New Rome

The Empire in the East

By: Paul Stephenson

Narrated by: Peter Noble

Length: 18 hrs and 31 mins

Publisher's summary

As modern empires rise and fall, ancient Rome becomes ever more significant. We yearn for Rome's power but fear Rome's ruin—will we turn out like the Romans, we wonder, or can we escape their fate? That question has obsessed centuries of historians and leaders, who have explored diverse political, religious, and economic forces to explain Roman decline.

In New Rome, Paul Stephenson looks beyond traditional texts and well-known artifacts to offer a novel, scientifically minded interpretation of antiquity's end. It turns out that the descent of Rome is inscribed not only in parchments but also in ice cores and DNA. During its final five centuries, the empire in the east survived devastation by natural disasters, the degradation of the human environment, and pathogens previously unknown to the empire's densely populated, unsanitary cities. However, Greco-Roman civilization, a world of interconnected cities that had shared a common material culture for a millennium, did not.

Politics, war, and religious strife drove the transformation of Eastern Rome, but they do not tell the whole story. Braiding the political history of the empire together with its urban, material, environmental, and epidemiological history, New Rome offers the most comprehensive explanation to date of the Eastern Empire's transformation into Byzantium.

©2021 Paul Stephenson (P)2023 Tantor

Full of fascinating details.

Listening to this during the day allowed me to expand upon my knowledge of the eastern Roman Empire and gave me plenty of sources to follow up on as I fall deeper down the rabbit hole that is Roman history. Listening to it at night also served as a great sleep aide, as the narrator has one of those voices that works hypnotically. Not a bad thing, but I did end up having to rewind the content by hours several times during my listening after some really good naps.