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Far left Julius Caesar ‘the greatest Roman of them all’ personifies the murderous violence that characterised the Roman Empire in the 1st century BC, when it was expanding faster than ever before, to achieve dominance over the Mediterranean basin and much of continental Europe. Yet, in the perspective of history’s longue durée, the Roman Empire was but an interlude unstable and unsustainable, for it defied the logic of Europe’s distinctive geography.

Current Archaeology
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The Land between the Oceans: The Making of Modern Europe (Part Three)

Geography made a unitary empire embracing the Mediterranean and temperate Europe inherently unstable; but the wreckage of the Roman Empire contained the building blocks of modern Europe. In the third and final part of our series based on Cunliffe’s new book, Europe between the Oceans, we chart the changes from Caesar to Charlemagne.