Empires have been a hot scholarly commodity of late. The collapse of the Soviet Union left the United States in a position of global military, economic, and cultural dominance similar to that possessed by England from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, and in antiquity by Rome for half a millennium. Even before the terrorist attacks on September 11 compelled the United States to increase its global presence even further, friends and foes alike were fretting over the existence of what a French Foreign Affairs minister called a hyperpuissance, a “hyperpower” certain to overreach and meet the fate of other arrogant imperial powers, an estimation typically delivered with a heavy dose of proleptic schadenfreude.

Given this topicality, the last several years have seen numerous volumes on the British and Roman empires and how their histories and fates can illuminate America’s global dominance. The subtitle of Adrian Goldsworthy’s How Rome Fell, “Death of a Superpower,” suggests another entry in this flourishing sub-genre. Goldsworthy is an ancient historian with an emphasis on military history, and he has written several books on the Roman empire and army, including the well-received Caesar: The Life of a Colossus. Despite, however, the promise of lessons for the present hinted at by the subtitle, the greater value of How Rome Fellcomes from its being a reliable, reader-friendly survey of Rome’s decline and fall, “one of the great mysteries of history,” as Goldsworthy styles