Customer Reviews

428 AD: An Ordinary Year at the End of the Roman Empire

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book deals with a single year in the Later Roman Empire. As you might guess from the title that year is 428. The idea of showing a single typical year in the Empire is a brilliant one. Too often in the broad sweep of history the day to day minutiae of life are lost. It's too easy to see what happens based off of what happens after. History is mainly remembered by famous events which are, by definition, extraordinary. By confining himself to a single year the author shows a fair sample of what occurred. A previous review stated that this type of yearly chronicle doesn't work for ancient civilizations due to the lack of available data, but I feel that by keeping the chapters short he eliminates that problem. The chapters tend to be under ten pages long. This does make for a rather short book. Without the bibliography and notes it only comes out to 132 pages. This isn't a definitive study, merely a new way of looking at the late Roman Empire. The chapters move around the empire in a counter-clockwise direction starting with Armenia and ending with the Persian Empire. Each one is focused on something specific like the Visigoths in Spain or the end of the kingdom of Armenia. After reading it I feel like I have a better understanding of what life was like then. The book is fairly well written, but the translation is somewhat dry. I feel that this book has been rather unfairly criticized. It does not pretend to be an in-depth study. It is designed to break the mold by showing the events of only one year. The worst problem is it's length.

Traina's brilliant panoramic tour of one year, AD 428, a generation or two before the end of the Roman Empire, gives a sweeping vision of what the world was like on the cusp of the Middle Ages, from Europe to the Mediterranean, across the steppes and deserts of Central Asia to China. High recommend this clearly written, erudite, entertaining book brimming with amazing and curious narratives of familiar and exotic historical figures and events from a pivotal point in history, 1,500 years ago.

I do not like to give negative reviews but this book was a significant disappointment. It reads like a dry encyclopedia article that packs in the maximum information in the minimum space with the minimum of explanation and no concession to the reader. The text is only 132 pages long, followed by an additional 50 pages of Notes (the Preface had notes!). It took me over two weeks to finish. I won't say this is a bad book--I'm sure for the right reader it's the right book--but it is definitely not for the general reader.

Here is a sample of the dry-as-dust writing, and just a brief excerpt from a paragraph that is a full page long (p. 118 if you want to know). (I am leaving out the diacriticals!): "Initially, the Lakhmids sided with Rome, but very soon became vassals of the Sassanian Empire, and governed the oasis--until the Great King Khusro II suppressed the dynasty in 602. In the fifth century, the Bedouin of Hira were the guardians of the Sassanian border. When Flavius Dionysus carried out his embassy, his Persian opposite number was probably escorted by these warriors. In 428, their leader was al-Numan's son, Prince al-Mundhir, who in the past had taken in and protected Bharam, who had studied alongside the prince's own son, Numan the Younger."

A little of this goes a very long way.

Mr. Traina obviously is well versed in the nuances of the ancient world, and I learned a lot from him. It was, however, a chore to acquire the information. The book reads like a doctoral history dissertation rather than a book for the general public. There is a great deal of information presented, but the author seems to assume a level of knowledge that I doubt the average educated layman will have. He (or his translator) has a fondness for run-on sentences, interrupted by parenthetical comments. These two habits make it difficult for the reader to follow his arguements. It's a pity, as his approach to presenting an ordinary year in Roman history is a good one.

The author is to be commended for his scholarship -- ordinarily what impresses me and earns a good rating. However, in this instance where the author attempts to cover a year of ancient history centered around the happenings in the Roman Empire, his approach and presentation fail to achieve much of anything. Other books have been written like 1865 that analyze a year for a particular country or region, and they have worked well, but here the scope is too broad and the depth of analysis too shallow.

Frankly I doubt if the author's approach would have worked for any year in ancient history due to the few sources available and lack of depth in the ones that are. Some contradict each other, and in no case do they provide the type of thorough information we have available in modern times. Many important individuals are little more than names or are subject to gossip that may or may not be accurate. Even in the early development of the Roman Catholic Church and its competing Christian churches, sects, and political factions, the information needed for an in-depth analysis has long ago been lost.

In presenting the important characters for 428, it is necessary to develop them for the reader in a much more thorough manner than done by the author. An example would be Galla Placidia, a formidable women who experienced one of the more turbulent lives in this period. Theodosius II was a vastly more complex character than presented -- his court was run as if he were almost a God even though he was a Christian.

With respect to Bahran V the ancient sources are almost non-existent and the author was forced to use medieval sources of doubtful accuracy. The Armenian line is usually considsred to have five groupings not counting the Kings of Sophene, starting with the Satraps of Armenia in 401 BC, Kings of Armenia from 331 to 200 BC, Kings of Greater Armenia (Starting with Artaxias I in 200 BC and ending with Tiradates I in 75 AD), Armenian Arsacids from Tiradates I to Arshak III in 389, and Persarmenia from Valarshak in 380 to Artaxias IV in 428. This is a long history and worthy of much more discussion than the author devotes to it. Nor did Armenia end in 428. In 885 it was resurrected by Ashot I, and Cilicia Armenia came into being under Levon I in 1187 and lasted until falling to the Ottoman Turks in 1375. And the Guptas ruled India in 428 under Kumaragupta I who at least should have rated a mention.

My point is the very brief survey of the status of the various empires and peoples around the Mediterranean (132 pages) really doesn't accomplish much or give the reader a sense of the area's history. History is rarely served by a still snapshot as it is a process of trends and movements that are often only slightly affected by "Great" individuals. In 428 the Roman Empire was in a substantial state of flux that is impossible to catch by looking at a single year.

All that being said, I gave the author four stars for scholarship and two stars for his attempt to describe the ancient Mediterranean world as of 428 AD. I found little among his discussion to warrant purchasing his book. Sorry, I wish my rating could have been higher. No doubt others might find the book very interesting so I don't want to be too negative. It's just that the book didn't work for me.

This is a quite well researched study of the 420's [more so than the actual year 428 IMO which is again IMO a literary device on which the author hangs his tale]. However again IMO too much of the actual description and content are in the endnotes. As footnotes I find this acceptable. I understand many publishers prefer endnotes as many readers find footnotes offputting. However the text should be written with this in mind and the notes saved for pure sourcing when using end notes. I also found the chapters on the Fifth Century West presume the reader knows the period as intimately as the author does. Keeping other books and articles open while reading is a pain but not doing so is a greater pain for those of us who are interested enough in the era to buy the book but are not period specialists. Another 15-20 pages of text would have solved this.

The book arrived through Amazon's auspicious and was read by myself immediately. The guts of the book tells the tales of the world in one day, 428 AD. It is full of information and is an easy, fast read. I would recommend it to anyone and it would provide special knowledge that could be plugged into other events of that time era. A nice, little bugger of a book.

Traina's '428 AD' takes a look at the late Roman world of the fifth century, particularly zooming in on one year, 428. The book starts on the eastern periphery in Armenia, with its fall to the Sassanid Persians. Traina then moves west, going first to Antioch and Syria before moving on to Constantinople, Italy, Gaul, Spain, Africa, Egypt, and back to Palestine. The last chapter deals with what happened in Sassanid Persia in the 420s and 430s. In this manner, Traina manages to do an entire sweep of the Mediterranean world while giving some attention to the areas beyond the borders, particularly to Persia and the southern areas of Egypt, although the lands beyond the Rhine frontier are conspicuously absent. Local maps highlighting the places discussed in each chapter are provided, which aids the understanding of what Traina chooses to discuss. The choice of subject matter is broad and varied, from high politics to religion to barbarians, and sometimes all three together.

While this is a decent book, I will fully admit that I did not particularly enjoy it. For a book that clearly targets a popular audience given the price point, short chapters, lack of real analysis, and maps that take up a surprising number of pages, this book is remarkably dense. I really like the concept of taking a single, not particularly exceptional year near the end of the Roman Empire in the west and seeing how things were in different geographical regions. The problem is that for a popular work, Traina never makes the world feel alive. His writing is generally quite dry. Given that the publisher allowed for extremely generous end notes (just under 50 pages), one would think that Traina could leave some of the less relevant details there and concentrate on giving the world some colour. It would have been far more interesting, for example in the chapter entitled 'Waiting on the Vandals' to describe Roman Africa from the eyes of Augustine and fill in the details. By leaning on Augustine, the little bits of the late Roman world that provide life to Augustine's world would have made Traina's book far more interesting. Instead, we have generally dry descriptions of how the Roman world was in 428. I read a lot of academic books on late Rome/Byzantium so I'm used to dry writing. I did not find this book difficult to get through. However, I can see the target audience quitting before the end despite the brevity of this work and not wanting to return to the fifth century, since this book does not make it seem as fascinating as it is.

The author picks an "ordinary" year to present a survey of the Roman Empire about 50 years prior to its "end". The author notes that this year had a sigular exception to its ordinaryness, which is the fall of Armenia. The survey is organized around regions which show a few of the fissures that were soon to crack or crumble.

My knowledge of people and ethnic groups is limited so a lot of this did not stay with me. The maps helped as did some of the descriptions of individuals.

This is an interesting format and suggests a series, a look at this Empire (and others), in the this type of survey manner every 50 years. For this and other books to appreciated for the general audience, more context is needed.

The juxtapositions of events are fascinating and informative in ways not seen in the usual formats. There is much to be said for the old-fashioned annal.