Rome on the Euphrates: The Story of a Frontier (Tauris Parke Paperbacks) Paperback – July 17, 2012

Professionally done thanks to a lifetime devotion and love of the subject. This book is not just told as a history but an adventure. It provides a greater insight into a particular area of the empire along with its personal history. For me, it makes me realize the truth in the phrase "History repeats itself to those who refuse to learn by it". Surely the drain and expenditure of both public taxes and generations of young men to acquire greater wealth for the powerful merchants and their government which demanded control of these routes has been repeated to our own day. The difference only being the substitution of goods from once precious silk and spices to the modern quest for control of petroleum within the same territory. The bloody sacrifice imposed on the middle class always being the same.

Freya Stark is a wonderful writer and a delight to follow along her outrageous travels, but her scholarship holds too closely to her citings from a rich variety of sources, and while it proves she has done her homework it lacks conviction. It wanders. It digresses. It strays too far from her own natural gift for language, which would be put to better use in descriptions of her own. She could tie up all the ends and commit herself to the process, instead of leaning on ancient historians. She would like, herself, to be considered an historian, but she doens't really qualify: she wants it both ways and it doesn't work. Otherwise, I adored the book because it just happens to deal with a region I know and love, but I had to invest my own enthusiasm, and my own references, for weaving some sense into it.

Why read a book about ancient history by a non-historian? 1. S. has great feeling for and knowledge of the topography. She spent decades traversing the Middle East. This translates into sympathy for people and antipathy for imperial ambitions and programs. armchair historians will benefit greatly. 2. S. is an excellent writer. 3. her subject is rarely engaged, almost never sympathetically for all sides. 4. The issues have not gone away. many of the names have been in the news since '01. She relies upon the major historians of the era ending with WWII. this somewhat cynical view of imperial Rome fell out of fashion--but is mild compared to contemporary views of empire. The breadth of investigation and depth of sympathy--e.g., the Cappadocians--merits the admiration of all. Readers with serious historical interests will not be disappointed.

Covers 800 years of history in great detail. A prior knowledge of Roman history would be helpful - this is not a beginners book on Rome! Only has one map but needs more. Quite interesting on the topic of imperial borders - natural ones are better than negotiated ones! Interesting that in our own day the U.S. has more trouble with its southern shorter, more natural border than it does with its longer un-natural northern border! The northern one must have been well negotiated!