Volume 23, Number 6 · April 15, 1976
In Gibbon's Shade
By Peter Brown
Roman Social Relations, 50 BC to AD 284
by Ramsay MacMullen
Yale University Press, 212 pp., $11.50
Christianity in the Roman World
by R.A. Markus
Scribner's, 192 pp., $10.00
Symbols of Church and Kingdom: A Study in Early Syriac Tradition
by Robert Murray
Cambridge University Press, 394 pp., $25.00
The Fall of the Roman Empire: A Reappraisal
by Michael Grant
The Annenberg School Press, distributed by Clarkson N. Potter, 336 pp., $14.95
For books on the Roman Empire and on the rise of Christianity to come before a reviewer in 1976 brings author and reviewer alike into the disturbing presence of a mighty shade. Two centuries ago, in 1776, Edward Gibbon published the first volume of his Decline and Fall. It was twelve years previously, in 1764, 'as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing Vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.'
Review, 4543 words
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