Late Antiquity, especially the often forgotten “afterlife” of the Eastern Empire following the Fall of Rome, has till recently been neglected by archaeologists and many historians, more interested in the supposedly linear evolution of modern European states from the Barbarian kingdoms that replaced the Western Empire. Now, if anything, more publications appear for Late Roman than for Early, but welcome all the same, because it is an extraordinary age of dramatic contrasts: between devastating wars and the slow death of cities, and the giant Christian basilicas with their emotive mosaics and the sprawling townlike estates of the powerful landowners. No wonder that a major style of this period’s art is an almost “comic strip” of “superheroes,” emperors, generals, saints, or Christ himself. The worse things got, the more loudly the secular and religious leaders needed to shout to prevent their world collapsing completely under both internal and external threats to its very survival.
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World History
