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 was going on than the people actually involved.  But I doubt we are justified.  People usually know exactly what is going wrong. As the crisis

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 perceived to come from the Persians.  Put yourself in the position of Valerian it isn’t hard to see what he was thinking.  Troublesome as the

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 have to actually agree to let the Goths leave with their loot and their prisoners.  If that wasn’t bad enough, he also had to agree

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 Century.  During this period the empire suffered from problems of instability, invasion, famine and plague. This makes the story very difficult to tell.  People obviously

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

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 ruled a great empire.  This empire had possessions on three continents and  controlled a huge territory right up to the borders of India and including