Limits of Empire, Limits of Patience

Today, a review of Simon and Jonathan Forty’s Limits of Empire. Rome’s Borders (2021) dropped into my mailbox, and I wondered if the reviewer and I had read the same book. I certainly didn’t feel that “This book is a nice addition to the literature aimed at a general readership”. However, I must admit that I read it on my vintage black-and-white Kindle, whereas I see (from Google Books) that the 200-page hardback is lavishly illustrated with 350 photographs (many of them from the wonderful collection of Carole Raddato, misspelled “Raddoto” here).

This no doubt swayed the reviewer, who emphasizes the “numerous high-quality pictures and maps which enable the reader to engage with the analysis of evidence more closely” (what analysis of evidence?). In the end, he recommends the book to “those who have no insightful knowledge and familiarity with the history of the Roman frontiers”. On the other hand, those who have such knowledge, he concedes, “might find glitches in it”. This is surely a worrying attitude for any educator to adopt. And I’m not sure that Casemate Publishers should be let off with typographical errors, even if “some of [them] are entirely forgivable”. (I wonder what the reviewer considers to be a “forgivable” error? The “African deserts of Arabia”, perhaps? Or the absence of a warning on the “mosaic from Mogontiacum [showing] the Capricorn symbol of legio XXII Primigenia” that it’s modern?)

The book is clearly intended for the coffee table, so I really shouldn’t be surprised by such gaucheries as “We are lucky that the Romans loved building as much as they liked fighting”; or such platitudes as “the largest collection of written information we have of the Roman world is in their books and letters”; or such banalities as “watchtowers, forts small and large, legionary fortresses: these all have a military purpose as well as potentially providing a customs barrier”. (However, I did enjoy the unintended comedy of aerial photography “unearthing otherwise hidden locations”.) Virtually every statement is qualified and vague; “potentially”, “mostly”, and “usually” conceal the authors’ unfamiliarity with the subject.

Errors abound — my goodness, there are so many —, but it is probably as tiresome to read about them as it is to record them. It’s just a pity that Casemate Publishers think so little of their readers as to sell them a book that is most certainly not “an ideal introduction to the Limesforschung”.