It must produce an odd feeling in an author to write a book like The Fate of Rome, especially given the fact that this book was first released in 2017. On the one hand, Kyler Harper gets to stand up and say that his thesis for the book has been proven 500% correct. On the other hand I’m sure Kyle Harper and the rest of the world would rest easier if he were wrong.
I hope I can accurately capture the essence of the Fate of Rome while reducing it to a few sentences. At its heart, the Fate of Rome is a book about the constant struggle between humanity and the environment. On the one hand, humanity as a species has had a larger impact on shaping the natural world to our own devices than any other species on the planet. Even ancient civilizations demonstrated immense talent and effort at literally reshaping the landscape to suit its purposes. However, the story of humanity on earth is also one in which nature constantly reminds us of its powerful dominion over us. The instruments of nature’s dominion stressed in The Fate of Rome are changing climate and the evolution of diseases. Climate change, whether natural or man-made, and evolving viruses and bacteria that can cause pandemics have the ability to send destabilizing shockwaves through the societies living through these phenomena. I don’t know about you, but there have been a lot of events since this book was published in 2017 that make me agree with these ideas.
While The Fate of Rome is a story about man’s constant struggle with nature, it is also a fascinating new perspective on a story that has been lovingly examined by fans of history since the events in question occurred. The rough timeline of the book begins with the Roman Empire in the second century CE and continues to the early Muslim conquests at the beginning of the seventh century CE capturing much of what remained of the Roman Empire (I don’t exactly know when it is appropriate to start referring to it as the Byzantine Empire). The Fate of Rome examines the question that has been asked a billion times: Why did the Roman Empire (especially in the west) collapse? People have been coming up with theories to answer that question for thousands of years. Some of them have been so overused and overdone that they have become cliches that contemporary scholars scoff at. Theories like the inevitable moral and decadent decline of empire’s and their leaders as they get older. The Fate of Rome is not a book that discounts any older theories out of hand. Instead, Kyle Harper asserts that there is an essential puzzle piece in this story that has always been missing, or if not missing at least underemphasized. Thanks to modern science, however, this missing piece can finally be highlighted and its significance appreciated. What makes this book so exciting is how much science has progressed since it was published, and how much more we will be able to learn in the future.
In a very brief nutshell, The Fate of Rome lays out the climatic conditions that made the rise and success of the Roman Empire possible. Then the book demonstrates how overtime the so-called “Roman Climate Optimum” ended, and the climate started to become fickle and unpredictable leading to drought here or flooding over there, ultimately leading to periods of intense food scarcity or uncertainty. On top of that, as the world started to enter the “Late Antique Little Ice Age,” there were also massive volcanic eruptions that helped blanket the planet with ash at a time when the sun was producing less radiation to heat the earth’s surface. All of these climate factors, and the disease component I will talk about in the next paragraph all made contemporaries literally believe the world was about to end.
The Fate of Rome also discusses some of the first widespread pandemics in world history that each in their own turn wiped out millions of people in the Roman Empire, and in the case of the plague of Justinian, would recurrently wreak havoc somewhere in the empire for more than two hundred years after the initial outbreak. Additionally (and this has a lot of modern parallels), the Roman Empire was a victim of its own success, as its interconnectedness and systems of trade made it easier for diseases to spread across continents. The plague I found most fascinating (in a morbidly curious way), was the plague of Justinian, because it was the first outbreak in history of the bubonic plague. Discovering the culprit behind the plague of Justinian means that historians and scientists can reconstruct, at least partially, what happened during the bubonic plague’s first prime time appearance to humanity. In a strange way the history of pandemics, especially recurring plagues like the black death, connect people across time and space better than almost anything else. People centuries apart on other sides of the planet could commiserate on their shared experiences as they watched helplessly as the bubonic plague spread through their communities and societies. New and old pandemics might be able to connect people in the future as well, because, as The Fate of Rome points out, the threat of systemic shocks from climate change and disease has not ended.
If anything, the threat could be increasing in the coming decades as man-made climate change forces people to become refugees and as more the environment is destroyed or made uninhabitable more wildlife will be forced to live closer to humanity, increasing the threat of bacteria or viruses jumping species. What The Fate of Rome does so brilliantly, and why I recommend it to everyone, is remind us that the threats to our civilization would be familiar to people for pretty much all of human history. Despite humanity’s increasing interference, nature still has dominion over us.
Links for The Fate of Rome:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-fate-of-rome-kyle-harper/1125843939?ean=9780691192062