Late Antiquity Quotes

• The new Late Antiquity is in part a deliberate corrective to a previous bias, which assumed that the entire Roman world declined in the fifth century, because this is what happened in the West. Relocating the centre of the world in the fourth to eighth centuries to Egypt, the Levant, and Persia is a stimulating challenge to our mental framework and cultural expectations.

  

  Bryan Ward-Perkins
  • Egypt
  • Center
  • Persia

• There is, however, an obvious problem in imposing, on the basis of eastern evidence, a flourishing Late Antiquity on the whole of the late Roman and post-Roman worlds. In the ‘bad old days’ western decline at the end of Antiquity was imposed on the eastern provinces. Now, instead of all the different regions of the empire being allowed to float free some flourishing in the fifth to eighth centuries, others not, a new and equally distorting template is being imposed westwards.

  

  Bryan Ward-Perkins
  • Problem
  • Roman
  • Late Antiquity