Richardson J. The Language of Empire: Rome and the Idea of Empire from the Third Century BC to the Second Century AD

New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. – 232 p.The Roman Empire has been an object of fascination for the past two millennia, and the story of how a small city in central Italy came to dominate the whole of the Mediterranean basin, most of modern Europe and the lands of Asia Minor and the Middle East has often been told. It has provided the model for European empires from Charlemagne to Queen Victoria and beyond, and it is still the basis of comparison for investigators of modern imperialisms. By an exhaustive investigation of the changing meanings of certain keywords and their use in the substantial remains of Roman writings and in the structures of Roman political life, this book seeks to discover what the Romans themselves thought about their imperial power in the centuries in which they conquered the known world and formed the Empire of the first and second centuries ad.John Richardson is Emeritus Professor of Classics, University of Edinburgh. He has written on Roman Spain: Hispaniae: Spain and the Development of Roman Imperialism 218–82 bc (1986); The Romans in Spain (1996) and Appian: Wars of the Romans in Iberia (2000); and he has contributed articles on Roman imperialism and Roman provincial administration to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd edition, 1996) and the Cambridge Ancient History, volume ix (2nd edition, 1994).