Accompanying the major BBC TV series, Richard Miles's Ancient Worlds tells the epic story of civilization, and the cities that made us who we are. The path of human progress is one of enlightenment and cruelty, achievement and bloodshed, creation and destruction. Here Richard Miles reaches back into our distant past to bring alive its most glorious and terrible people and places: from the first ever city in Mesopotamia to the death cults of Egypt, from the Phoenician seafarers who invented the alphabet to the brutal Assyrian empire, and on to the great city-states of Athens and Rome. By...

This is the first book for over twenty years to undertake a holistic examination of the Donatist Controversy, a bilious and sometimes violent schism that broke out in the North African Christian Church in the early years of the century AD and which continued up until the sixth century AD. What made this religious dispute so important was that its protagonists brought to the fore a number of issues and practices that had empire-wide ramifications for how the Christian church and the Roman imperial government dealt with the growing number of dissidents in their ranks. Very significantly it was...