311 pages
Published 2024
Read from November 10 to November 17
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
We always have to step carefully around histories of Rome. As with histories of war, the topic tends to attract cryptofascists and bootlickers, glassy-eyed in their praise of power and empire and masculine control. Which is a shame; Rome lay at the center of a fascinating era, a period of cultural interchange and population movement. But no, so many histories want to grovel at the feet of the caesars.
This book is a history of Roman roads, utilizing them as a means of examining imperialism and structures of power throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. Fletcher breezes through the Classical Roman section of her history within 60 pages. The bulk of Roads is about how successive cultural moments engaged with (and mythologized) the memory and infrastructure of Rome. We wend through the medieval age of pilgrimage, the early modern Grand Tour, the encroachment of railroads, the imperialist myth-making of Fascism, and the romanticizing sheen of Hollywood and all-inclusive continental vacations.
Along the way, we sometimes get bogged down in recitations of politicians and authors who traveled a road, or who purposefully avoided a road. Fletcher interweaves her sources with her own post-lockdown travels across Europe and Asia Minor. Her contemporary journeys are enjoyably written, seasoned with an academic’s wariness of our decade’s resurgent national populism. Both the historic and modern narratives would have been enhanced with more maps, but publishers are cheap about illustrations these days.
One thing from Roads that will forever stick with me: the understanding that the “Great Man” style of history was “part of a wider European trend of history in service of the modern nation state,” crafting a narrative of national heroes and their patriotic deeds. It’s one of those observations that’s blatant in hindsight, but that our culture doesn’t tend to acknowledge.
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