The Falls of Rome

Michele Renee Salzman is Professor and Chair in the department of history at the University of California, Riverside. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Academy in Rome, the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, the American Philosophical Society, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Jerusalem, she is the author of On Roman Time: The Codex Calendar of 354 and the Rhythms of Urban Life in Late Antiquity and The Making of a Christian Aristocracy and General Editor of The Cambridge History of Religions in the Ancient World. She has also published The Letters of Symmachus. Book 1. Introduction, text and commentary. Translation with Michael Roberts, and co-edited two books, Pagans and Christians in Late Antique Rome: Conflict, Competition and Coexistence in the Fourth Century, with M. Sághy and R. Lizzi Testa, and Violence in Late Antiquity: Perceptions and Practices, with E. Albu, H. Drake, M. Maas, and C. Rapp.

1. Approaches to the fate of the Late Antique City; 2. The Constantinian compromise; 3. Responses to the sack of Rome in 410; 4. Rome after the 455 vandal occupation; 5. Why Gibbon was wrong; 6. The fall of Ostrogothic Rome and the Justinianic reconstruction; 7. The demise of the senate.