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Edward J. Watts holds the Alkiviadis Vassiliadis Endowed Chair and is professor of history at the University of California, San Diego. The author and editor of several prize-winning books, including Mortal Republic, he lives in Carlsbad, California.
At last, a history of the Roman state as it has always been crying out to be told, and never has been! Not even Edward Gibbon, more than 200 years ago, covered the full 2,000-year span, as Edward J. Watts does here. And at last we learn the truth: that Rome's 'decline and fall' was brought about not by barbarian invaders from the east in the 5th and 6th centuries but by crusading Europeans from the Christian west in 1204. Watts tells this story with verve and aplomb, and a wealth of finely observed detail drawn from Roman historians' own accounts of their past. -- Roderick Beaton, author of Europe: A New History The great achievement of this book is its scale. The coverage is vast and yet Watts deftly brings two thousand of Roman history under one powerful arc of analysis. What it meant to be Roman was always in flux, but what made the Roman state so successful - its unique combination of resilience and adaptability - remained intact throughout -- Jerry Toner
