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PREFACE
The decision to extend The Cambridge Ancient History to the end of the sixth
century, from the closing date of a.d. 324 selected for the first edition of
1938, has already been explained in the Preface to Volume XIII.
Scholarship in Britain lagged behind continental Europe in the discovery
of ‘late antiquity’, which suffered (and to some extent still suffers) from the
disadvantage of falling between the two stools of ‘ancient history’ and
‘medieval history’. However, in 1964 the political and institutional parameters
of the period were magisterially set out in English in A. H. M. Jones’s
The Later Roman Empire 284–602. A Social, Economic and Administrative Survey,
which was followed seven years later by the very different picture presented
in Peter Brown’s World of Late Antiquity (1971).
Jones’s evidence consisted primarily of legal texts, administrative documents
and narrative political histories, from which he constructed a powerful,
if undeniably bleak, image of the late Roman state; whereas Brown
exploited mainly hagiography and the writings of pagan and Christian literati
to reconstruct a world of vibrant (if somewhat anxious) spiritual and
intellectual debate. More recently, in work pioneered by French and Italian
scholars, the abundant and ever-increasing archaeological evidence for the
period has also been brought into play. This material evidence proved conclusively
that, in the eastern Mediterranean at least, late antiquity was no
mere appendage to classical glories, but a period of spectacular prosperity
and splendour.
It is our hope that CAH XIV mirrors and builds on earlier work on late
antiquity; and that it provides an introduction to the richness of the
different sources and different approaches that are now readily available for
this period. As a multi-author work, it cannot have the crispness and sense
of direction of the best single-author surveys, and we have not attempted
as editors to iron out differences of opinion or of emphasis. On the other
hand, there are obvious merits in multiple authorship. In particular, no
single scholar can hope to be as much at home in sixth-century Britain as
in Egypt, nor as comfortable with late antique saints as with barbarian warlords;
so a wide range of expertise is needed to provide detailed introductions
to specific fields of knowledge. Furthermore, multiplicity of opinion
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