The eruption of a rebellion in Mesopotamia prevented him from fully transforming the territory into a Roman province; he died shortly afterwards. The Persians and the Romans rapidly fell victim to the forces of the newly emergent Islamic army out of modern-day Saudi Arabia. While his focus is global, admirers of Rubicon will be pleased to find that, 20 years on, Holland also remains alive to the nastiness and sexual irrepressibility of Rome’s leaders. Yet, by and large — with the exception of the Year of the Four Emperors and the occasional revolt — vast stretches of the world that had previously been convulsed by conflict were stable. People in high or in distinguished life ought to have a greater circumspection in regard to their most trivial actions.

And the people who were there to receive your terrifying, thrusting, Roman penis were, of course, women and slaves: anyone who is not a citizen, essentially. Two ancient sources, Suetonius and Cassius Dio both claim that the Emperor Domitian (81-96 AD) brought in the prohibition. A censor wasn’t someone who went around cancelling people or closing down newspapers; a censor was someone who, every few years, would go around, working out how much money each individual citizen had, and also his moral worth. The capital did see some peace after that, but Vespasian and his successors waged a series of wars with various groups along the empire’s northern frontiers, and then with the Persian Empire.I’m not remotely qualified to say whether or not this is true, but it is clearly the case that this is a spectacularly wealthy period.

In Rome, death by crucifixion was a shameful death reserved for what would have been thought of as the dregs of society.Nicholas II became the last Tsar of Russia after his father, Alexander III, died an early death from kidney disease. He modulates the pace of his narrative excellently and I have read nothing which gives such a detailed and compelling account of the political and administrative life of the provinces and their relations with the imperial government. Romans offer sacrifice to the gods or you pay dues to the gods rather in the way that we take out an insurance policy.

You, like all irrational believers in “zeitgeist”, are positing some entrenched mentality, inimical to question and typical of all people at one, hazily defined, time. But I think that Rome provides us with a model: we are shadowed by the sense that if you have a moment in the sun, if you have greatness, then you are doomed as an empire to decline and fall. Let the sensitive beware: this is a book that judges everything about Rome by the standards of the Romans themselves. They are a kind of universal people — that ultimately makes Christianity so suited to an empire that is universal in scope: you can have churches, anywhere, and they’re all consecrated to the same God.As well as writing and presenting documentaries for Channel 4 and the BBC, Tom Holland co-presents the podcast “The Rest is History". So I would say that, between Augustus and the final collapse of the empire in the West, there are really only three significant emperors.

Interesting and hopefully accurate idea about the moral change we are going through being more analogous to the Reformation than anything in Roman history. There's no other historian who can bring the ancient world before the reader in all its sights, sounds and smells, its pomp, magnificence and martial glory, its strivings and sufferings and horror.

FS: You say in your book that “an immense reward was offered to anyone capable of implanting a uterus into the eunuch”.