Why read The Tragedy of Empire?

Book cover of The Tragedy of Empire: From Constantine to the Destruction of Roman Italy

Book description

A sweeping political history of the turbulent two centuries that led to the demise of the Roman Empire.

The Tragedy of Empire begins in the late fourth century with the reign of Julian, the last non-Christian Roman emperor, and takes readers to the final years of the Western Roman Empire…

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European history

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Tragedy of Empire as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

John C. Rodrigue

Author

I was not previously familiar with Michael Kulikowski’s work, but I now intend to read more of it.

Kulikowski meticulously examines the slow, tortured, and almost imperceptible—to the people who experienced it— disintegration of the Roman Empire during its last two centuries.

In this seamlessly woven narrative, he dismantles the age-old notion, which refuses to die, of a decisive “fall” of the Empire, and he traces the continuities and discontinuities — in both the Empire’s western and eastern halves — between the Empire and the world that succeeded it.

The period of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages often…

From John's 3 favorite reads in 2023.