They are coming hard and fast. Reviews will follow in due course, but I thought you’d be interested to see what’s new.
Fate seems to have decreed that I concentrate on the Late Antiquity or thereabouts. Aside from the novels (reigns of Theodosius II and Justinian & Theodora) which my group is discussing this month, another Gibbon session is coming up, and I recently reviewed the novel Belisarius: The First Shall Be Last.
On my dining table, there now sit three new books for review.
Two of those are covering the above general time frame: Rome’s Gothic Wars: From the Third Century to Alaric (Key Conflicts of Classical Antiquity) by Michael Kulikowski (Cambridge University Press, more) and our friend and fellow blogger Adrian Murdoch’s latest: The Last Roman: Romulus Augustulus and the Decline of the West (Sutton, UK edition, it’s not out in the US yet). Adrian has a teaser.
The third book, from Yale University Press, is an amply illustrated
and well-glossaried reference book, Roman Woodworking
by Roger B. Ulrich. Unfortunately, it comes with a stiff price tag. No
table of content or sample pages are available so far.
The Fall of Rome, of course, is a favorite subject right now, beginning with the 2005 publication of The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians by Peter Heather and The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization by Bryan Ward Perkins. The books are reviewed jointly at BMCR.
So… this will keep me busy for a while, especially with the holiday season coming up… and there is the new Aeneid translation by Robert Fagles which I couldn't resist… and finally Anthony Everitt’s Augustus: The Life of Rome’s First Emperor… hopefully through a bookstore gift certificate under the tree, the publisher being silent…
