This is an excellent book - fascinating and a joy to read even for the non-specialist. Thank you, NetGalley and Harvard University Press, for the eARC.

Professor and author Paul Stephenson provides a look at the Eastern Roman Empire and its downfall not just from the perspective of warfare and the loss of territory but also the other more fundamental events that lead to the downfall of society such as internal strife, environmental degradation, and disease. Well worth both the cost and the time for not just those interested in the classics but also anyone interested in the big things that matter.

The later part of the Roman Empire isn't one that gets as much attention and here Paul Stephenson examines the empire from the 'New Rome' (aka Constantinople) point of view- roughly 395-700. Mostly the eastern part of the empire- Constantinople, and what today would be called Asia, Turkey, parts of Africa, etc.

I found the first part of this three part book the most interesting. Looking at life in the later empire, from family and religion to the changes of culture and cities overall was interesting and informative. Part 2 covered the emperors and their attempts or successes at dynasties which got drawn out and repetitive and more resembled a text book you'd read in college focusing on battles and who killed who than anything else. The end of each chapter summarized everything the chapter had just said and I might recommend reading only that part to just get the gist of it and move on. Part 3 gets slightly more general as it looks at the age as a whole, mostly religious, also highly repetitive. By then I was more than ready for the book to be over. Repetitive and focusing on religious changes, by this point I wasn't getting anything out of the book.

Probably this is a book more for scholars than the casual reader, although since it seems to be more general in terms of the information provided, I can't imagine scholars are going to find anything new in reading this long and dry textbook-like tome.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

In-depth overview of late antiquity in the Eastern Mediterranean the book held my interest but could have been better written and jumped from topic to topic with insufficient cohesion