Rome and Persia: The Seven Hundred Year Rivalry by Adrian Goldsworthy (Basic Books/Hachette, 2023) is an excellent example of popular narrative history. The author has a doctorate from Oxford and teaches in Wales but is the author of 11 other books on ancient history. He has learned not to bog the reader down with academic details.
Covering the period from the Second Century BCE to the Seventh Century CE in 700 pages obviously means that there are large gaps that are covered in just a few pages, if at all. Since we don’t have many narratives from the Parthian and Sasanian side – a few inscriptions, some archeological sites and coins – the author is basically limited to Roman and Byzantine accounts. But he does try to indicate where they are probably inaccurate or flat-out wrong.
Due to the sources, we know much more about campaigns and battles than about the long periods of peaceful coexistence. The author does try to fill this out as best he can, but he admits that there is very little documentation. Almost all of the discussion of trade and economics, for example is based on the very limited archeological evidence. Trade was the most common connection between the empires; after all, Persia was the endpoint of the silk road.
To me, one of the most interesting things was the half chapter or so discussing the role of Palmyra, a sometimes-independent city-state on the border of the two empires. Although it serves as an introduction to the career of Queen Zenobia of Palmyra, it really attempted to show how a small but strategic polity managed to survive in that situation.
The book has many excellent maps to enable the reader to follow along, and the footnotes are kept to one per paragraph at most. There is also an extensive bibliography. Since the narrative he constructs is clearly based on the most modern works on the topic, there are few references to sources earlier than 1990.
All in all, I found this to be an extremely well-written and informative book for the non-specialist.
By: Daniel A. Bronstein, Professor Emeritus, Michigan State University