To begin with, this is a peculiar choice for an audiobook, and while I rather enjoyed it, caveat emptor. It is a highly technical demographic study of farming and conscriptions in the period leading up to the tribunal of Tiberius Grachus, filled with lusty, uninhibited data crunching. Good for students, specialists, born nerds, or anyone interested in methodology, but a far cry from the drama of Gibbon or HBO. The reader has a good, youthful, even voice that helps, and he keeps at it manfully. But he tends to mispronounce a few of the ten-dollar words (I did say “youthful”) and for a few quantitative stretches he might as well be reading a credit card bill. I know nothing about Roman history and am not qualified to judge the research. The demographics of the Gracchan reforms are highly charged ideological material. Leftists see Tiberius Gracchus as a hero of class struggle, while conservatives see him as the Hugo Chavez of the ancient world, an unscrupulous populist who set Rome on the path to tyranny. (There is no fouler insult than “You Gracchi!” at the Cato Institute, no doubt.) As a leftist, I was and remain a bit suspicious of new histories of the period, given today’s orchestrated right-wing efforts in America to rewrite the history of the depression and New Deal. This work seems good, interesting, and not overtly ideological, but it will undoubtedly provide conservatives with “hard facts” for retrospective culture wars. I am not sure what I think about such quantitative approaches. No matter how carefully the author qualifies his material and points to deficiencies, “data” has psychological impact and a long afterlife. My own purely amateur sense is that the many contingencies, unknowns, and variables involved in such models do not warrant the sense of certainty we tend to ascribe to the numerical output.