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The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750 (Library of World Civilization)
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This remarkable study in social and cultural change explains how and why the Late Antique world, between c. 150 and c. 750 A.D., came to differ from "Classical civilization."
These centuries, as the author demonstrates, were the era in which the most deeply rooted of ancient institutions disappeared for all time. By 476 the Roman empire had vanished from western Europe; by 655 the Persian empire had vanished from the Near East. Mr. Brown, Professor of History at Princeton University, examines these changes and men's reactions to them, but his account shows that the period was also one of outstanding new beginnings and defines the far-reaching impact both of Christianity on Europe and of Islam on the Near East. The result is a lucid answer to a crucial question in world history; how the exceptionally homogeneous Mediterranean world of c. 200 A.D. became divided into the three mutually estranged societies of the Middle Ages: Catholic Western Europe, Byzantium, and Islam. We still live with the results of these contrasts.- ISBN-109780393958034
- ISBN-13978-0393958034
- PublisherW. W. Norton & Company
- Publication dateMarch 17, 1989
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions5.9 x 0.6 x 8.3 inches
- Print length216 pages
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- ASIN : 0393958035
- Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company (March 17, 1989)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 216 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780393958034
- ISBN-13 : 978-0393958034
- Item Weight : 9.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.9 x 0.6 x 8.3 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #62,606 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #8 in Ancient History (Books)
- #76 in Ancient Roman History (Books)
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Customers find the writing style intriguing and well-written. They appreciate the vivid, lucid images of artifacts and paintings surviving from Late Antiquity. However, some customers report issues with color accuracy, with no color plates or black and white reproductions instead of advertised color images. There are mixed opinions on readability, with some finding it clear and easy to understand, while others mention parts were difficult to read.
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Customers find the book's writing style engaging and well-written. They describe it as a fascinating account of historical transitions from the fall of the western empire. The book is described as an important work of cultural history by an expert in the field. Readers appreciate the interesting facts that give a good sense of what was happening during this transitional age.
"The author, a historian at Princeton, presents a brief (fewer than 200 pages of text) and well-written survey of Late Antiquity -- the four hundred..." Read more
"...Packed with information on a much neglected era of history, but approachable and not too scholarly for the average person...." Read more
"...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..." Read more
"...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..." Read more
Customers find the book's images clear and vivid. They appreciate the beautiful images of artifacts and paintings from the Roman era. The print is larger and the pictures are sharper.
"...This edition is well supplied with beautiful images of artifacts and paintings surviving from the times in question which help keep the reader..." Read more
"Enjoyed the look into Late Antiquity...." Read more
"...to the American one from Norton: the print is bigger and the pictures clearer. So glad I found it here." Read more
"Mr. Brown paints a vividly lucid portrait of the whirlwind decline of Roman power in the West portion of the empire and the dynamic players involved..." Read more
Customers have mixed opinions about the book's readability. Some find it clear and easy to understand, with great content. Others mention issues like faded text and faint lettering that make it difficult to read.
"...Not light reading, but worth the effort." Read more
"...It is also entertaining and a enjoyable read...." Read more
"...much about these things but it bothers me to a level that affects my reading experience...." Read more
"Interesting read." Read more
Customers are unhappy with the color accuracy of the book. They mention low-quality print, no color images where advertised, and poor quality paper with black and white reproductions that look like color.
"...There are no color pictures in this book. As others have said it is like a bad xerox copy...." Read more
"...print on demand book with thin paper, low quality print, and no color images where some images would have originally been in color...." Read more
"...Poor quality paper, black and white reproductions that look as if they have been done on a photocopier out of toner, large areas of faded..." Read more
"...The color illustrations are faint dull gray, as are all other illustrations, resembling very lousy faint xerox copies...." Read more
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- Reviewed in the United States on September 22, 2024The author, a historian at Princeton, presents a brief (fewer than 200 pages of text) and well-written survey of Late Antiquity -- the four hundred year period from the shift from the Principate/High Roman Empire to the Dominate/Low Roman Empire in the mid-third century to the final disintegration of the ancient, pagan Mediterranean world into the monotheistic Western, Byzantine, and Islamic worlds.
The Roman Empire imploded in the third century, but was restored before the end of the century thanks to Diocletian and others. This group that saved the Empire did not come from the Italian Senatorial aristocracy; rather, they came from the provinces (especially the Balkans), were of humble birth, and gained their power through military leadership. In the fourth century, under Constantine, the Empire began to move away from paganism and toward Christianity, and the balance of power continued to shift east -- away from Rome and toward Constantinople. Meanwhile, the old Senatorial aristocracy adjusted by becoming bishops, while ascetic holy men inspired Christians throughout the Empire.
The Greek East and the Latin West continued to move in different directions. The rural West both refused to integrate the Germanic tribes who were invading (or immigrating) into their territory and refused to organize armed resistance to the Germanic tribes. Accordingly, the Western half of the Roman Empire ceased to exist by the middle of the fifth century.
The more urbanized Greek East continued its existence, thanks in large part to its brilliant sixth century ruler, Justinian. However, Justinian established a totalitarian, highly bureaucratic regime that stifled Byzantine development for the remainder of its existence.
In the Middle East, the Persian Empire reemerged as a major power, with its base in Mesopotamia. The Byzantine Empire devoted significant resources to defending its eastern border with Persia, but this left its northern border open to the Slav invasion of the sixth century.
In the seventh century, the disparate Arab tribes were finally unified under Islam, and the Arabs emerged out of the deserts of the Arabian peninsula to conquer territories from the Persians, the Byzantines, and even some Western European territories (Spain). However, the Arab conquest of Persia led to a shift in the base of Islamic culture, away from the Arabian peninsula and toward Baghdad.
In conclusion, the period of Late Antiquity witnessed the destruction of one civilization -- a pagan Mediterranean civilization that had existed for a thousand years or so -- and its replacement of three new civilizations -- a Western/Northern European Catholic civilization, an Eastern European Orthodox civilization, and a Middle Eastern/North African Islamic civilization. Thus, the consequences of Late Antiquity are still felt today, in the War on Terror and the Russo-Ukrainian War, for example.
- Reviewed in the United States on July 26, 2023This book by Peter Brown is well worthy of it's reputation. Packed with information on a much neglected era of history, but approachable and not too scholarly for the average person. This edition is well supplied with beautiful images of artifacts and paintings surviving from the times in question which help keep the reader immersed in the subject. I can't recommend this book enough to both the general reader and those with interest in the period.
- Reviewed in the United States on January 27, 2016There 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.
Top reviews from other countries
- SilviaReviewed in Germany on March 15, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Delivered in excellent condition
Delivered in excellent condition.
- PedroReviewed in Brazil on April 3, 2021
3.0 out of 5 stars Great book, misleading title
This is a great book with a misleading title. First, let me assure you this book is great for what it intends to discuss: Christianity’s impact as a cultural a political phenomenon in Late Antiquity. I’ve got to know Mr. Brown’s work through the chapter he wrote on the rise of Christianity in “A History of Private Life” of Georges Duby and Paul Veyne. This book expands nicely on that chapter by positioning Christianity first as a revolutionary ethos for urban citizens of the Roman Empire, then discussing the rise of monasticism and its impacts on early Christian beliefs and finally showing how Christian religion eventually fused into the political administration of the territories of the former Empire.
Mr. Brown writing is both elegant and fluid and he looks at ease when analyzing a vast range of sources. I’ve found interesting how he shows the different development paths the Western and Eastern parts of the Roman Empires took from the IV century onwards:
- How Pagans maintained Classical culture and education in the East but the Catholic Church filled such role in the West;
- How local elites dealt with central authority and religious leaders in the different parts of the Empire;
- How policy differed when dealing with the barbarian migrations
- Why, despite coming to dominate the remnants of the Western Roman Empire, such barbarian kingdoms could not influence that much the culture and customs of their subjects and eventually sought to emulate the Empire they replaced.
All of this is presented in an extremely rich book, with a hundred plus pictures on contemporary art which help tremendously to contextualized and contrast changes in representations of daily aspects of life throughout this period. By showing what and how people chose to emphasize in such depictions, Mr. Brown’s arguments on how customs evolved are much more credible.
Nonetheless, the title of this book is misleading. First, this is more like an essay than a book per see, so don’t expect deep expositions on the topics discussed here, especially considering the long time period it deals with. Also, if you are looking for a good summary of the period from multiple points of view, maybe this book will frustrate you: while the author discusses a wide range of topics and really covers a lot of ground in a hundred plus pages, the only topic he really goes into in detail is religion. This leaves a rather superficial treatment on political, military, and economic factors he discusses throughout the book, with a lot of name-dropping and succinct statements with very little explanation. This puts the reader in a difficult position to accept his arguments at face value without a lot to assess the validity of them. For instance: Mr. Brown argues persuasively on the great adaptability of the Roman Empire during the third and fourth centuries, with a steep decline in the power of landed aristocracy and an increasingly militarized society represented by soldier-Emperors of the period, and how this should be viewed as a revival rather than a decline as the popular view came to accept it. While this is a very original take with several interesting ramifications, this argument is supported by just a couple of pages in the book. The chapters on the reforms of the Byzantine Empire and the revival of Sassanid Persia are also frustrating in a similar way because of this.
- Victor de LorenzoReviewed in Spain on July 4, 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars The Fall of the Roman Empire was not as we were told
Nice & original view of the transition between two epoch in History
- M. WesternReviewed in the United Kingdom on July 25, 2011
5.0 out of 5 stars A great introduction to the period
This book is very readable and handsomely illustrated making it one of the best value books I've bought for some time.
It is one of the most cited academic texts in its period and its thesis is put forward very eloquently. It provides a high-level view of cultural and social developments rather than a political and military history. Of course, his thesis has been challenged by more recent scholarship but it remains a key text for the period and, in my view, is still very much worth reading. And finally, unlike several books I have read recently, Brown successfully condenses his thesis in under 200 well edited pages. Other writers take note!
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José MacayaReviewed in Spain on October 5, 2019
3.0 out of 5 stars No el mejor libro de Peter Brown
Me parece que Peter Brown ya no estaba en su esplendor cuando escribió este. es como un viejete contando recuerdos.