How the ruthless contest among Julius Caesar’s heirs ignited a global war that raged far beyond the borders of RomeThe succession of civil wars that plagued the last years of the Roman Republic has often been portrayed as a settling of scores between Roman factions—Sulla against Marius, Caesar against Pompey, Octavian against Mark Antony—with foreign campaigns serving as a backdrop to the tragic spectacle. The Roman World War recasts the struggle for Rome ...

This is a sweeping tour of the Mediterranean world from the Atlantic to Persia during the last half-century of the Roman Empire. By focusing on a single year not overshadowed by an epochal event, 428 AD provides a truly fresh look at a civilization in the midst of enormous change--as Christianity takes hold in rural areas across the empire, as western Roman provinces fall away from those in the Byzantine east, and as power shifts from Rome to Constantinople. Taking readers on a jo...

A military history of the campaigns of Stilicho, the army general who became one of the most powerful men in the Western Roman Empire.Flavius Stilicho lived in one of the most turbulent periods in European history. The Western Empire was finally giving way under pressure from external threats, especially from Germanic tribes crossing the Rhine and Danube, as well as from seemingly ever-present internal revolts and rebellions.Ian Hughes explains how a Vandal (...

A military history of the campaigns of Flavius Belisarius, the greatest general of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Emperor Justinian.Back in the 6th century, Belisarius twice defeated the Persians and reconquered North Africa from the Vandals in a single year at the age of 29, before going on to regain Spain and Italy, including Rome (briefly), from the barbarians. This book discusses the evolution from classical Roman to Byzantine armies and systems of warfare, as we...

The tenth century dawned in violence and disorder. Charlemagne's empire was in ruins, most of Spain had been claimed by Moorish invaders, and even the papacy in Rome was embroiled in petty, provincial conflicts. To many historians, it was a prime example of the ignorance and uncertainty of the Dark Ages. Yet according to historian Paul Collins, the story of the tenth century is the story of our culture's birth, of the emergence of our civilization into the light of day.The Birt...

At the start of the first millennium AD, southern and western Europe formed part of the Mediterranean-based Roman Empire, the largest state western Eurasia has ever known, and was set firmly on a trajectory towards towns, writing, mosaics, and central heating. Central, northern and eastern Europe was home to subsistence farmers, living in wooden houses with mud floors, whose largest political units weighed in at no more than a few thousand people. By the year 1000, Mediterranean domination...

The death of the Roman Empire is one of the perennial mysteries of world history. Now, in this groundbreaking book, Peter Heather proposes a stunning new solution: Rome generated its own nemesis. Centuries of imperialism turned the neighbors it called barbarians into an enemy capable of dismantling the Empire that had dominated their lives for so long. Heather is a leading authority on the late Roman Empire and on the barbarians. In The Fall of the Roman Empire, he explores the extraordina...

Why did Rome fall?Vicious barbarian invasions during the fifth century resulted in the cataclysmic end of the world's most powerful civilization, and a 'dark age' for its conquered peoples. Or did it? The dominant view of this period today is that the 'fall of Rome' was a largely peaceful transition to Germanic rule, and the start of a positive cultural transformation.Bryan Ward-Perkins encourages every reader to think again by reclaiming the drama and violence of the last days of the Roma...

"Practically all new information on the greatest empire of all and how it controlled and policed its frontiers. Absolutely fascinating!"— Books MonthlyAt its height, the Roman Empire was the greatest empire yet seen with borders stretching from the rain-swept highlands of Scotland in the north to the sun-scorched Nubian desert in the south. But how were the vast and varied stretches of frontier defined and defended?Many of Rome's frontier defenses ha...

Jesus taught his followers that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Yet by the fall of Rome, the church was becoming rich beyond measure. Through the Eye of a Needle is a sweeping intellectual and social history of the vexing problem of wealth in Christianity in the waning days of the Roman Empire, written by the world's foremost scholar of late antiquity.Peter Brown examines the rise of the church through the len...

For nearly four centuries, from AD 43 to 410, Britain was a small province on the north western edge of the vast Roman Empire. Patricia Southerns masterly new history tells the story from first contact, through invasion and conquest, coexistence to eventual decline incorporating the political, social and cultural history of Britannia. For the first time the wealth of voices from the varied population of Roman Britain are placed centre stage in the narrative. Indirectly via the works of anc...

The Migration Age is still envisioned as an onrush of expansionary "Germans" pouring unwanted into the Roman Empire and subjecting it to pressures so great that its western parts collapsed under the weight. Further developing the themes set forth in his classic Barbarians and Romans, Walter Goffart dismantles this grand narrative, shaking the barbarians of late antiquity out of this "Germanic" setting and reimagining the role of foreigners in the Later Roman Empire.The Emp...