July 30 (Bloomberg) -- Fancy a hike through the ancient Roman world? Philip Parker will be our guide.

A scholarly traveler, Parker takes us on a tour of 20 countries and cultures in “The Empire Stops Here: A Journey Along the Frontiers of the Roman World.” The outing isn’t for the fainthearted.

Sometimes we amble along, gathering information as we go. On our jaunt along Hadrian’s Wall in the north of England, we learn that the fortification comprised a million cubic meters of stone, though turf was also used.

But the expanse and diversity of the Roman Empire were extraordinary, stretching from Scotland to the Sinai desert, and we have a lot of ground to cover. So at other moments the pace quickens, as we bustle through whole eras of Middle Eastern or North African history at a dizzying rate.

There’s plenty to divert us. Roman troops holding the troublesome Scots at bay referred to Britons as “brittunculi,” or “filthy little Brits,” apparently for our low-down fighting techniques. Others, dismayed by the cold and the wet and discontented with army issue, wrote home asking for warm socks and underpants

Then there’s the astonishing sophistication of Roman baths in Germania. Here we have a sequence of rooms and treatments culminating in the scraping of accumulated oil and dirt from the bather’s body, a process likely to be that bit more painful if the tips to the slaves weren’t free-handed enough.

Frescos, Wage Freeze

In Syria, we learn that beautiful, figurative frescos dating from 244 A.D. have been found in a Jewish synagogue, suggesting that the Jews didn’t always have an aversion (to be shared by Muslims) to the depiction of the human form.

On Roman economics, we find that Emperor Diocletian (who reigned from 284 to 305) tried to subdue raging inflation in the province of Cyrenaica (present-day Libya) with an early experiment in micromanagement by the state. An edict fixed wages for laborers and artisans and the prices of a thousand commodities. The result? The market did its thing, supplies of goods were throttled, and the edict was duly withdrawn.

Modern parallels haunt the narrative as the Romans fight endless local wars. We are reminded of Vietnam, Afghanistan -- you name it -- though Parker spares us any moralizing about overextended empires. The increasing defense commitments entailed in subduing incessant insurrections speak for themselves. By the year 400, the strength of the Roman army had reached 645,000 according to one estimate. It was a stupendous figure for the time.

Elastic Frontiers

The message the author draws from his travels is that the growth of the small city state of Rome into an ancient superpower was less a conscious strategy than a policy of improvisation, adaptation and muddling through. His thesis is supported by the untidiness of the frontiers themselves, which for the Romans were shifting, elastic affairs.

I trudged willingly enough through Britannia, Germania, Egypt, Arabia and the rest. But by the time I got to the Berber kingdoms of Numidia and Mauretania in northeast Africa, I felt parched from ingesting a sandstorm of dry, unfamiliar facts.

Parker should perhaps have provided more colorful descriptions of frontier peoples to encourage us to keep up. We needed more about the cultural frictions with their occupiers, and more about whether the Romans deserved their reputation for shouldering a civilizing mission. We get hints that the Vandals, for instance, were less brutish than their name has come to suggest. We could have done with more examples like that.

This awesome and original work of history is better suited to the antiquarian traveler well versed in the classics than to the common tourist, however enthusiastic to learn and sturdily shod.

“The Empire Stops Here” is from Cape in the U.K. (649 pages, 25 pounds).

(George Walden, a former U.K. diplomat and member of Parliament, is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this review: George Walden in London at gwashch@aol.com.

Last Updated: July 29, 2009 19:00 EDT