The Tragedy of Empire: From Constantine to the Destruction of Roman Italy by Michael Kulikowski

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 361 that baptism take place in running water, made it necessary for early Christian communities to guarantee its availability. Some of the medieval contributions provide interesting insights which may or may not be of relevance when studying ancient history. For instance, Elisabeth Gruber relates (184) that in Vienna, the construction of a large water pipeline was begun only after a big fire in 1525. Previously, the authorities of this major city had hoped to be able to fight the frequent fires by requiring inhabitants to keep water stored in vats in attics and courtyards, and by requiring members of various guilds to provide assistance. This approach has something in common with what Nero decreed after the great fire of 64 (subsidia reprimendis ignibus in propatulo quisque haberet, “everyone was to have appliances for checking fires in the open,” Tac. Ann. 15.43) and with what the emperor Trajan replied to Pliny, who asked permission for the Nicomedenses to set up a collegium fabrorum for the purpose of fighting future fires: the domini praediorum should prepare what is necessary and in addition rely on the voluntary efforts of bystanders (Plin. Ep. 10.34.2). The difference between the Roman world and fifteenth-century Vienna consists in Trajan ’s extreme aversion towards any kind of associative activity among the population. Rainer Schreg’s “Human Impact on Hydrology: Direct and Indirect Consequences of Medieval Urbanisation in Southern Germany” is rich in observations of many kinds. So, for instance, can one read about the effects that towns situated along rivers had on the surrounding landscape. River transport of logs for construction was practical and the Neckar river made it possible for the town of Tübingen to import large quantities of timber (255–256). This led to the cutting down of large tracts of forest upstream, and to subsequent land erosion. Surviving timber in medieval buildings allow scholars to reconstruct the kind of rafts that were used for floating the logs down the river, providing information that is much more detailed than anything available for the classical world. Schreg approaches an even larger question when he notes that changes in biotopes may have exacerbated the effect of the Black Death after 1347 (259–260). Urbanisation was one factor which led to changes in the medieval landscape, such as soil erosion, and may thus have impacted the rodent population (Schreg assumes that Yersinia pestis may have remained endemic in Europe after the Justinian Plague of the sixth century, and that a genetic mutation occurred shortly before the Black Death). According to the author, local factors may have contributed to the horrific pandemic which resulted from the arrival of the new wave of the plague from the East. Much is hypothetical here and the matter cannot be resolved with brief references to less than a handful of earlier publications. But the topic is in some ways a fitting conclusion to the volume, in that it combines two features of classical antiquity which continue to exert a major fascination in the modern world: water supply and hydraulic management on the one hand, and ancient plagues and diseases on the other. University of Toronto Christer Bruun The Tragedy of Empire: From Constantine to the Destruction of Roman Italy. By Michael Kulikowski. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2019. Pp. xxx, 382, 25 colour plates. A companion and sequel to Kulikowski’s The Triumph of Empire (Cambridge, MA 2016), this volume is a confident and unsentimental political history of the later Roman 362 PHOENIX empire. The primary focus is on the western provinces, but considerable attention is paid to the pars orientalis, and the whole is intelligently set within a broader context that extends as far east as China. The approach to the material is mainly chronological, chapter divisions usually aligning with the reign(s) of a consequential emperor or emperors or with the ascendancy of another political heavyweight. The concluding chapters cast a wider net over the transition to the Byzantine empire in the east and to the medieval polities of western Europe. Kulikowski does not intend to hold up a mirror to our times, because in his view history offers...

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