The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire

Kyle Harper. (2017). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

The main focus of this book is to highlight the role played by climate change and pandemics into the narrative of the fall of the Roman Empire. Harper places the Romans in the Holocene and then proceeds to break it down further into the Roman Climate Optimum (c. 200 BCE – 150 CE), the Roman Transitional Period (c. 150 – 450 CE) and the Late Antique Little Ice Age (c. 450 – 700 CE), dating them with natural resources (ice cores, mineral deposits, tree rings) alongside surviving textual evidence. Four main events Harper focusses on are (1) a pandemic under Marcus Aurelius; (2) 3rd Century CE drought, pestilence and political change; (3) the splitting of the Empire and the fall of the West in the 4th-5th Century CE; (4) the eventual fall of the Eastern Empire in relation to outbreaks of bubonic plague and the little ice age.

Example Quotation

the influence of the climate on Roman history was by turns subtle and overwhelming, alternatingly constructive and destructive. But climate change was always an exogenous factor, a true wild card transcending all the other rules of the game. From without, it reshaped the demographic and agrarian foundations of life, upon which the more elaborate structures of society and state depended

(p.15)