The AD 400s and the fall of Rome

The Roman Empire in 395 at the death of Theodosius (Map: Geuiwogbil at the English Wikipedia)

In 1984, a German academic, Alexander Demandt, published a book, Der Fall Roms, and he listed 210 reasons for the fall of Rome in the West.

Barbarians inside and outside the empire, Christianity, […]

Living at the Roman dusk

In the Roma Nova story, over four hundred Romans loyal to the old gods trekked north out of Italy in AD 395 to a semi-mountainous area similar to modern Slovenia.

Led by Apulius and his friend Mitelus at the head of twelve senatorial families, they established a colony based initially on land owned by […]

Roman women in late antiquity - a slippery fish to catch

Helena, mother of Constantine the Great (author photo, Naples Museum)

I set out to write a piece about women in the late Roman period – ambitious for a blog post I know, but I thought I could pull some threads out of a big subject and produce a digest. Not that easy, as […]