Far more than a history, this brilliantly illustrated volume offers a reconstruction in human terms of the many facets of Rome's extraordinary legacy. The Romans speak to us here through their splendid achievements and their tragic failures, their monuments and their tastes, to give us an understanding of the spirit behind these dramatic events. From village to Empire, for nearly a millennium Rome kept up a dizzying pace of change and expansion.

Stirring victories over Hannibal, the Gauls, the Britons alternated with peaceful intervals of cultural development under Augustus and Marcus Aurelius, until the final days of chaos and decline. Those thousand years take shape on the pages of Professor Cunliffe's beautiful book to give us a gradually unfolding vision of a people who once lived and of a resplendent world now in ruins.

Instead of a textbook, he has virtually recreated Rome itself, a world opening up, maintaining its brief, fragile balance, and then collapsing. The whole dynamic nature of the process is evoked here by the use of historical passages alternating with concise analytical views of daily life.

"The rise and fall of a great empire," Professor Cunliffe writes, "cannot fail to fascinate us, for we can see in such a story something of our own time. But of all the empires that have come or gone, none has a more immediate appeal than the Empire of Rome. It pervades our lives today.".

The sheer vastness of the Empire was staggering. At its height, it extended across 2,600 miles east to west, and 2,000 miles north to south. But these figures mean little. Even understood as reaching from the north of Britain to Africa, and engulfing Spain, Germany, and lands as far as the Persian Gulf, Rome does not come alive until captured - as in this book - through glimpses of shops and villas, the voices of people, the echoing theaters, baths, temples, and slums.

And Professor Cunliffe provides them for the reader. Along with the history of Rome's growth and dominion, he has added a careful history of her changing political, social, and cultural institutions. But above all, the Romans themselves speak. Cicero, Seneca, and Petronius seize the flavour of the Roman experience. Marius, Pompey, and Caesar use the urban mob as a pawn in their power games. Livy pieces together the city's origins from folklore.

Even the coins transmit news and instill piety, ultimately becoming devices for propaganda. Tombstones, monuments, bawdy and political graffiti, and private letters miraculously preserved give us a wealth of human details - the voices that gave life to Rome and her Empire... A young soldier writes home to Egypt: "Dear mother, I hope this finds you well. When you get this letter, I will be much obliged if you will send me some money....".

On a wooden tablet from London written by a master to his servant in Rome: "I believe you know I am very well. If you have made the list, please send. See that you turn the slave girl into cash...." Lucretius the Epicurean explains natural phenomena in terms of philosophical concepts; Vitruvius lays down the rules of architecture; the poets and playwrights all help enrich the fabric - and our heightened understanding - of Roman life.

In this handsome book, such materials provide readers with the eloquent testament and indestructible evidence of a city that emerged from obscurity in 500 B.C. and directed the civilized world until the birth of Constantinople in 500 A.D.

Featured among the volume's 1,000 illustrations, of which half are in full color, are superb photographs by former Life correspondent Brian Brake and by Leonard von Matt. These stunning works are augmented by additional photographs, reproductions, portraits, engravings, maps, and drawings that capture even more of the gifts that have been handed down to us by the Romans.