A comprehensive study which introduces the reader to the vigour and variety of the fourth century AD.
After being beset by invasion, civil war and internal difficulties for a century, the Roman Empire that Diocletian inherited in AD 284 desperately needed the organizational drive he brought to the task of putting its administration and defences on a newly secure footing. His successor, Constantine, sustained this consolidation of imperial strength by adopting a vibrant new religion, Christianity.
The fourth century AD was a decisive period; its many new challenges and wide...
A comprehensive study which introduces the reader to the vigour and variety of the fourth century AD.
Within the space of three centuries, up to the great Persian invasion of 480BC, Greece was transformed from a simple peasant society into a sophisticated civilization which dominated the shores of the Mediterranean from Spain to Syria and from the Crimea to Egypt - a culture whose achievements in the fields of art, science, philosophy and politics were to establish the canons of the Western world. The author of this book places this development in the context of Mediterranean civilization, providing an account of the transformation that launched Western culture.
Within the space of three centuries, up to the great Persian invasion of 480BC, Greece was transformed from a simple peasant society into a sophistica...
Between the Sack of Rome by the Gauls in 390 BC and the middle of the second century BC, a part-time army of Roman peasants, under the leadership of the ruling oligarchy, conquered first Italy and then the whole of the Mediterranean. The loyalty of these marrauding heroes, and of the Roman population as a whole, to their leaders was assured by a share in the rewards of victory, rewards which became steadily less accessible as the empire expanded - promoting a decline in loyalty of cataclysmic proportions.
Between the Sack of Rome by the Gauls in 390 BC and the middle of the second century BC, a part-time army of Roman peasants, under the leadership of t...