Our book today is The Edge of Empire: A Journey to Britannia: From the Heart of Rome to Hadrian’s Wall, an utterly winning and somewhat old-fashioned work by Bronwen Riley in which she imagines a sprawling travel itinerary of Antonine Rome through a narrative device that was once familiar in popular histories of ancient Rome, books with titles like A Day in the Life of Rome or Daily Life in Pliny’s Rome: pick a focal-point character and tell the larger story through that character. It’s an inherently limiting device but also instantly effective – it personalizes the presentation of an otherwise enormous amount of information.

The focal-point character Bronwen Riley chooses is Sextus Julius Severus, a successful general who in AD 130 set out from Hadrian’s Rome to his far-distant posting as the new governor of Britannia. Severus had been governor of Moesia Inferior on the shore of the Black Sea, so he’s perfect for Riley’s purposes: he had to prepare for his trip across the breadth of the empire, organize, pack, trek, and then arrive and adapt to life on the very edge of the Roman world.

“In this period,” Riley writes, “Rome was still the radiant centre of imperial power, the city where both the emperor and the ruling class needed to have a base and the place from which many high-ranking officials would have set out at the start of their postings to the provinces.” And throughout The Edge of Empire, our author is keenly aware of the inherent wide-screen drama of her story, starting at the heart of it:

It is April, AD 130. Rome is the teeming capital of an empire that stretches from the blustery north-western shores of Britain to the fringes of Mesopotamia, 2,500 miles to the east, and as far south as Africa and the desert of Sahara. The Roman Empire’s boundaries extend from the ocean where the sun god rises to the ocean where he sinks. Publius Aelius Hadrianus, a most complex and compelling man, has been emperor for fourteen years.

Once Severus reaches Britannia, The Edge of Empire settles in to a harder sell: a province-by-province, road-by-road tour of Roman Britain. There have been many such books: Arthur’s Britain by Leslie Alcock, A Guide to Roman Britain by Leonard Cottrell, The Real Lives of Roman Britain by Guy de la Bedoyere, Under Another Sky by Charlotte Higgins, and dozens of others, all of them more or less devolving into museum earpiece-guides for raincoated tourists trudging around ruins:

As the travellers draw near to Viroconium they find themselves in cattle country, the territory of the Cornovii (encompassing much of Cheshire and Shropshire). Sitting in a landscape of mixed arable and pastoral farms, Viroconium Cornoviorum is protected by the River Severn snaking around it to the west, and by the valleys of small streams to the north and south … Viroconium is built on the site of a legionary fortress established here in the late AD 30s as the base of the Legion XIV Gemina and the Legion XX Valeria Victrix. Here, on the higher east bank of the Severn at a place where there is a major ford, the army had control to the west and south and a convenient base for attacking Wales and for penetrating further north.

Riley’s book is bright, sunny company during these tours, but a reader in Baton Rouge (and with no plans to leave Baton Rouge) is going to find it occasional rough hoeing to keep the various legion encampments straight. Riley is a writer for the English Heritage organization, so it’s entirely likely that she gave neither a thought nor a care for whether or not her book would play well in the colonies. But she has a real flair for you-are-there writing about ancient Rome, so even armchair travelers will finish The Edge of Empire hoping she turns to the subject again. Perhaps a nice long look at Hadrian’s Rome?