The Fate of Rome is a history of the Roman Empire from its height in the second century AD to the crises of the seventh, written by the classicist Kyle Harper and published by Princeton University Press in 2017 in its series on the history of the ancient world. Its argument is that the empire's long story cannot be told only through emperors, armies and barbarian peoples: changes in climate and the arrival of new infectious diseases were active forces that repeatedly struck a society whose own success had made it vulnerable.
Kyle Harper · AuthorThe Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire
Author
Kyle Harper
About Kyle Harper
Kyle Harper is an American historian of the ancient Mediterranean and professor of classics and letters at the University of Oklahoma, where he has also served in senior academic administration, including as provost. His first books concerned the social and moral history of late antiquity: Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275–425 (2011) and From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013). The Fate of Rome (2017) turned to environmental history, combining the written sources with evidence from climate science, ancient DNA and skeletal remains, and he widened that approach in Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History (2021).