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[This is the eighth of many finalists in the book review contest. It\\u2019s not by me - it\\u2019s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I\\u2019ll be posting about two of these a week for several months. When you\\u2019ve read all of them, I\\u2019ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. If you like reading these reviews, check out\\xa0point 3 here\\xa0for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA]

Rome, 401 AD. The great pagan Roman senator, Symmachus, sponsors games to celebrate his eighteen year old son becoming praetor. Romans who witness the pageantry were still talking about it a generation later. There were theatrical displays in a flooded amphitheater. Symmachus brought crocodiles from the Nile, bears from the Balkans, great Irish wolfhounds from Britain, lions from the southern mountains of north Africa, antelopes and gazelles trapped along the edges of the Sahara, Saxon prisoners of war to serve as gladiators (all twenty of whom, frustratingly for Symmachus, committed suicide before the games, strangling each other with their own hands in their prison cells). Powerful Romans had displayed their wealth and civic love in the same way for the greater part of a millennium.

Within a generation, much of the wealth of great senators like Symmachus was lost or slipped into the Christian church. Goths sacked the city of Rome. Vandals conquered wealthy north Africa and the great city of Carthage. Over the next hundred years, western Europe and north Africa completed their transformation from a classical pagan society to a medieval Christian one. It was not only a political revolution. "It was in this world that the conglomerate of ideas that medieval persons took for granted was first formed." This period rivals the Enlightenment as the most dramatic transformation of the West.

Background on the Author

Peter Brown, is an English historian and the Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton. He\\u2019s one of the great scholars of \\u201cLate Antiquity." He is sometimes regarded as the inventor of the field (per Wikipedia). I\\u2019m not a historian, but I am interested in the world of classical Rome and Greece. I\'m interested in men and women struggling to maintain systems and hold off collapse. The end of the Roman society is probably the best documented and most accessible example. Thus I first came across Peter Brown\\u2019s work in the extremely readable \\u201cThe World of Late Antiquity\\u201d from 1971. The short, introductory work got me hooked, so I read Brown\\u2019s 2014 book \\u201cThrough the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD.\\u201d