Greg Woolf, “Rome: An Empire’s Story”

I read this because of a review by Joseph Bottom in The Weekly Standard, which makes some good points.  The book is solid but doesn’t really offer a lot of insight into Christianity.  One point I liked (irrelevant to Christianity) is that Rome was unique in that its leaders/elite wrote poetry (297).  This point (286-87) is relevant:  “[T]he most likely factor making the world less receptive to imperial projects [broadly defined] must be the emergence of the new universal religions of late antiquity.  Christianity and Islam did not destroy the Roman Empire, but the world they introduced was one less friendly to the great political empires of antiquity.”