-on to McLaughlin’s study of trade across the Indian Ocean. Despite being almost the same size, it feels like an appendix to it.

Whereas his former book spent a lot of time giving specifics of particular trade goods and where Romans were going to get them and trying to get an idea of the overall Roman budget, this is more of a jumbled history of some of the land area between Rome and China. He starts off with a discussion of what Rome had to get from China, which is interesting.

The obvious part is silk, and he goes into the difference between ‘domesticated’ silk, and ‘wild’ silk, where the latter uses threads from cocoons where the larvae ate it’s way out, cutting the strands. Chinese ‘domesticated’ silk is so good because it has extremely long single strands to work with. At any rate, the lesser version was produced in many places, including the Greek island of Cos. More surprising is the assertion that Chinese steel was superior to what Rome could produce, so high-quality steel was an import. I’d like to see some sort of study of the history of metallurgy to check that. The most surprising part is indications that Rome was exporting silk to China. It wouldn’t have been much, but the Roman world had access to some brilliant dyes that China did not, so dyed silks left the Empire again.

Most of the rest of the book takes a look at various areas and regimes along the northern trade routes that made up the Silk Road(s). He starts with China’s troubles with the Xiongnu (Huns!), which started China exploring to the south of their territory looking for potential allies against them. This eventually gets them to Bactria… but just as the post-Alexandrian nation there is dissolving into fragmented city-states.

There is some look at the Chinese economy, but it’s not nearly as well developed, and most of the book he seems to try to avoid discussing their currency. (“Han revenues: 12,300 million cash”, without saying cash what.) At one point near the end he does define the wushu, which seems to be the currency base for his calculations. He spends some time discussing the differences between revenue collection between the two, which could probably stand to be more in depth, though I’d have to spend a fair amount of time thinking about it to make sense of everything he does have there.

All that is basically the ends of the book. In between, there’s a discussion of various regions in between, their contacts with other areas, trade routes through, but mostly little on the actual trade itself. It makes for a good history of central Asia from ~200 BC to ~100 AD, also with some helpful notes on the geography involved, but it doesn’t integrate them with each other very much except for a time line given in the front. So, it’s nowhere near as useful as The Roman Empire in the Indian Ocean, though it is interesting, and good books on this region are rare.

This is mostly a reconstruction of the Sertorian War. There’s also some notes of the larger history of the Iberian peninsula, and people with an interest in the history of Iberia in general may want to pick this up too.

Back to the main subject, Sertorius is considered one of Rome’s best and least known generals. While I generally agree, I can’t help wondering if Sertorius was only successful because he was well-suited to the mixed force he had and the guerilla holding action he fought. That is, put him in charge of regular Roman legions in a more normal Roman war, would he have done so well, or would all of his superb qualities have been wasted in the standardized system, away from terrain he knew well? In any case, he was the perfect person for the role he did play, but that was unfortunately on the losing side of the civil wars of the early 1st Century BC. And the upshot of that is despite some glowing praise for his generalship, we don’t know a lot about what exactly happened over the course of eight years of fighting.

However, scholars have combed through all the various references that do exist to what happened, many of which are just particular incidents without a lot of context, and assembled them into a framework that seems to work. This book is Matyszak’s presentation of this framework for a popular audience. As there is so little go off of, a high percentage of the book is direct quotes from the ancient sources, woven together with explanations and probable interpretations.

As such, this is a very important book for those wanting to know more about Sertorius’ campaigns, as this is about as fleshed out as it gets at the moment (and quite possibly, ever). I have some quibbles with yet another unneeded in medias res opening to a history book, and Matyszak is still too unforgiving on the character of Gaius Marius (but that’s much more peripheral than it was in Cataclysm 90 BC). There’s three maps of Iberia at the beginning of the book, and the fun one is ‘from a campaigning point of view’, and is keyed with ‘merely unpleasant’, ‘rugged and mountainous’, and ‘practically impassible’. Overlaying the apparent routes of march of various campaigning seasons on that one would have been interesting.

Typically, thoughts about the economy of the ancient world hit a wall of ‘they didn’t have a solid idea of how finance works’. Similarly, talk of the Roman Empire doesn’t generally get any further away than it’s immediate political neighbors.

McLaughlin tackles both of these in a very interesting book. He starts by assembling an idea of how big the Roman budget was during the First Century. This is presented in detail in an appendix, that uses at it’s base current population estimates of the Roman world, makes a high-level assumption of the average amount of tax contributed by the population (based off a couple of reasonably solid numbers given in primary sources), then similarly estimates expenses by knowing how many legions there were, what legionary pay was like, and so on. This is all extremely problematic, but is systematically done, seems to give possible numbers, and moves the discussion into the realm where it’s possible to argue about it.

To some extent, the book was worthwhile to me just for giving a good list of currency conversions up front. I’ve never been able to keep track of the Roman money system, and this also gives conversions to Greek and Egyptian currencies. However, that allowed me to note a place where he converts a figure into Greek talents, but the math says he means Egyptian talents. Combined with another place where he makes a basic interpretation mistake of a source he just quoted shows that this isn’t as thoroughly checked over as it should be. I assume that’s at least partially the fact that Pen & Sword seems to be a smaller publisher, and probably does not have the robust editorial staff of more traditional publishers (nor as wide a circle of pre-readers and consultants as it should).

However, the bulk of the book is McLaughlin looking at the various areas around the Indian Ocean that Rome had contact with, and describing what sort of trade was going on. He actually starts inside the Empire with the grain dole, related trade from Egypt, and some knock-on effects thereof (which seem a bit speculative, but sound reasonable). He then gives an introductory essay on incense and Classical medicines before talking about the production of balsam (an ointment from a now-extinct tree) in Roman-controlled Judea. From there, he tackles Nubia, Arabia, East Africa, India and beyond in turn. The earlier parts are especially interesting as he pulls in a few early Imperial wars in the Roman East that you generally don’t hear much about, but also demonstrate the Empire’s interests in the area.

Pretty much all of this comes out an examination of one source, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (Indian Ocean), a very handy guide to trade written in the mid-First Century. There are some other sources which help shore up parts of this, and are notably used for the later parts of the book, though the real annoyance is the author re-introduces us to the Periplus from scratch on a few separate occasions, which shows that this was probably originally formatted as a series of smaller separate works (and one part of this was separately published about four years earlier).

He finishes up with Chinese records of an envoy from the Roman Empire (and since there’s record of this in the Empire, contrary to the author, I suspect, actual official or no, he was acting on his own initiative, which might explain some other oddities), before turning to the Antonine Plague of 165. He posits that this as having created a military and financial crisis… that he doesn’t explicitly say dooms the Western Empire, but it’s not far from what he does say. He points out that the plague apparently shut down the silver and gold mines in Spain, and once spare silver and gold coinage left the Empire to the east in the decades after, Rome’s main export was gone (which is something he refers to during the entire book, and is a concern in some of the primary sources).

McLaughlin is putting up a fairly rickety structure with all the assumptions he has to make to put together a large-scale picture of the Roman economy. But I’m still impressed that he got it to stand up at all. As I mentioned before, this is a needed starting point for further study and argument. Just as a fuller description of the Periplus, and the bits of corroboration of it he provides, it’s well worth a read.