Hello and welcome to Literature and History, episode 86, an introduction to late antiquity.

In this program we begin our show's sixth season, this one on late antiquity, a period

of history that stretches roughly from the 200s to the 600s CE. During these five centuries,

the Western Roman Empire collapsed, population migrations spread westward and southward

from central and eastern Europe, and the Catholic Church arose from the obscureer and more

heterodox world of early Christianity. To the east, the Byzantine Empire became a prominent

independent power and it sparred with the Sasanian Persian Empire. The wars between these two

superpowers damaged both sides to such an extent that when the armies of the Rashidin caliphate poured

into modern-day Iraq and Iran in the six thirties and six forties, Islamic forces gained control

of the Middle East, and within a century the Byzantines were holding on for dear life.

As exciting and pivotal as these events sound, late antiquity has never been a very popular

period of history to study. The emergence of Christianity into the Roman world produced a

complex marbling of old and new religion, just as barbarian migrations forged compound

situational identities and alliances within and beyond the bounds of the empire. With the

disintegration of the Western Empire over the course of the four hundreds, and even before that,

the crisis of the third century and the rise of the Diocletian tetrarchy at the close of the

two hundreds, Rome, its wars, and its ruling dynasties cease giving us a central cable that we

can use to understand the greater web of ancient history. Suddenly, during the two hundreds CE and

after, things start getting quite busy, and we begin to have the Visigoths, the Vandals, the

Huns, Ostrogoths, Franks, Lombards, and more, and among them more pervasive century after century,

the Catholic clergy itself diverse and restless as well. Late antiquity is a period of history that

may lend itself better to specifics than generalizations, to case studies more than broad overviews

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