“Veyne, the most eminent living historian of Rome, has written an elegiac lament on the meaning for world history of this looted city. His short book describes how Palmyra, an oasis on the route across the north Syrian desert, around the turn of the common era became immensely wealthy as a staging post in the trade route from the Roman Empire to the Parthian Kingdom and the lands beyond as far as India and China. . . . Veyne’s account offers an excellent survey of the relationship between the city and the wider Roman Empire.”
 

Times Literary Supplement

“Palmyra (a best seller in France in 2015) is the merest wisp of a book. You could comfortably read it in an hour. It offers no radical new theories about the history or culture of ancient Palmyra. Mr. Veyne is one of the foremost living historians of the ancient world, and here, without jargon or pedantry, he describes the city’s art, its religion, its architecture, and its people. What cannot be expressed in words is shown in photographs. . . . Scarcely more than a page is explicitly dedicated to the Islamic State, but don’t be fooled. The Islamists’ destruction of Palmyra is the true subject of every word of the book. . . . Mr. Veyne’s book is propelled by an argument of luminous simplicity. . . . The final sentence of the book should be carved over the entrance to every school in the world: ‘Yes, without a doubt, knowing, wanting to know, only one culture—one’s own—is to be condemned to a life of suffocating sameness.’ Mr. Veyne does not mention Islamic State; he doesn’t need to. . . .This is a book of passion and moral integrity that ought to be read by anyone with the slightest interest in the ancient world.”

Wall Street Journal

“Brightly ‘sketches a portrait of the past splendor of Palmyra,’ in a story tightly bound with affection.”

San Francisco Chronicle

"Brings wonderful clarity to the most fundamental & complex problems of the ancient world."

History Today

"An eloquent and learned farewell."

Marina Warner | Times Literary Supplement, Books of the Year

"A short, angry eulogy. . . . A colourful and very readable account of a city that thrived in the middle ground between political empires and cultural worlds, refocused on its recent destruction and on a single question: why?"
 

London Review of Books