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  • The Triumph of Empire: The Roman World from Hadrian to Constantine by Michael Kulikowski
  • H. A. Drake
The Triumph of Empire: The Roman World from Hadrian to Constantine. By Michael Kulikowski. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2016. Pp. xxvi, 360. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-674-65961-2.)

The third century of the Christian era has been a killing field for courses in Roman history, in more ways than one. Most obviously, the disruptions of that century—from barbarian invasions to plague to a more aggressive Persian empire to a dizzying turnover in holders of the imperial office—stands in unhappy contrast to Edward Gibbon's "most happy and prosperous" second century. But it has been almost equally devastating for scholars who entered Roman history through the study of classical texts, since they find the absence of a narrative in a reliable primary source unpalatable. Hence a tendency either to end a course with the death of the philosopher-emperor, Marcus Aurelius, or to take a deep breath and with a few sentences jump to the end of this century, where events become more settled with the advent of Diocletian.

Michael Kulikowski's Triumph of Empire. supplies precisely what has been needed to reduce these casualties. Even though he begins in the same century that took Gibbon's breath away, Kulikowski's aim in so doing is not to chart a decline and fall but to identify for the reader second-century trends that shaped the course of the third and resulted in "an entirely new Roman empire" (p. 264). The effect is to change the third century, for all its turmoil, from an aberration into an integral part of imperial history.

Kulikowski accomplishes this feat by reconfiguring two well-known characteristics of the later empire—its extensive bureaucracy and the threats it faced on its borders. Instead of bureaucracy, Kulikowski writes of a process that he calls "equestrianization," by which he means "the rise of a new equestrian elite that penetrated much deeper into provincial lives than earlier types of Roman government had done" (p. 118). Far from being the product of either a "levelling policy" long attributed to the Severan dynasty or the controlling temperament of emperors like Diocletian, Kulikowski finds that increasing reliance on Rome's traditional second class derives from nothing more sinister than the inability of its first, senatorial, [End Page 566] class to supply the needs of an empire of some 2,000,000 square miles from its own ranks. Turning an old argument on its head, Kulikowski decides that this administrative extension was the cause, rather than the result, of imperial ambitions in the later empire, for the existence of this civil service "meant that governmental uniformity could be envisaged as a real possibility in a way that it could not in the second century or before" (p. 247).

But it is in looking at the frontiers that Kulikowski has made his most impressive changes. Devoting an entire chapter to "Eurasian history," he brings the disruptions on Rome's frontiers into a global perspective. Although "contemporaries on both sides of the frontier had little real idea of what was going on" (p. 154), we can now see that the movements of the third century brought Rome for the first time into broader Eurasian history. Later Roman history "cannot be understood without reference to this much wider world" (p.119). This chapter is an example of the way Kulikowski has been able to harvest studies of a wide variety of non-literary evidence—from prosopography, numismatics, archaeology, anthropology, and even epidemiology—to bring much-needed clarity to a period that, when seen primarily through Roman literary sources, has often seemed murky and confusing. His book might easily have been titled "The Long Third Century," for its real strength is the way Kulikowski knits this century into the fabric of an imperial program that began in the second century and was not fully completed until the middle of the fourth.

H. A. Drake
University of California, Santa Barbara
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