Month: January 2011

Aurelian became emperor with only some very limited opposition.  The brother of Claudius made a claim, but it lasted only 17 days before he committed suicide rather than face the…

I agonised for ages about whether or not to get a Kindle. I had a couple of pretty serious misgivings about it.  For a start I wasn't keen on the…

Its easy to be condescending about the past.  We look back with the benefit of hindsight, scholarship and having watched well made documentaries, and assume that we know better what…

Why was the empire's response to the barbarian invasions of the middle of the third century so feeble?   It was largely a question of priorities.  The biggest threat was…

The battered remains of the army acclaimed Gallus, a senior officer, as the new emperor.  It fell to him to negotiate with Cniva and to be the man who would…

Modern historians have chosen a good name when they refer to the period between the Secular Games of Philip and the reign of Diocletian as the crisis of the Third…

A big current question is climate change.  This seems very contemporary , so it comes as a bit of a surprise to open the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire at Chapter 9 and find Gibbon discussing climate change and referring to a series of other writers on the subject.  It seems that quite a few writers back then were proposing that Germany had previously been much colder.

When Rome was just a rustic settlement a trouble only to, and only troubled by, its nearest neighbours in the centre of  Italy, far away to the east the Persians…