Karl Loewenstein

There are so many books on Roman history that it's difficult for a layman to filter out the interesting ones. I read history mostly due to my interest in the practice and theory of government. This book checked all the boxes for me and probably ended my search for new sources on Roman history. In the future my time will be better spent reading this book repeatedly rather than taking chances on new unknown works. The author presents himself as an amateur historian and professional political scientist. Perhaps professional historians of antiquity can point out some inaccuracies in the details, but the great advantage of this book lies in the generality of its analysis and conclusions. The author moves from the early republic to the civil wars, Augustus' Principate and the dictatorial late-Roman Dominate, analyzing along the way how power was distributed and what government meant in these periods.

The most enduring legacy of Roman government lies in the different frameworks for power distribution that were tried during its thousand-year history and recorded for posterity by its historians. This book presents those frameworks without trying to force them into an overly theoretical typology and also without getting bogged down in the biographies of the most powerful and influential individuals. The wealth of detail at times becomes a bit tedious, especially in the presentation of early republican institutions, but this book probably could not have been made any shorter without omitting something of value. All in all the subject matter of this book is clearly too narrowly confined to suit readers who want a general overview of Roman history. But if you've read about ancient Greek democracy and wondered how the politics of the far more long-lived Roman civilization was organized, this book provides as complete an analysis as you're ever likely to find.… (més)