This fine book seeks to overthrow the current academic consensus that the Romans were incapable of strategic thought, had little understanding of their frontiers, lacked the will to develop a coherent defensive system due to the problems of time and distance, and finally did not believe it was their role to protect the provincial population from attack from those across the frontiers.
Rather, for five centuries from the Battle of Actium in 31 BC to the final collapse in AD 476, ‘they’ maintain that the Empire lurched along in haphazard fashion driven by one capricious emperor after another. James Lacey’s contention is that this flies in the face of both the evidence and common sense. It is Lacey’s belief that, ‘the Romans were, for their time, very sophisticated strategic thinkers who possessed all the tools to plan long-term strategies and to act according to those plans’.
The controversy over whether the Romans were capable of strategic thought dates back to 1976 and the publication of Edward Luttwak’s The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire from the First Century AD to the Third. Luttwak is what may be described as a ‘professional defence analyst’, and his intrusion into the cosy world of Classical scholarship caused quite a furore 46 years ago. Eventually, the riposte came with Ben Isaac’s The Limits of Empire: the Roman Army in the East (1990), in which Isaac refuted much of what Luttwak had said, maintaining that Rome had no grand strategy and little thought of defence, arguing that the concept of an imperial frontier was irrelevant in Roman terms.
