My impressions from reading this book in 1991.

I suspect, especially from reading this book and Ramsey MacMulen's Corruption and the Decline of Rome, that the history of scholarship on Rome has progressed from the glamorizing Rome in Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to an empire full of extortion rackets, thuggy soldiers, and burdensome taxes which verge perilously close to slavery on supposedly free citizens as depicted by MacMullen and Isaac.

Isaac adds further condemnation with his convincing arguments that the Roman military did not do much to protect the bulk of Roman citizens. Indeed it preyed on them at least in the eastern provinces where citizens were made to defend themselves against Persian and nomadic attack. Further, he argues that the Romans were little interested in defense and quite preoccupied with conquest and its resultant material benefits which included occupying the always dangerous troops.

Perhaps the cruelest insult of all to the idea of the benefits of empire is Isaac showing that the emperors were not nearly as active in building projects as many historians have claimed. The provincials seem to have gotten mostly money from the empire and little else.

At times this book was tedious. It's definitely written for specialists in the field. It assumes, besides specialized knowledge, that the reader knows French, English, German, Greek, and Latin and is an archaelogical specialist at that. There are portions of this book that would be fine if I were writing an historical novel and I wanted to know exactly how many Roman watch-towers my character would see on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, but it's slow going.

Still, I found other chapters quite engrossing: the chapters on relationships between the army and civilians (particularly taxation) and the chapter where Isaac refutes other historians' views of Roman military strategy and defenses. It's interesting to compare MacMullen's and Isaac's views on the garrisoning of troops in cities. MacMullen sees it as evidence of corruption -- troops being used as enforcers for powerful patrons -- and as a sign of slackening frontier defenses as well as a burden on the citizens. Isaac sees them as always being in cities to control the native populace and not winding up there as evidence of an increasingly corrupt social order though Isaac certainly concurs that their presence was onerous and burdensome to the citizens.

Despite my lack of specialized knowledge (particularly in post-Constantine Roman history), especially of archaelogy, I learned a lot of things that justified the time and energy and money I spent on this book. Roman frontiers never had a defensive system of fortification, that a primary job of the Roman army was not defense but subjugation of imperial citizens. They were often posted in cities to try to get wind of rebellions before they happened -- a job, given the frequency of rebellions in places like Judea and Alexandria -- they often failed at. Troops were also used to control of communications and trade routes for taxes and monetary profit. Isaac argues the Romans were horrible at geography and strategic planning. Specifically, he takes some historians to task for a typically scholarly sin: assigning too rational of military thinking to people of the past. Romans could replicate our modern mistakes of bad analysis and illogical thinking. Romans had no firm geographical concepts of imperial boundaries. Rome had outposts beyond the traditionally held boundaries of Empire, placed no markers to designate imperial boundaries, thought of subjugation in terms of people andnot land. Veteran colonies could not possibly serve as means of military control because the veterans were too old. They really were only for staging areas for operations against rebels and future expansion Romans also felt client kingdoms like that of Herod were part of their empire.

Part of this book is concerned with the conflict between those ancient superpowers of Persians and Romans. Both fought via surrogates, jockeyed for control of the same areas, and signed elaborate treaties that included a type of arms reduction.

One odd thing about this book is that Isaac uses history from other times to bolster his arguments or provide examples of what may have went on in the Empire. I'm not sure it was always relevant to hear how the Ottoman Empire tried to control desert nomads, how much trouble certain Czars had on subjecting certain provinces, or how T. E. Lawrence says a guerilla war should be conducted, but I think Isaac does show the on-going problem of controlling certain pieces of land, and that the Romans might have had the same problems. ( )