Reddit Reddit reviews The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750 (Library of World Civilization)

We found 6 Reddit comments about The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750 (Library of World Civilization). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

History
Books
Ancient Civilizations
Ancient Roman History
The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750 (Library of World Civilization)
Check price on Amazon

6 Reddit comments about The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750 (Library of World Civilization):

u/The_YoungWolf · 64 pointsr/AskHistorians

Because by the time of Constantine's conversion, Christianity was no longer an obscure cult made up of subversive elements from the lower classes, but was firmly entrenched among the class of urban professionals and rising new military and bureaucratic officials that made up a very influential chunk of the Empire's demographics.

The Crisis of the Third Century brought substantial social and cultural changes to the Roman Empire. Most notably, it brought a rising tide of "new men" from outside the traditional upper classes of the empire to prominence. Their avenue to power was primarily through the military, for the Crisis was a series of divisive and devastating civil wars between self-proclaimed emperors:

> For the Roman Empire was saved by a military revolution. Seldom has a society set about cutting out the dead wood in its upper classes with such determination. The senatorial aristocracy was excluded from military commands in about 260. The aristocrats had to make way for professional soldiers who had risen from the ranks. These professionals recast the Roman army.

> ...

> The soldiers and officers [who fought in the Danubian campaigns], who had seemed so raw to the Mediterranean aristocrats of a previous age, emerged as heroes of the imperial recovery of the late third and early fourth centuries...The army was an artesian well of talent. By the end of the third century, its officers and administrators had ousted the traditional aristocracy from control of the empire.

These "new men" formed the basis of a new imperial bureaucratic and military administration that would preside over a recovery that spanned the fourth century. Their rise heralded the dawn of a new system of advancement that relied more on merit than birth. As a result, men from disparate regions, cultures, ethnic groups, and religions could rise to high positions with the administration.

This new culture and influx of talent allowed for men with Christian beliefs to quickly entrench themselves into the highest levels of Roman governance once Constantine converted to Christianity.

> The reign of Constantine, especially the period from 324-337, saw the final establishment of a new "aristocracy of service" at the top of Roman society...After the conversion of Constantine in 312, the emperors and the majority of their courtiers were Christians. The ease with which Christianity gained control of the upper classes of the Roman empire in the fourth century was due to the revolution that had placed the imperial court at the centre of a society of "new" men, who found it comparatively easy to abandon conservative beliefs in favour of the new faith of their masters.

So now the question is how Christianity was so appealing to this wave of "new men" (outside of how conversion allowed them to rise more quickly in the court of a Christian emperor).

Christianity offered a few distinct advantages compared to other religions at the time, chiefly its culture of community, exclusivity, and egalitarianism. Anyone could become a Christian no matter their ethnic, economic, or former religious background. And once you were a Christian, you were part of an exclusive community, of which many were men from well-off economic backgrounds and invested their wealth in improving that community. Thus, Christianity appealed to men who felt they lacked a social identity, and/or were trying to carve out a new niche for themselves in post-Crisis Roman society; and since the turmoil of the Crisis uprooted many people and produced a new group of ambitious, talented social risers, Christianity found itself with a wealth of new converts.

> The Church was also professedly egalitarian. A group in which there was 'neither slave nor free' might strike an aristocrat as utopian, or subversive. Yet in an age when the barriers separating the successful freedman from the declasse senator were increasingly unreal, a religious group could take the final step of ignoring them. In Rome the Christian community of the early third century was a p[lace where just such anomalies were gathered and tolerated: the Church included a powerful freedman chamberlain of the emperor; its bishop was the former slave of that freedman; it was protected by the emperor's mistress, and patronized by noble ladies.

> For men whose confusions came partly from no longer feeling embedded in their home environment, the Christian Church offered a drastic experiment in social living...

-----

> The Christian Church suddenly came to appeal to men who felt deserted. At a time of inflation, the Christians invested large sums of liquid capital in people; at a time of increased brutality, the courage of Christian martyrs was impressive; during public emergencies, such as plague or rioting, the Christian clergy were shown to be the only united group in town, able to look after the burial of the dead and to organize food-supplies...Plainly, to be a Christian in 250 brought more protection from one's fellows than to be a civis romanus.

> ...

> What marked the Christian Church off, and added to its appeal, was the ferociously inward-looking quality of life...the wealth of the community returned to the members of the community alone, as part of the "loving-kindness of God to His special people.

> ...

> The appeal of Christianity still lay in its radical sense of community: it absorbed people because the individual could drop from a wide impersonal world into a miniature community, whose demands and relations were explicit.

Once Christians gained access to the highest levels of government via the "new men", and those "new men" carved out their own position among the elite classes of the Roman Empire, Christianity continued the process of adapting to the new culture of the classical world. The Crisis of the Third Century had brought more than civil war - foreign powers hostile to the Empire, such as Sassanid Persia and the Germanic tribes along the Rhine, had taken advantage of the weakness of Roman borders and launched raids and invasions into imperial territory. The mood of the apparent collapse of the "civilized", classical world took deep hold across the Roman Empire, and the narrative of Christianity was well-suited to adapt to this new mood:

> Hence the most crucial development of these centuries: the definitive splitting-off of the "demons" as active forces of evil, against whom men had to pit themselves. The sharp smell of an invisible battle hung over the religious and intellectual life of the Late Antique man...To men increasingly pre-occupied with the problem of evil, the Christian attitude to the demons offered an answer designed to relieve nameless anxiety: they focused this anxiety on the demons and at the same time offered a remedy for it. The devil was given vast but strictly-mapped powers. He was an all-embracing agent of evil in the human race; but he had been defeated by Christ and could be held in check by Christ's human agents.

-----

> The early fourth century was the great age of the Christian Apologists...They claimed that Christianity was the sole guarantee of [classical] civilization - that the best traditions of classical philosophy and the high standards of classical ethics could be steeled against barbarism only through being confirmed by the Christian revelation; and that the beleaguered Roman empire was saved from destruction only by the protection of the Christian God.

When Constantine very publicly converted to Christianity, he was inundated by a flood of Christian "new men" who desired his patronage either for their own advancement within the government or for the advancement of their community's interests under his rule. By surrounding himself with Christians, Constantine surrounded himself with Christian propaganda, and allowed that propaganda to spread throughout the empire. And because Christianity was already entrenched among the urban middle class, combined with the eastern empire (the focus of Constantine's power and attention) being considerably more urbanized and developed than the western empire, this led to the majority of the entire empire becoming firmly Christian from the bottom up, despite the resistance of the traditionalist pagan aristocracy:

> This prolonged exposure to Christian propaganda was the true "conversion" of Constantine. It began on a modest scale when he controlled only the under-Christianized western provinces; but it reached its peak after 324, when the densely Christianized Christianized territories of Asia Minor were united to his empire.

Constantine's nephew, Julian the Apostate, who became emperor after the death of Constantine's son Constantius II, was a firm pagan who sought to roll back Christian infiltration within the upper levels of Roman government. But his premature death on the battlefield in 363, only three years into his reign, smothered those plans in the crib. The new Christian domination of the Roman world was here to stay.

Source: The World of Late Antiquity, by Peter Brown (pub. 1971)

I encourage you to seek out further replies and sources to this question. My sole source is a secondary one, and an old one, despite being an extremely influential work in the historiography of the late Roman Empire.

u/alfonsoelsabio · 9 pointsr/Christianity

Here are a few specifically about the so-called Dark Ages:

The Inheritance of Rome

Barbarians to Angels

The World of Late Antiquity

u/wedgeomatic · 6 pointsr/AskHistorians

If you only read one book on the subject it should be Robert Grant's Augustus to Constantine. It's a tremendous piece of scholarship, in-depth without being overwhelming or boring, and Grant does an excellent job of situating the rise of Christianity against the background of the larger Roman Empire.

Other suggestions:
Henry Chadwick's The Early Church is a classic survey, but it's a bit dated now. Still a very accessible introduction, cheaper and shorter than the Grant.

Peter Brown is, in my opinion, one of the greatest historians who's ever lived and he has written extensively on Late Antique Christianity. For this specific topic, I'd suggest The World of Late Antiquity or The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity. The advantage of Brown is that he's also a fantastic writer.

Another interesting source is Robert Louis Wilken's *Christians as the Romans Saw Them. While it won't give you a full survey of Christianity's rise, it provides the perspective of pagan thinkers reacting to the strange, barbarous, troubling religion that is Christianity. This one is more of a supplement to the other listed works, but I think it helps really understand Christianity against the religio-cultural background of the Roman Empire.

Finally, the great primary source on the subject is Eusebius's *History of the Church. Obviously Eusebius, the 4th century bishop, doesn't match up to modern standards of historical accuracy, but you still get a comprehensive picture of the rise of Christianity that's pretty darn fun to read. Read with a critical eye, it's a terrific source. Also, it's available for free online. (also Eusebius basically invented documentary history, so that's kinda neat)

If you want more recommendations, or want more specific suggestions, I'd be glad to help out. My strongest recommendation are the Grant and the Brown.

u/GeneralLeeFrank · 5 pointsr/AskHistorians

It's a good read for historiographies, but I'm sure ancient historians have gone past some of his theories. Nevertheless, it's still regarded as a classic.

If you want more modern books, check out: Peter Brown's World of Late Antiquity and Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire

There are different theories on the fall, you could probably go through an entire library of them. I just picked selections I had from class, as I think these were more readable.

u/Guckfuchs · 2 pointsr/AskHistorians

The Constitutio Antoniniana which granted Roman citizenship to all free inhabitants of the empire was issued in 212 AD and there is quite a lot of Roman history after that. Soon follows the so called “crisis of the 3rd century” between 235 and 284 AD throughout which the empire was shaken by internal as well as external problems. Next comes Late Antiquity, a period which has attracted a lot of scholarly attention in recent decades. It saw some huge changes like Christianity’s rise to dominance or the final partition of the empire into a western and eastern half that you mentioned. And while the western part already disappeared throughout the 5th century the Eastern Roman Empire would survive for a long time further. The rise of the first Islamic caliphate in the 7th century AD cost it much of its territory and caused further transformations. This surviving remnant of the Roman Empire, now centred around Constantinople, is usually called the Byzantine Empire. Its eventful history would continue through the entire Middle Ages until 1453 AD when it was finally conquered by the Ottomans. So all in all there is more than a millennium of further Roman history to cover.

u/CptBuck · 1 pointr/AskHistorians

FYI: in the /r/askhistorians booklist, the Byzantine recommendations are (of course) split between several different sections, so some are in Europe and some are in Middle East.

The word "Byzantium" or "Byzantine" isn't even necessarily mentioned in some of them, so for instance one of the standard introductory texts about the transition from "Rome" to "Byzantium," namely, Peter Brown's The World of Late Antiquity (which is excellent, read it!) might not appear at first glance.

Anyways, the point being that the book list is in general quite extensive, even if it's not always especially searchable : )