The Roman empire remains unique. Although Rome claimed to rule the world, it did not. Rather, its uniqueness stems from the culture it created and the loyalty it inspired across an area that stretched from the Tyne to the Euphrates. Moreover, the empire created this culture with a bureaucracy smaller than that of a typical late-twentieth-century research university. In approaching this problem, Clifford Ando does not ask the ever-fashionable question, Why did the Roman empire fall? Rather, he asks, Why did the empire last so long? Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire argues that the longevity of the empire rested not on Roman military power but on a gradually realized consensus that Roman rule was justified. This consensus was itself the product of a complex conversation between the central government and its far-flung peripheries. Ando investigates the mechanisms that sustained this conversation, explores its contribution to the legitimation of Roman power, and reveals as its product the provincial absorption of the forms and content of Roman political and legal discourse. Throughout, his sophisticated and subtle reading is informed by current thinking on social formation by theorists such as Max Weber, Jargen Habermas, and Pierre Bourdieu.

罗马帝国仍然是独一无二的。虽然罗马声称统治世界，但它并没有。相反，它的独特性源于它所创造的文化和它在从泰恩河到幼发拉底河的地区所激发的忠诚度。此外，该帝国创造这种文化时，其官僚机构比典型的二十世纪末的研究型大学还要小。在处理这个问题时，Clifford Ando并没有问一个永远时髦的问题：为什么罗马帝国会灭亡？相反，他问的是，为什么帝国能持续这么久？罗马帝国的帝国意识形态和省级忠诚度》认为，帝国的长寿不是依靠罗马的军事力量，而是依靠逐渐实现的共识，即罗马统治是合理的。这种共识本身就是中央政府和其遥远的周边地区之间复杂对话的产物。安藤研究了维持这种对话的机制，探讨了它对罗马权力合法化的贡献，并揭示了它的产物是各省对罗马政治和法律话语的形式和内容的吸收。自始至终，他复杂而微妙的解读都参考了马克斯-韦伯、J-rgen Habermas和皮埃尔-布尔迪厄等理论家对社会形成的当前思考。