Falls of Rome

Michele Renee Salzman is Professor and Chair in the department of history at the University of California, Riverside. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Academy in Rome, the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, the American Philosophical Society, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Jerusalem, she is the author of On Roman Time: The Codex Calendar of 354 and the Rhythms of Urban Life in Late Antiquity and The Making of a Christian Aristocracy and General Editor of The Cambridge History of Religions in the Ancient World. She has also published The Letters of Symmachus. Book 1. Introduction, text and commentary. Translation with Michael Roberts, and co-edited two books, Pagans and Christians in Late Antique Rome: Conflict, Competition and Coexistence in the Fourth Century, with M. Sághy and R. Lizzi Testa, and Violence in Late Antiquity: Perceptions and Practices, with E. Albu, H. Drake, M. Maas, and C. Rapp.

• 1. Approaches to the fate of the Late Antique City; 2. The Constantinian compromise; 3. Responses to the sack of Rome in 410; 4. Rome after the 455 vandal occupation; 5. Why Gibbon was wrong; 6. The fall of Ostrogothic Rome and the Justinianic reconstruction; 7. The demise of the senate.

'Michele Salzman's The Falls of Rome does nothing less than re-write the history of the city of Rome in the last centuries of the ancient world. Based on scrupulous attention to evidence of every kind, her account offers a new perspective on almost every aspect of the fate of this vast city and of the remarkable families who rallied again and again to rescue and renew it after every crisis. Here is no story of ineluctable Decline and Fall in the manner of Edward Gibbon, still less of the triumphant absorption of a pagan city by the popes of Rome. Instead, the Roman Senate and its members hold center stage. Seldom has an ancient aristocracy shown such tenacity and such resilience in difficult times. Nor has any recent scholar shown such a gift for conjuring up, from such scattered and easily-neglected evidence, the profile of the distinguished men and women, the emperors and the generals, the grandees and the priests whose dogged defense of the traditions of their unique city imposed their own pace of change on a crisis-ridden age. This is scholarship at its best. The book is a model and a masterpiece.' Peter Brown, Princeton University