Dominion
By Tom Holland
Little, Brown, 624pp, £25/$32
The Romans are the most “epic” figures in history, as my son says about anything awesome, exerting a glamour and allure that no other civilisation has successfully matched. That magnetism can appear heightened by what followed: the illiterate bleakness of the early Middle Ages, and the joyless religion that came with it. Many down the years have lamented the switch from the Rome of the Caesars to the Rome of the popes.
The young Tom Holland was one of them. Raised as an Anglican, the historian developed a childhood fascination with dinosaurs that evolved into a love of those other “apex predators”, the Romans and Greeks. “Although I vaguely continued to believe in God,” he writes, “I found him infinitely less charismatic than the gods of the Greeks: Apollo, Athena, Dionysus. I liked the way that they did not lay down laws, or condemn other deities as demons; I liked their rock-star glamour. As a result, by the time I came to read Edward Gibbon and his great history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, I was more ready to accept his interpretation of the triumph of Christianity: that it had ushered in an ‘age of superstition and credulity’. My childhood instinct to see the biblical God as the po-faced enemy of liberty and fun was rationalised.”
