Characters and Events of Roman History by Guglielmo Ferrero

As a long time student of Roman history I have burned up many hours of my life reading some very interesting and not-so-interesting books on this expansive topic. Ferrero was a Roman historian in the early twentieth century and a professor and author with much acclaim in his day. So much so, that he was invited by President Teddy Roosevelt in 1908 to come to the United States and deliver a series of lectures which forms the basis of this book. Each chapter is a lecture and retains the style and feel of a public presentation much as I have always imagined Chataqua Lectures must have been like. Kind of “edu-tainment on steroids”. What will certainly not be missed by today’s reader is his almost prophetic comparisons between modern Europe and the Roman Empire. He speaks of how Rome, once it had achieved a certain level of wealth and luxury, went into negative birth rates causing a “famine of men” which made possible the radical reordering and decline of the empire by the barbarian incursions. It isn’t rocket science to note that Europe has had a negative birth rate for decades and the result is a radical demographic, social, and religious shift caused by large numbers of non-European immigrants. Like the “barbarian invasions” of late antiquity, it was far from all bad and perhaps some of the new immigrants will revitalize and renew some aspects of Europe which have grown old and tired with time. Another prescient observation Ferrero made in his day was that Europe was built around the wedding of Christianity and the idea of Empire it inherited from Rome, but seems to be jettisoning its intellectual patrimony and moving more towards the political ideals of Rome. One certainly sees today a Europe which is almost embarrassed about its Christian past and yet unified economically and more and more politically. Ferrero makes an almost startling observation about the tyrannical emperor Nero and St. Paul that still has me scratching my chin. He makes a case that Nero set the stage for a wider and broader acceptance of Christianity because of his importation and popularizing of all things oriental in the arts and letters. As these things became more Roman, Christianity seemed less eastern. This synergy, he suggests, reached its zenith in the Roman Catholic Church of the Middle Ages and Renaissance where art and Christian teaching ruled the hearts and minds of most Europeans. Obviously not a book for everyone, but an enjoyable synthesis for those who know even the rudiments of Roman history.