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As this Year of Our Common Calendar 2010 began its downhill slide, I turned 32 years old, saw bleakness on all sides of me, and read the following books:

The Rise of the Roman Empire, Polybius. This one took forever. Not because it’s long; I read the far more lengthy Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in much less time. Whereas Gibbon’s prose still seems very contemporary after a couple of centuries, however, no translation can really quite bridge the ten-times-as-long gap between us and Polybius. As I find to be the case with many classic works, it was interesting, and if you settle into its rhythms you can make good progress, but it’s still very easy to set aside.

Having finished it, I confess that I’m still not entirely sure how Rome built its empire; this book was really more like “How Rome subdued Carthage and became kingmakers among the Greeks.” I can note, however, that while “killing those who opposed them” certainly did play a role, I really don’t think it was the key. (After all, a province with a productive, taxpaying populace was of far greater value than a desolation.) In fact the Romans employed canny diplomacy as much as sharpened steel.

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