In this week’s TLS – a note from the Editor

Why do we still study the Roman empire? Because it was so successful. Why was it so successful? The Romans themselves asked that question and, like the rest of us who came later, could not find a single satisfactory answer. As Mary Beard discusses this week, one of the first attempts to explain the superpower to itself came from a Greek called Polybius, tutor to the young Scipio Aemilianus, conqueror of Carthage and scion of other great Roman conquerors. Although it is not easy to decide how successful Polybius was himself (only five of his forty books survive complete), he left behind numerous citations by other historians, an oeuvre that in the twentieth century so dominated the life of the classicist F. W. Walbank that “it is now almost impossible to think of Polybius separately from Walbank, or vice versa”. Beard notes the personal cost as well as the historical gain in this relationship, a subject not often confronted in festschrifts and one that should be “required reading for every academic”.

Eventually the city of Rome was supplanted by Constantinople. Peter Frankopan reconsiders the deceptive simplicities of this shift. T. Corey Brennan praises Caroline Vout’s dazzling account of how Rome so long saw itself as a city of seven hills. For students of both Greece and Rome, the sacrifice of animals is one of the customs deemed to define the ancient against the modern. But why did it begin? As a relic of Palaeolithic humans hunting wild beasts? A reminder of communal dinners once men and women had settled down on farms? The formal point of sacrifice was to communicate with the gods but, when Peter Thonemann assesses the origins, he finds the best explanation in “an act of violent killing in order to eat”.

The latest novel by the eighty-seven-year-old American novelist James Salter begins in 1945 at the end of the Pacific War: but its massive naval clashes evoke the violent rituals of the Iliad, writes Michael Saler. Salter’s life and fiction demonstrate “the conjugation of two sets of ideals – that of archaic moral values and complex aesthetic truth”.

Peter Stothard