The Fate of Rome - a microbe′s world

"The Fate of Rome" is a pre-COVID book published in 2017 by Kyle Harper, an historian who shows the role of climate and microbes in the rise and fall of the Roman empire.

I loved everything about it, though history as a subject is not very close to me. It generally brings back memories of very tedious classes in school with too many names and dates. This book keeps both the amount of names and dates to a minimum to tell a compelling story. The timeline at the beginning that I kept coming back to is nicely clean as is the language.

Being a biologist, not an historian, it was fascinating to read history with a perspective on nature. Down to the spooky end with these quotes:

"… we should not see the case of Rome as the object lesson of a dead civilization. Rather, the Roman experience is important as part of an ongoing story. Far from marking the final scene of an irretrievably lost ancient world, the Roman encounter with nature may represent the opening act of a new drama, one that is still unfolding around us."

and even better:

"It′s a microbe′s world – we′re just living in it."

As if we hadn′t known ...