| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Ancient and Medieval

Clifford Ando. Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire. (Classics and Contemporary Thought, number 6.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2000. Pp. xxi, 494. $60.00.

Almost twenty years ago, Alexander Demandt chronicled some four hundred attempts to account for Rome's demise. And yet, that the Imperium Romanum eventually faded might seem only natural; its astonishing longevity is the nearly supernatural thing. Clifford Ando offers an explanation not for Rome's fall but for its remarkable resilience. 1

Ando's book, which he prefers to call an essay (of just over 400 pages), "does no more than sketch the path to an answer" (p. xiii). The path described by Ando is important, however, and, in many ways, convincing. In short, it is this: during the first and second centuries A.D., a period when those living beyond Rome's frontiers left the empire relatively in peace, residents of the territories controlled by Rome internalized, by means of various societal, governmental, or religious rituals, an imperial ideology. A kind of universal consensus as to the legitimacy and desirability of Rome's rule was developed. And so "the empire survived its crises because of what had been achieved in times of peace" (p. xii). Ando's task, then, is to describe, or define, that achieved consensus and, more importantly, to demonstrate how it was brought about. . . .

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