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Rating: 
Summary: Helpful though needlessly academic
Review: Although I'm not a classicist by specialization, I have taught a one-semester college survey course in ancient Rome for twenty-six years. Schiavone, whose self described "difficult Italian" has been translated for this volume, has provided me with a number of significant insights that I hope to use in future lectures--notably ideas from Chapter 9, "Slaves, Nature, Machines." Nevertheless, the book is too long by about half and filled with academic name dropping. The author spends overmuch time trying to convince his readers that he has a thorough command of his sources in all languages. He does. But that's what footnotes are for. Furthermore, dragging in moderns like Marx, Hegel, and Weber does little to advance his argument--although it may have encouraged Harvard to accept this book for its list. Even more strained is Schiavone's argument that at the end of the Republic there was a window of opportunity for Rome to have abandoned its slave-based economy and to have moved towards a more modern notion of productivity.
Rating: 
Summary: a labor
Review: Blinded by footnote barrages at times I am sure to have missed some of the fine arguments presented. However, this book is golden despite the scope of an almost intractable undertaking. The author discusses in the most detail the ways of the Roman economy and its labor supply (slave), in order to argue that when conditions of the Roman world were no longer sufficient to maintain the empire the "greatest catastrophe ever experienced in the history of civilization" was experienced due to the very nature of these systems. The result is a dense opus of effort and erudition that re-evaluates the Romans, Roman historians, and the differences between the Romanity and modernity.
Rating:
Summary: a labor
Review: Blinded by footnote barrages at times I am sure to have missed some of the fine arguments presented. However, this book is golden despite the scope of an almost intractable undertaking. The author discusses in the most detail the ways of the Roman economy and its labor supply (slave), in order to argue that when conditions of the Roman world were no longer sufficient to maintain the empire the "greatest catastrophe ever experienced in the history of civilization" was experienced due to the very nature of these systems. The result is a dense opus of effort and erudition that re-evaluates the Romans, Roman historians, and the differences between the Romanity and modernity.
Rating: 
Summary: Decline and Fall, ...and Rise
Review: I read this work on the decline of the Roman Empire in association with Hardt and Negri's Empire (!), and this cast these two(quite different!) books in an ironic light. This account of the dynamics of Roman decline begins at the high point of the second century A.D. when the Roman system seems to reach a peak, as reflected in the Oration of Aristides, "To Rome", with its celebration of the Roman achievement. More than imperial complacency, the oration points to a pinnacle of achievement on the scale of a universal history, in a mood not totally dissimilar to the 'end of history' concept of today.
Behind this mood of a victorious civilization lies a system starting to reveal its actual state of frozen development, unable to proceed in a linear direction beyond its premises, a civilization deprived of it future, with the outcome of its dissolution almost prerequisite to future advance. The author cogently assesses the economic factors in the context of the slave system, the 'blind alley between economics and politics'. As the book ends with a short essay on the resolution to this impasse in the displacement and recursion of modernism, with its economic breakthrough and basic liberties essential to that, we are left nonetheless with a sense of what might happen again, a civilization reaching the limit of its basic premises, unable to advance.
Well worth reading. If "Empire" is your cup of tea, read this work alongside of that.
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