The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750 (Library of World Civilization)

There are numerous books that document specific periods in the course of the history of the Roman Empire (as an example, the multitude of books dealing with the fall of the Western Empire) , Peter Brown's classic does a fine job of investigating the period of late antiquity as a continuous and seamless narrative where rise and fall are not an ends in themselves but are outcomes of underlying trends in society and economy over a period of six centuries. Given the number of tumultuous events that took place in this period, right from the Crisis of the 3rd century to the influx of war bands of Goths and Huns that vexed Rome to the Roman - Sassanid wars that culminated in the rise of the Arab Empire, the temptation to delve deep into just one of these proves irresistible for many an author - Peter Brown, to his credit, refuses to elevate any one of these epochal events to a pedestal and instead shows that these tectonic shifts underpinned a more subtle but significantly more far-reaching change in the nature of life in the Mediterranean during this period that is as elusive as it is staggering.The author starts off by layering the concept of Rome and its Empire as something more than a patchwork of territories under a single jurisdiction - he shows that the singularly most important achievement of Rome was to bind closely the life of communities living by the sea around the Mediterranean into a single social and economic regime. Romanitas was predicated on the existence of cities around the Sea connected to each other through maritime and land trading networks that served to draw in economic surplus from the countryside and pool it into a giant inter-connected system with Rome and the Emperor at the pinnacle. The economic embrace served to further Roman - Greek culture all around the Mediterranean - looking at the map of the world today, it is easy to forget that much of the 'Arab' world of today was 1500 years ago solidly Roman in its cultural bent. The importance of cities and local elites was most pronounced in the early Empire when the Senate was all powerful and the military was kept assiduously out of politics - the empire was governed through the loyalties of local elites and the Roman overlords were happy to leave the inhabitants alone to practice their religious beliefs as long as tribute was received on time. However, the Crisis of the 3rd century set in motion the events that ended this cozy embrace - the instability of the Empire and the emergence of local elites powerful enough to secede brought about a military solution, a pacification driven by the subordination of the Senate to the Emperor who was now almost always of military stock - this was a seminal change in Rome as the earlier practice whereby power vested in a few Brahminical elites in Rome and the urban centers now quickly passed on to rough military men coming from backwater provinces such as Dalmatia. The emphasis was on centralization and obedience to a system of patronage that centered around an Emperor - a change also reflected in the increasing popularity of Christianity in the Empire, for Christianity through the cult of saints and the symbolism of God as an emperor in Heaven mirrored the client-patron system that governed life in late Antiquity. However, this centralization was short-lived for the military solution to the empire's fissiparous tendencies was bound to come up short at some point - in the West it happened when war-bands of Goths became large, sophisticated and numerous enough to undermine central authority successfully enough to forge alliances with local elites in Gaul and Hispania and render the Western emperor impotent. This broke the stranglehold of Rome and led to a shift of the balance of power in Rome northwards, especially with the emergence of the Franks.The situation was a lot more interesting in the East - the empire in Constantinople not only survived but was actively thriving in the centuries when the West faced serious challenges. However, here too, events were set in motion that led to the destruction of Romanitas and the cultural and political elites that transmitted Romanitas in the region. The reign of Justinian, even though it led to the re-conquest of territories in the West, paradoxically did the most damage to Romanitas in the East. Justinian was a brutal and ruthless despot and he systematically favoured a select, palace clique of advisors with personal loyalty to him while undermining the traditional, educated elites who had hitherto dominated the bureaucracy. Paradoxically, Justinian's successes may have weakened the East irredeemably because he emerged as a despot and forever lay down the archetype of the absolute monarch, the cult of personality around him perpetuated the myth that one man could make the Empire prosper. The brutal centralization of power was also followed by a suppression of dissident belief and it is no surprise that Justinian's reign made life hell for pagans, philosophers, non-Chalcedonian Christians, Jews and Samaritans. The end-game of the East had started in his reign itself when another equally absolute monarch, Khusro Anushirwan of Persia, broke the long-held uneasy truce between the two Empires by attacking Antioch and other towns deep inside Byzantium and sparked off the Roman-Sassanid wars that lasted nearly a century and bankrupted both Empires.The last part of the book is the standout because it highlights how the lose-lose game of the Romans and Persians led to the emergence of the Arab Empire. However, instead of just ending the story with the rise of the Arab Caliphate, Peter Brown posits that subsequent events within the Arab Empire were a continuation of the Persian - Roman struggle by proxy. Initially, the Arabs conquered most of their territories in the Roman part of the Empire - Syria, Egypt and the Near East were the major successes and the first Arab dynasty, the Umayyads were headquartered in Damascus, their monuments like the Dome of the Rock or the mosque in Damascus a conscious imitation of Byzantine architecture - indeed for Muawiya and his Umayyad descendants, conquering Constantinople was the holy Grail. Matters might have ended there and North Africa and the Near East still remained in the Mediterranean cultural sphere had it not been for the last - and decisive - tectonic shift of the world of Antiquity - the Abbasid revolution, whereby the former Persian territories under Arab rule, now Islamized, revolted against the ethnic Arab supremacy of the Umayyads and installed as Caliphs a regime that took its monarchical and cultural cues from the former Sassanid Empire. The Persian elite bureaucracy that underpinned the new regime decisively oriented the Arab world eastwards, towards their own world, the World of Persia. The Arab state was now headquartered not in Romanized Syria but in Baghdad, within touching distance of Ctesiphon, the former capital of the Persians. In time, North Africa, Syria and later Anatolia would be bound into the cultural milieu of the East as the Arab court centered around Baghdad. In that sense, the Abbasid revolution was the ultimate victory of the Persians over Rome - only this time, there was no fireworshipping Shahenshah to bask in the glory, only a foreign race bowing their heads towards a Black rock in the Arabian desert - a pyrrhic victory if there ever was one.

Peter Brown is a great historian, his work is amazing, and everyone should read The World of Late Antiquity.HOWEVER, the formatting of this edition (by W. W. Norton & Company) is terrible and the printing quality is abysmal. Maybe some people don’t care very much about these things but it bothers me to a level that affects my reading experience. Furthermore, the book promises 17 illustrations in color (from a total of 130 illustrations ), but I could not find a single one in color. For a book costing US$30-plus dollars, this edition is shameful, lazy, and disturbing. I am still debating whether I should keep it or return it.

This "essay" as Peter Brown calls it, introduces a man to late antiquity the period of time between about 155 A.D and the medeival period brought about by Islamic conquest in the 7th and 8th centuries. This highly tumultuous time is too often ignored, and yet these times have had great impact on who we are today, the languages we speak, and the beliefs we take for granted. Peter Brown thoroughly disabuses a person's ignorance of this period with this essay in which art becomes a footnote.Not since reading  How Should We Then Live? (L'Abri 50th Anniversary Edition): The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture have I seen a book so thoroughly look at art and its interplay with culture. Seriously, this book should be read by art lovers just for the treatment it gives to the development of western art, and its meaning!However, that does bring us to an unfortunate aspect of this Norton Print on demand book. There are no color pictures in this book. As others have said it is like a bad xerox copy. I would give it a four for this, if it weren't for the fact that the essay itself is so intriguing, and one can look the pictures up online if one wants to see more detailed versions of it.It is an essay, and it has not footnotes or endnotes. The Bibliography in the back is undoubtedly out of date yet again as it was revised in 1987 the last time. Hard to believe that was almost thirty years ago. However, the book is still a great introduction to the period, his explanations of the art make up for a lack of footnotes, and verify what he writes in a very unique way. I am not yet sure if the illustrations, though, are more or less distracting than footnotes might have been. In any case they were enjoyable.

Brown is the original scholar of Late Antiquity, having been the one to coin the term.The era is roughly the third and eight centuries, covering Rome's crises of the third century, subsequent reforms under Diocletian,collapse and transformation of the West, up through Charlemagne and the Muslim Conquests. Much of this time is commonly known by the largely incorrect an misleading term of the Dark Ages. Brown challenges the Gibbon's view of a decline the sudden collapse of the Roman Empire do to Decadence and Barbarian conquests as the end of a Golden era and the beginning of a dark one. On the Contrary, Brown explains that if anything Rome underwent a gradual transformation and that the time period saw a continuation of many Roman cultural traditions, but transformed into newer versions along with also being a period of great innovation and progress. Browns masterwork completely change how European history was viewed and gave rise to new area of studies.It is also entertaining and a enjoyable read. It should be considered required reading for any scholar or indeed anyone with even a passing interest in early European history.

Just awful. No book should be printed this badly. It's especially upsetting to be a few pages into a really interesting and well-written book and have the print literally rubbing off the page (see picture). In my copy, this happened at the left-hand side of many of the even-numbered pages. Returning this edition and seeing if I can find a publisher that respects what they print.

This is a quick but fascinating exploration of how the world of the late Roman Empire evolved into the early medieval world which has so influenced our culture, especially as regards the form and development of Christianity. It is a quick read and people may prefer to look at Peter Brown's longer expositions of this subject. Nevertheless it is worth looking at and very interesting.

Brown's argument in The World of Late Antiquity is that the collapse of Roman civilisation in the fifth century is overrated, in particular that it focuses too much on the West and ignores a process of transformation that had begun two hundred years before. The book goes on to tell the story of a late-antique civilisation, poised between the second-century Roman heyday and the Middle Ages proper, and centred around the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire and its Persian and Arab rivals.As Brown has it, the Roman Empire in the west saw wealth and power concentrate in the hands of a few magnates. This led to ossification, the regionalization of power bases, and an estrangement of these magnates from the frontier armies that guaranteed Rome's safety. The same Western elites failed to integrate invading barbarian chieftains in the fourth and fifth century, forcing these to take power in their own name. Meanwhile, paradoxically, Christianity helped Latin and a popularised classical culture to spread at the grassroots, ensuring these would survive in places such as Gaul and Spain.Roman civilisation, however, was at its most lively in the East, where the Greek language and culture dominated. Brown writes that Eastern civic cultures remained lively, providing the energy and flexibility to face the barbarian invasions. Monasticism, in particular, integrated with urban cultures to create a new flourishing that was the basis for the empire's cohesion into the seventh century. The author goes on to describe the Byzantine flourishing under Justinian, its travails in the latter part of the reign, and its seventh-century struggles. His argument is again that a late antique civilisation endured around the Mediterranean far longer than is generally recognised.Brown examines two phenomena: socio-political evolution in the two halves of the Roman Empire, and cultural-religious change. These are interconnected but not always logically linked, making for a subtle and complex narrative. Moreover, because this is but a general overview of a long period, not every point is substantiated. Brown takes for granted, for example, Constantine's conversion, the timing and terms of which are actually at dispute. Nevertheless, The World of Late Antiquity does a good job of presenting a challenging argument at the same time as it paints a broad picture of six hundred years of history.

This book is thought provoking, beautifully written and a bargain. Brown's personal impressions and insights are so powerful that as I closed the book I was tempted to start again immediately on page 1. The book is organized loosely by theme and chronology. Basic political history is sprinkled along the way, but this is not the book's main purpose. So it may be useful to read this together with or after reviewing a historical primer. For this purpose, it would be hard to beat Mike Duncan's History of Rome podcast.

A must read if you have an interest in the Roman Empire....

Very good survey of the period, lots to think about.