Volume 47, Number 10 · June 15, 2000
Bizarre New World
By Jasper Griffin
Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World
edited by G.W. Bowersock, by Peter Brown, by Oleg Grabar
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 780 pp., $49.95
Just in time for what has been insistently declared, despite the resistance of the pedants, to be the new millennium, a handsome and informative book appears, to enlighten us about that long, difficult, and often neglected period, the postclassical world. It runs, the editors declare, roughly from 250 to 800 CE. Those centuries have received their undying definition from the masterpiece of Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. That title does not conceal a moral judgment—the fall of the Roman Empire, evidently, was a bad thing. As Gibbon famously declared,
Review, 4780 words
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