TIME: BEyOND LATE ANTIQUITy | 45mation.^108 Soon after this, Andrea Giardina in Rome complained that
Brown’s ambitious portrait had led to an “explosion” or “elephantiasis” of late
Antiquity as it sprawled unmanageably across the centuries. Giardina tidy-
mindedly insisted that each historical period must have a political, institu-
tional, and economic structure plainly distinct from those that precede and
follow it, and pronounced that the Lombard invasions of northern Italy
from 568 marked a clear break, likewise the Arab conquests.^109 Then in 2005
came two books that took an even more radically conservative line: Peter
Heather, The fall of the Roman Empire, and Bryan Ward- Perkins, The fall of
Rome and the end of civilization. Both are too preoccupied with the West—
in other words the origins of Europe—to engage effectively with the Orien-
tal prospects opened up by Brown. For Heather and Ward- Perkins, 410 is
once more a deeply significant date—as it was for Augustine too, except he
knew how to conceptualize it, discerning its meaning amid the broader his-
tory of Christianized Rome.^110 Ward- Perkins, in particular, could not be re-
moter from this view of history. By emphasizing the destruction of physical
infrastructures and the decline of material well- being, he attempts to compel
acknowledgment of a major breakdown—“the end of civilization”—in the
fifth century. Those who accept his values may or may not be inclined to ac-
cept his historical analysis. But a materialist and archaeological orientation,
while evidently consistent with indifference to the achievements of art his-
tory, need not in itself be an obstacle to longer periodizations. I shall return
to this point in chapter 3.
More interesting is Wolf Liebeschuetz’s Decline and fall of the Roman city
(2001), synthesizing a mass of archaeological material to reaffirm the view
that the high imperial Roman city (urban core with monumental secular as
well as religious architecture, rural territory, town council) declined and was
well on the way to collapse by c. 600—at the latest—in the West, the Bal-
kans, and Anatolia. But in the East Liebeschuetz sees a different scene: a
higher level of prosperity in the later sixth to early seventh centuries, and
maintenance of that prosperity (“paradoxically”) into the early Caliphate, so
that late Antiquity ends c. 750, in line with Brown’s view.^111 Admittedly,
where Brown reveled in the new, even exotic images and ideas flooding the
108 A. Schiavone, La storia spezzata (Rome 1996) (English tr. M. J. Schneider, The end of the past
[Cambridge, Mass. 2000] 2, 22–29).
109 A. Giardina, “Esplosione di tardoantico,” Studi storici 40 (1999) 157–80, esp. 176. In response,
articles by various hands in Studi storici 45 (2004), and G. W. Bowersock, “Centrifugal force in late an-
tique historiography,” in Straw and Lim (eds), The past before us [2:94] 19–23.
110 Greek Christians were less likely to see 410 as a major event: A. Momigliano, The classical
foundations of modern historiography (Berkeley 1990) 144.
111 G. Avni, ““From polis to madina” revisited—Urban change in Byzantine and early Islamic Pal-
estine,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 21 (2011) 301–29, questions whether abandonment of monu-