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There has never been much doubt about the faith of the \"infidel historian\" Edward Gibbon. But for all of Gibbon's skepticism regarding Christianity's central doctrines, the author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire did not merely seek to oppose Christianity; he confronted it as a philosophical and historical puzzle. Gibbon's Christianity tallies the results and conditions of that confrontation. Using rich correspondence, private journals, early works, and memoirs that were never completed, Hugh Liebert provides intimate access to Gibbon's life in order to better understand his complex relationship with religion. Approaching the Decline and Fall from the context surrounding its conception, Liebert shows how Gibbon adapted explanations of the Roman republic's rise to account for a new spiritual republic and, subsequently, the rise of modern Europe. Taken together, Liebert's analysis of this context, including the nuance of Gibbon's relationship to Christianity, and his readings of Gibbon's better- and lesser-known texts suggest a historian more eager to comprehend Christianity's worldly power than to sneer at or dismiss it. Eminently readable and wholly accessible to anyone interested in or familiar with the Decline and Fall , this groundbreaking reassessment of Gibbon's most famous work will appeal especially to scholars of eighteenth-century studies.

In recent scholarship, the impact of palaeoclimate change is often understood as a main factor contributing to the fragmentation and “fall” of Rome’s empire. The various attempts at postulating disastrous effects of temperature shifts in the fifth to sixth centuries—cooling caused harvest failures, famine, political and social unrest, and disruptions in food supply—have been criticized for a good reason: compelling causal links between cooler weather conditions and decreasing agricultural productivity are missing. The socio-economic and political impact of a prolonged climate-related Late Roman drought (ca. 360–440 CE), however, has been widely overlooked. This paper aims to compare palaeoecological data from cave speleothems and lake sediments that indicate palaeoclimate and environmental change through precipitation shifts in the southern Black Sea region with the archaeological data of the urban granary in Pompeiopolis. Combining these data offers fresh insights into Roman environmental imperialism, command ecologies and economies, and the impact of climate change on Rome’s tax system that kept the network of redistributive food supply running. This archaeo-environmental approach sheds light on the ecological vulnerability of integrated economies, failures of the dysfunctional metabolic regimes of ›polis command economies‹, and the chain of cause-and-effect provoking the “fall” of Rome.

A feature of neo-conservative critiques during the course of this century, concerning public issues such as immigration and multicultural policy and Islamic terrorism, has been the use of a rhetoric based on historical imagery as a means to generate affective reactions to matters of debate. This article examines one example of such rhetoric, the claim by the economic historian Niall Ferguson that the terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015 represented a close parallel to the \"Fall of the Roman empire\" in antiquity which highlighted failures of France's immigration policies. Interactions between media debate, ancient world scholarship, and popular history are explored.

On May 20, 1347, Cola di Rienzo overthrew without violence the turbulent rule of Rome’s barons and the absentee popes. A young visionary and the best political speaker of his time, Cola promised Rome a return to its former greatness. Ronald G. Musto’s vivid biography of this charismatic leader—whose exploits have enlivened the work of poets, composers, and dramatists, as well as historians—peels away centuries of interpretation to reveal the realities of fourteenth-century Italy and to offer a comprehensive account of Cola’s rise and fall.

Immanuel Wallerstein's highly influential, multi-volume opus,The Modern World-System,is one of this century's greatest works of social science. An innovative, panoramic reinterpretation of global history, it traces the emergence and development of the modern world from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.

This article considers Anatomie Titus Fall of Rome Ein Shakespearekommentar (1985), a play by East German socialist playwright Heiner Müller, and Anatomie Titus: Fall of Rome (2009), his widow Brigitte Maria Mayer's three‐screen high‐definition digital video installation, as two productions of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus that speak to one another across the divide of the 1989 collapse of the German Democratic Republic. As Shakespeare's pre‐text of violence and cannibalism is anatomised and reassembled by Heiner Müller, it becomes a work that speaks of the decline of Western civilisation and its threatened overthrow by former European colonies. In Mayer's hands, and with the help of her daughter Anna Müller who takes on the role of Lavinia, the play transmutes into a meditation on the ways in which the Western culture of consumption is predicated on the sacrificial starvation of its daughters. Mayer's appropriation of Heiner Müller's poems in her installation enables Anna Müller's Lavinia to rebel against her father's script. Heiner Müller's and Shakespeare's texts are remembered with a difference, their plotlines reconfigured into a parable of the orphaned daughter's survival in a world in which, in accordance with Müller's prediction, Western consumerism conspires with the economic expansion of Asia, the religious unrest of the Middle East and the hunger of Africa to demand her Christ‐like sacrifice. In the process, Mayer's installation anatomises and dismantles the pedestal of suffering onto which Lavinia has been raised by Shakespeare and Müller.

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This chapter contains sections titled: Dido and Monnica Teaching Vergil Renouncing Vergil Using Vergil Remembering Vergil Further Reading

The new teacher is Jana Hansen. She is white, but she has come to Chelsea from the predominantly black environment of a public school in Cleveland. She finds the change jarring, and is instinctively drawn to [Jerome Washington] as well as to Rashid Bryson, a scholarship student from modest circumstances in Brooklyn. Jana is large-hearted, \"bright and full of sharply stated opinions,\" recently divorced and emotionally vulnerable. Rashid is bright, too, but while he is grateful to be at Chelsea he is also at sea: \"The schoolwork at Chelsea was so much more dense and intricate than anything he'd ever done before. He felt that eyes were on him every second, here, back home, everywhere. Everything was weighing on him.\" Rashid wears his hair in dreadlocks and has, or so Jerome senses, \"a slightly insolent air\" about him. Jerome, by contrast, could be a model in a Brooks Brothers catalogue. Rashid imagines that the one black faculty member is his natural ally and mentor, but Jerome is the exact opposite. He demands more of Rashid in the classroom and on the practice field, more than he demands of any white student. \"If I am hard on you in class,\" he tells Rashid, \"it is out of my belief that knowledge fought for is knowledge best remembered,\" but as events unfold, it becomes clear that there is more to it, that Rashid's presence on campus embarrasses Jerome.

He mentions \"an anxious flicker of recognition,\" what he calls \"the eagle in the mirror ... when catching sight of the characteristics that Rome and America share.\" This book encourages our own recognitions. One striking mirror image is the current demise of the family (read Polybius!). Another is the religion we share with Rome, the same cult of worldly pleasure and success. [Cullen Murphy] refers to the sadness of Ovid's exile. Modern poets suffer a similar exile in seeking an otherworldly spiritual vision. They endure what Czeslaw Milosz called a new \"Diocletian Rome planetwide.\" Southern writer Walker Percy expressed this predicament perfectly: \"Catholic or Protestant, the believing writer is equally unhappy. He feels like Lancelot in search of the Holy Grail who finds himself at the end of his quest at a Tupperware party.\"