Product Description

The Roman Empire was the largest and most enduring of the ancient world. From its zenith under Augustus and Trajan in the first century AD to its decline and fall amidst the barbarian invasions of the fifth century, the Empire guarded and maintained a frontier that stretched for 5,000 kilometres, from Carlisle to Cologne, from Augsburg to Antioch, and from Aswan to the Atlantic. Far from being at the periphery of the Roman world, the frontier played a crucial role in making and breaking emperors, creating vibrant and astonishingly diverse societies along its course which pulsed with energy while the centre became enfeebled and sluggish. This remarkable new book traces the course of those frontiers, visiting all its astonishing sites, from Hadrian's Wall in the north of Britain to the desert cities of Palmyra and Leptis Magna. It tells the fascinating stories of the men and women who lived and fought along it, from Alaric the Goth, who descended from the Danube to sack Rome in 410, to Zenobia the desert queen, who almost snatched the entire eastern provinces from Rome in the third century. It is at their edges, in time and geographical extent, that societies reveal their true nature, constantly seeking to recreate and renew themselves. In this examination of the places that the mighty Roman Empire stopped expanding, Philip Parker reveals how and why the Empire endured for so long, as well as describing the rich and complex architectural and cultural legacy which it has bequeathed to us.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #41553 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 656 pages

Review
'I couldn't stop reading' --The Scotsman

Review
“Whether he is considering Antony and Cleopatra, Queen Zenobia starting her own great eastern Empire from Syria or the significance of Hadrian’s Wall, Philip Parker is the perfect combination of compelling narrative historian and observant travel writer. This is one of the liveliest works of ancient history I’ve ever read.”
Reader’s Digest

“This is a labour of love, clearly the work of long years…”
Telegraph Review

“The Empire Stops Here is not only a history. It is also an engaging modern travelogue with observations on how the archaeology of the Roman empire is preserved and presented in these 22 modern countries.”
Financial Times

“The patience, effort, and research that have gone into The Empire Stops Here are awe-inspiring.”
The Scotsman

"…his book is far from being a conventional travelogue… Neither a work of history, nor a scholarly gazetteer, nor a guide, but rather a blend of all three, The Empire Stops Here is a book in which weather-beaten masonry serves to crowd out human beings, and in which the people who most truly come alive are those who have been dead for 2,000-odd years. …a quite breathtaking and eccentric edifice of scholarship. Parker's true models, it turns out, are not the modern generation of travel writers at all, but rather the ancient geographers, scholars such as Strabo and Diodorus Siculus, who thought nothing of using their travels as pegs on which to hang entire histories of the world. Unlike Shelley's traveller from an antique land, Parker does not write in scorn of the colossal wreck that he has witnessed, but rather in praise of it. His travels, he confesses, prompted in him two emotions: "wonder that after close to 2,000 years so much can survive, and sadness that for all our sophistication, we are unlikely ever again to create something so enduring." At least he can console himself with the reflection that, with this extraordinary book, he has raised a monument all of his own.”
The Guardian

About the Author
Philip Parker was born in Liverpool in 1965. As a publisher he ran the Times books list, including works on Ancient Civilizations and The Times History of the World. He has travelled widely in Europe, North and South America, North Africa, Asia and Australia. He lives in London with his partner and daughter.

Customer Reviews

Definitely worth getting if you're interested in the far-flung areas of the ROman EMpire
Written in a captivating style, exhaustively researched and backed up with a very impressive and thorough grasp of the history of the time, this is an extraordinarily well written academic book which can also act as a travel guide.

Philip Parker has managed to fuse contextual depth and scholarly rigour to a travel book, and to make an academic tome of ancient history jump to life.

If you are interested in Roman history, this is a terrific book to further your knowledge, written by an expert on the subject, but it also serves as an unrivalled and invaluable guide to take with you and to read, perhaps piecemeal, during a trip to a ruined temple on a dusty desert plain, a hilltop fort or ancient villa, or any other Roman remain or town that one might visit in Syria, Morocco, Egypt, Spain, Britain, Eastern Europe, or any of the far flung fringes of the Roman empire.

Definitely worth getting - this might be a model for how all history books will be written in the future.

Good, interesting but academic.
This is an interesting book, but I doubt if many people will read it from cover to cover. It's an academic tome.
Good and informative , but a heavy read. Good to dip into if you are visiting any of the places on the old Roman frontier.

historians shouldn't travel
There's travel writing, and there's history, and then there's the history told via a travel narrative. And in this case the synthesis is less than the sum of the parts. Travel writing is personal, and history is contextual, personal only in the sense that it might be about persons, but rarely about the writer. So what we have here is a serious amount of history, of the worthy but dull variety, and not enough anecdotes to spice it up along the mighty ramble. A shame, because at times when the author lets himself go he develops a nice style, but then either he or his editor veer back on track.