The Later Roman Empire, 284-602: A Social, Economic, and Administrative Survey [Paperback]

Jones two volume history of the LRE is a book any serious student must have. Thre is no where else to start. Gibbon is dated and only useful in 18th century intellectual history.

Jones has sections that are both nararative and topical. He has whole chapters of essentuial background information. His primary sources, to which he refers constantly, are again the sine qua non for research in any topic or period. His notes are massive.

Yes, he published in 1964. But without Jones the arguments in people like Heather and Goffart have no context. Is Jones' book a classic, a monument? I would not condemn it to such a status yet. If you are new to the field, you have to start somewhere, and this is the place to start.

These books are the seminal works on Late Roman history. All historiography of the past fifty years has begun here. Much like Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire inspired writers of the 18th and 19th Century, this book inspired the authors who would create the field of Late Antiquity. Not that I would take the comparison too far: Gibbon's book is infinitely better written and quotable. But this one has the benefit of taking advantage of years of research and development in the historical arts. It may be slightly outdated in some areas (the inevitable result of inspiring research rather than benefiting from it), but nobody has yet written anything which can replace it. I'll list at the bottom a few general histories which do cover some of the same material, in better or worse ways, for those who have an interest in the period but cannot find/afford this book which has gone sadly out of print.

The basic purpose of this book is not to tell a narrative history, but to analyze the various features of Roman life and administration which changed in Late Antiquity. There is a narrative included in the first book for clarity's sake (which takes up the first 317 pages) but it is not the primary focus.

The second section is the longer one. It deals with the Land, Trade and Industry, Church, Education, and the Decline of the Empire. These sections are highly useful as they make it far easier to find information on specific areas. Many history books nowadays are organized in this way, but they don't cover such a wide area so thoroughly. The essential purpose of this section is to examine how the Empire was run, a very different goal from most previous books. You see this a lot nowadays, but it's generally limited to an examination of a single reign or dynasty. That nobody has really attempted to take on Jones speaks volumes for how thorough he is. It lays out the command structure and duties of the Romans and examines how they changed over time.

The biggest complaint and problem with this book is its reliance on written sources to the almost total exclusion of everything else. He admits in the opening that he has little knowledge of the relevant archaeology and it shows. He makes statements like there is "no reason to doubt Eusebius' assertion that [Constantinople] was never sullied by pagan worship," which is a fact that should have been questioned even by the archaeological evidence available then. In many sections this doesn't damage his case too much since the issues he raises aren't much affected by archaeology, but that doesn't mean it doesn't severely limit his work. He does make use of epigraphy which is fortunate. He had access to a large number of inscriptions and gives them as much thought as the other written sources.

The book is the second of two volumes. It's 751 pages long, but most of that is taken up with footnotes. The complete set is 1546 pages. If 1500 pages sounds a bit of a hurdle, it may help to know that the last 500 of them are just the footnotes and bibliography. This is just the second volume which is a problem since the set is split simply for length. The juncture isn't at a particularly good place. It actually separates the chapters on the land and the cities, which would work better read in tandem. So there really isn't much point to buying them separately. The books were conceived as one and this volume is mostly footnotes.

Adrian Goldsworthy's How Rome Fell analyzes the reasons for the decline of the empire and pushes his own solution: political infighting and the willingness of the soldiers to fight civil wars. It doesn't always convince and is written by a man whose main focus is in the late Republic, but it does a pretty good job of explaining what went on and is, importantly, quite cheap and easy to find. It's a narrative history and not really an administrative study, which may be useful to fill in some of the gaps left by Jones. David Potter's The Roman Empire at Bay covers the first period of Jones' book in exquisite detail. Basically it details the period of the crisis and then the recovery under Diocletian and Constantine through Theodosius. This book may be good as a primer for Jones' work since Jones summarizes the first half of this period only briefly in his first chapter. Potter is interested in both the collapse and the recovery while Jones is only interested in the recovered empire. This book is mainly narrative, but it deals with many other issues as well. Also detailing the crisis is Pat Southern's The Roman Empire from Severus to Constantine, although it doesn't go beyond the early 4th Century. Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire does a great job of covering western Rome's last century. He also pushes his own theory (the Huns are responsible for Rome's collapse), but is a horde of valuable data and should not be missed. After the fall of Rome there are few books dealing with wide spans of time. There are several books on Justinian and one on Belisarius, but no general history covering 500-600 except for books on the Byzantines, and most of these start later. So for those last few centuries this book is currently the best there is.

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