Review: The Falls of Rome: Crises, Resilience, and Resurgence in Late Antiquity, by Michele Renee Salzman

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Book Review| February 01 2023 Review: The Falls of Rome: Crises, Resilience, and Resurgence in Late Antiquity, by Michele Renee Salzman Michele Renee Salzman, The Falls of Rome: Crises, Resilience, and Resurgence in Late Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 462 pp. ISBN: 9781107111424. $39.99, £29.99. Chris Wickham Chris Wickham Universities of Oxford and Birmingham Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Studies in Late Antiquity (2023) 7 (1): 159–162. https://doi.org/10.1525/sla.2023.7.1.159 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Chris Wickham; Review: The Falls of Rome: Crises, Resilience, and Resurgence in Late Antiquity, by Michele Renee Salzman. Studies in Late Antiquity 1 February 2023; 7 (1): 159–162. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/sla.2023.7.1.159 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentStudies in Late Antiquity Search Michelle Salzman has written an important book. The title is misleading in some ways; for a start, “the falls of Rome” refers to Rome as a city, not to the Roman Empire, as many might expect. (I will come back to two other ways I do not quite agree with the title later.) But what she argues, and she is wholly convincing, is that the major crises in Rome’s late antique history were in each case rather less serious than many historians have supposed. The sieges and/or sacks of Rome in 410, 455, and 472, and several during the disaster of the Gothic war between 537 and 550, were not necessarily fatal; in each case they offered challenges for the senatorial aristocracy, who for a long time were largely Rome-based, to rebuild and reconstruct, which senators took up with some commitment. And she demonstrates her point, with the appropriate nuances... You do not currently have access to this content.