Roman Rebuttal

Now that yet another book (number 19, I think) has appeared to challenge my Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, first published in 1976 with several subsequent editions also in Hebrew, Chinese, and lesser languages—and there is also a very critical wiki entry—the time has come to confess how I came to write the book.

With the profitable family factories in Italy still going strong and absolutely no interest in earning a living, after going to Israel as a war volunteer just in time for the 1967 war but left at loose ends by an ill-timed 1970 ceasefire, I responded to the invitation of two genteel and distinguished Johns Hopkins University professors to spend two years in the United States signed up as a graduate student while writing a dissertation, without any tiresome coursework or classes and with tuition paid and even a scholarship. At the time I was mostly interested in strategic nuclear weapons and had just published a booklet on “the strategic balance” that went beyond missile inventories to operationalize them, to see who would come out on top by attacking not cities but missile silos.

On my first day visiting the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus I was stopped by a young professor who somehow knew I was the author of the aforementioned booklet, which evidently he disliked intensely (it was a tad cold-blooded about the end of the world). He sneered: “So I suppose you mean to write a dissertation on the research and development of the Minuteman ballistic missile?” No, I replied, my subject is… The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire (stringing together the most resonant, most grandiloquent words I could think of).

Now all that remained was to write the dissertation whose title I had just made up to respond to the sneer with a put-down. Because I had mostly studied analytical economics at the London School of Economics, all I had to start with were schoolboy memories of colorful emperors, but Latin I had studied in school, starting at age six because a wildly eccentric elementary school teacher in Palermo who was supposed to teach us Italian refused to do so (“you all speak Sicilian anyway”) and taught us Latin instead.

Later when I ended up in a British boarding school, there was an ex-priest converted to Judaism who taught plangent church Latin, and a retired lieutenant colonel with a wooden leg (El