Abstract

Why did the Roman Empire fall? For Edward Gibbon, the answer lay with the triumph of superstition and barbarism. Other answers have been sought, from manpower supply to lead poisoning. More recently, scholars have preferred to think in terms of continuities and innovations that make the world of late antiquity a vigorous one, and well worthy of study. Now along comes Aldo Schiavone with a different analysis. For him, the study of late antiquity is a valuable enterprise: the age presents the historian with ‘an entirely new universe … in which simplistic and teleological explanations have no part’