An exciting new history of the Roman Empire’s struggle for survival in a turbulent era rocked by crises, when the specter of its decline and fall loomed over it as never before. Rome''s decline, as historian Cassius Dio famously put it, "from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust," seemed inevitable. After a brilliant Golden Age, the ominous specter of crisis, chaos, and collapse loomed over the Roman Empire. The first cracks began to appear during the celebrated rule of Marcus Aurelius with a series of bloody wars against marauding barbarians who smashed through the Empire’s northern frontiers. In the succeeding decades the Empire was rocked by a series of bloody usurpations, civil wars, barbarian attacks, epidemics and economic woes. In In this sweeping history that takes readers from sprawling army bases in the Sahara to the blood-drenched halls of the imperial court, from the high-brow philosophical schools to the apocalypse-obsessed religious cults, Miles demonstrates how the Roman obsession with their empire’s inevitable demise acted as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Miles asks the question of whether it was only through crisis, both real and imagined, that the imperial behemoth that was the Roman Empire managed to sustain its greatness....

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Richard Miles is the newly appointed provost of Queen’s University Belfast and the academic director of the Ancient North African Research Network. A specialist in Roman and Carthaginian history, he has directed archaeological excavations in Carthage and Rome, has hosted historical documentary series for the BBC, and is the author of a number of books on the ancient world, including Carthage Must Be Destroyed.