![]() ![]() That’s a good start, because it gives him a entirely different perspective to authors traditionally fixated on Constantinope, Rome or Ravenna (the new western capital). He had to find some way to choose the year, of course, and he selected this one because it marked the end of the Kingdom of Armenia, which just happens to be the author’s special subject. It’s to attempt to get at something of that lived reality that Giusto Traina has written 428AD: An Ordinary Year At The End of the Roman Empire. They can’t have been, in their own minds, living through the end of empire – they were living their lives, dealing with the local upsets, expecting the empire which in human timeframes had gone on “forever”, to continue. The “end of the Roman empire”: it is a popular topic, with some big questions around if: why? How? when? They’ve been some excellent, illuminated books written on it – I reviewed one of them recently – but what tends to disappear in these accounts is the real lived experience of the people of the period. ![]()
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