Peter Heather. Rome Resurgent

Peter Heather has a well-earned reputation as one of the leading scholars of the relations between the later Roman world and its non-Roman neighbors, and in Rome Resurgent: War and Empire in the Age of Justinian, he turns his attention to the remarkable series of events that resulted in the east Roman reconquest of North Africa from the Vandals, Italy from the kingdom of the Ostrogoths, and parts of southeast Spain from the Visigothic Kingdom. This is a fast-paced, highly readable narrative aimed at a general readership, a narrative that takes recent research into account and that also takes into consideration the archaeological and material cultural data that is still, unfortunately, often overlooked or marginalized in many historical surveys. Many writers have devoted a great deal of ink to Justinian’s reign in efforts to understand the nature of that emperor’s rule, the logic underlying the reconquests, and the reasons for the apparent rapid breakdown of eastern Roman power in the fifty to sixty years following his death in 565, and they follow for the most part, and understandably, an agenda set already during Justinian’s own time by the historian Procopius of Caesarea.

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