Roman Power provides a synthetic account of the growth and decline of Roman power from its early years as a middling Italian city-state in 400 BCE to the 7th-century CE Islamic invasions of the Byzantine East. Harris is concerned not only with the allocation of military or political force on external enemies, but with myriad forms of power—economic, legal, social, and the power of gender and ideas.

William V. Harris. Roman Power: A Thousand Years of Empire. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

From Bryn Mawr Classical Review (BMCR). Review by Charles Goldberg, Bethel University