The Empire Stops Here: A Journey Along the Frontiers of the Roman World
By Philip Parker
Jonathan Cape £25, 656 pages
FT Bookshop price: £20

In the middle of the ancient city of Rome, the first emperor Augustus set up a “Golden Milestone” to record the distance from the imperial metropolis to large cities of the empire. It was a glittering display of Rome’s power across the Mediterranean and beyond – from Spain to the Sahara, from eastern Turkey to northern France. Britain and much of the Balkans would be added after Augustus’s death.

The imperial frontier stretched for thousands of miles, in some places there remains an impressive marker wall, elsewhere these are identified only by scholarly conjecture. Philip Parker had the bright idea of taking a trip around all the Roman frontier provinces. The Empire Stops Here is an account of that journey, of the Roman remains he visited and the history they evoked. Inevitably much of this is the story of battles, massacres and the borders of Roman influence, shifting according to the success of the Huns, Goths, Picts or Parthians – all of whom have a walk-on part here.

But there is more to the book than military history. As Roman historian Tacitus famously put it: “Eventually the secret got out that an emperor could be made elsewhere, not just in Rome.” The picture implied by Augustus’s milestone – of distant borderlands, hardly in contact with the centre of the Roman world – began to change towards the end of the first century AD. Even emperors came from frontier provinces – Septimius Severus was Libyan, for example – but on several occasions armies stationed on frontiers were responsible for placing their own candidate on the throne. Later, as the empire was divided into separate administrative regions, previously marginal territory became the centre of political action and imperial powerbroking.

Parker’s journey includes visits to outlying forts, late imperial palaces and mini-capitals – such as Antioch in Syria, emperor Diocletian’s base for several years. Apart from a few factual wobbles (I wouldn’t wholly trust Parker on Roman religion or funerary law), The Empire Stops Here succeeds in turning this disparate, often ruined material into what is, in effect, a history of imperial Rome.

But how on earth was this vast territory governed? It was one thing to boast these imperial possessions, quite another to control them. Roman administrators were few in the outlying provinces. And, given the state of communications, it was hard for the central government to know what was happening in its distant territories, let alone direct operations there. In the winter it must have taken weeks, if not months, for Rome’s man in Armenia to send a message to the imperial HQ in Rome, and get a reply.

Parker does not quite capture this “information deficit” in the empire. When Cicero went to govern the province of Cilicia in modern Turkey, for example, he could not even discover whether his predecessor was still there. The regions were as much a mystery to him as to anyone. Cassius Longinus, later an assassin of Julius Caesar, claimed he defeated a group of Parthians, Rome’s rival in the east. The gossip at Rome, according to Cicero, was that they were not Parthians but Arabs dressed as Parthians. How often did the Romans know who they were fighting?

Perhaps, as historians now argue, the Romans succeeded only because they set their sights low. So long as the provincials paid their taxes and did not actively rebel, that was enough. The Romans were not out to win hearts and minds. Nevertheless, the spread of Roman pottery, fish sauce and bric-a-brac all over the empire seems reminiscent of today’s global Coca-Cola culture.

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. We move from the soulless, spick-and-span, reconstructed forts of the German frontier, for example, to romantic ruins in eastern Turkey, so under-studied that in one case it is unclear if they’re church remains or an aqueduct.

Almost everywhere we find people trying to make money out of the Romans. From Hadrian’s Wall to Jerash in Jordan there are people making money from pretending to be Romans. What “Jefficus” offers to tourists on the wall is much the same as the “re-enactors” at Jerash, with their shiny helmets and polished armour. An unexpectedly universal legacy of the empire.

Mary Beard’s ‘Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town’ (Profile) won the 2008 Wolfson History Prize