What attracts you to Late Rome?

[Nathan Ross]

I absolutely cannot stand Roman history post-Commodus... My true Roman love interest is the High Republic to Civil Wars

Like you, my first interest was the later Republic. I was introduced to Roman history about twelve years ago, after watching a History Channel documentary about the Gallic wars on a fuzzy little TV in a stinky hotel room in Hyderabad, India. For the next two years I was focussed entirely on the period between Caesar's first consulate and the death of Marc Antony - an era that seemed to contain everything.

Then I went to Italy, saw Pompeii and the monuments of empire, read Tacitus and Suetonius, and became fascinated by the Flavians. More recently, however, I've gravitated towards the later empire: specifically, the period between the rise of Diocletian and the death of Constantine. Like the late republic, this was a time of revolution and civil war. Roman society, culture and army were all in transformation. But while the changes of the late republic led to the (relative) stability and glory of the principiate, the gold and grandeur of the later empire appears against a darker background. Everything seems tinged with impending tragedy - an old-fashioned way of looking at it, perhaps, but it suits my taste for the dramatic!

More practically, there's a lot more of the later empire left to us. I first went to Rome looking for the late republic, and was dissappointed to find so little of it, and so much of the remains of later centuries. Now it's the later stuff that draws my attention - those hulking basilicas and overbearing arches. The majority of surviving Roman buildings and monuments are from the later era - we can see and appreciate the material fabric of the day, rather than just reading about it.

There's also literature. Ammianus Marcellinus is a great read, and has the benefit of being a participant in several of the scenes he describes. His work has an immediacy often lacking in the senatorial historians of an earlier age. Alongside him, there are panegyrics and letters and even novels that give us a fascinatingly fragmentary and distorted view of a culture and society often alien, but one that foreshadows our own. There's something creepily totalitarian in a lot of those later imperial writings.

I confess that I used to find late Roman military equipment offputting as well. You get used to it very quickly though, once you see it in the context of its time. Reconstructions like this one, I think, show very clearly just how imposing and impressive the fourth century soldier could appear!