The Ruin Of The Roman Empire

“Anexotic and instructive tale, told with life, learning and just the right measure of laughter on every page. O’Donnell combines a historian’s mastery of substance with a born storyteller’s sense of style to create a magnificent work of art.” — Madeleine K. Albright, former U.S. Secretary of State The dream Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar shared of uniting Europe, the Medi-terranean, and the Middle East in a single community shuddered and then collapsed in the wars and disasters of the sixth century. Historian and classicist James J. O'Donnell—who last brought readers his masterful, disturbing, and revelatory biography of Saint Augustine—revisits this old story in a fresh way, bringing home its sometimes painful relevance to today's issues. With unexpected detail and in his hauntingly vivid style, O'Donnell begins at a time of apparent Roman revival and brings readers to the moment of imminent collapse that just preceded the rise of Islam. Illegal migrations of peoples, religious wars, global pandemics, and the temptations of empire: Rome's end foreshadows today's crises and offers hints how to navigate them—if present leaders will heed this story.

What really marked the end of the Roman Empire? James O'Donnell's magnificent new book takes us back to the sixth century and the last time the Empire could be regarded as a single community. Two figures dominate his narrative - Theodoric the 'barbarian', whose civilized rule in Italy with his philosopher minister Boethius might have been an inspiration, and in Constantinople Justinian, who destroyed the Empire with his rigid passion for orthodoxy and his restless inability to secure his frontiers with peace. The book closes with Pope Gregory the Great, the polished product of ancient Roman schools, presiding over a Rome in ruins.

This classic history book offers a detailed account of ancient Rome, covering important events such as the founding of the city, the Punic Wars, and the eventual decline of the Roman Empire. It is a valuable resource for anyone interested in the ancient world. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

The Roman Empire has been a source of inspiration and a model for imitation for Western empires practically since the moment Rome fell. Yet, as Julia Hell shows in The Conquest of Ruins, what has had the strongest grip on aspiring imperial imaginations isn’t that empire’s glory but its fall—and the haunting monuments left in its wake. Hell examines centuries of European empire-building—from Charles V in the sixteenth century and Napoleon’s campaigns of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to the atrocities of Mussolini and the Third Reich in the 1930s and ’40s—and sees a similar fascination with recreating the Roman past in the contemporary image. In every case—particularly that of the Nazi regime—the ruins of Rome seem to represent a mystery to be solved: how could an empire so powerful be brought so low? Hell argues that this fascination with the ruins of greatness expresses a need on the part of would-be conquerors to find something to ward off a similar demise for their particular empire.

The Ruin of the Eternal City provides the first systematic analysis of the preservation practices of the popes, civic magistrates, and ordinary citizens of Renaissance Rome. This study offers a new understanding of historic preservation as it occurred during the extraordinary rebuilding of a great European capital city.