A wish to court the wider public also manifests itself in other ways. The five authors (myself included) who aspire to be bought and read by the intelligent, and all-too-elusive, "wider reading public", all open their books with intriguing, and supposedly well-written, little stories, designed to tempt the reader into the heart of the book. Some (and again I am guilty) even open individual chapters in the same way.  Has this become an over-used cliché of "popular" history (though I have to admit I can't think of a better way of hooking a reader)? Some of these authors also have a fondness, even a weakness, for throwing in allusions and parallels from contemporary history and from literature. James O'Donnell particularly likes this style: on one single page (227), in discussing the emperor Justinian, he works in references to Huck Finn, Hollywood, Hamlet, Gertrude and Ophelia, and Kurt Vonnegut. Does this shed revealing light on Justinian, or is it primarily meant to tell us how cultured and aware the author is? Christopher Kelly has a similar propensity to display his knowledge of the modern world and modern culture, this time through his chapter titles: "Axis of Evil", "Shock and Awe", "Mission Impossible" and "Close Encounters", as well as one dreadful pun, "A Backward Steppe" (which discusses Hunnic society north of the Black and Caspian Seas). I find all this a bit cheap, but am I just being curmudgeonly?

"Axis of Evil" and "Shock and Awe" (which O'Donnell also uses, in a subtitle) are of course meant to make us consider parallels with contemporary events, and raise the question of whether these books are intended to transmit lessons from the past to us in the present.  In the case of three of these books — Adrian Goldsworthy's, James O'Donnell's and my own — a moral for the present is explicit. In my case it is a very general one — that material well-being (and with it high culture) are dependent on economic complexity, which is fragile; when an economy collapses (as I believe happened at the end of the Roman empire), the consequences are dire. 

I don't advocate any solutions, but I do suggest a degree of caution and humility. (In the case of Goldsworthy's book, the moral is much more precise: that great powers which lose a sense of common purpose and cease to value public service are in severe danger of decline, and that the present-day United States should look to this lesson. O'Donnell is worried by the recent propensity of the US to impose its military will with very little regard to the long-term consequences, and seeks to steer opinion towards a much more cautious and irenic strategy. 

The aggressive Justinian is roundly condemned, and presented, implicitly but unambiguously, as a sixth-century George W. Bush: "He [Justinian] was a man of limited talents from the provinces, surrounded by gifted men who knew only too well how to reshape their world in the image of delusion about the position of the city [Constantinople] and its emperors in this world...We may choose to call them Justinian's best and brightest or, if you prefer, his neoconservatives" (p.216). 

Explicit and implicit comparisons between old and new Romes have a long and very distinguished history, reaching back to Gibbon and beyond, though learning lessons from Rome's past, as with all lessons from history, has proved problematic — lessons are easy to see with the advantage of hindsight, much less easy to spot in the heat of the moment. The genre of explicit comparison is most thoroughly represented in another recent work, Cullen Murphy's Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America (Houghton Mifflin 2007), which I have only excluded from consideration alongside our seven books because it is very different in style and approach. It is not a conventional history book and does not focus specifically on the late empire; rather it is a detailed (and intelligent) exploration of different aspects of ancient Roman and modern American society, drawing out the contrasts between the two as much as, if not more than, the parallels.