The Roman Empire in Crisis, 248–260: When the Gods Abandoned Rome

This book is a narrative history of a dozen years of turmoil that begins  with Rome’s millennium celebrations of 248 CE and ends with the capture  of the emperor Valerian by the Persians in 260. It was a period of  almost unremitting disaster for Rome, involving a series of civil wars,  several major invasions by Goths and Persians, economic crisis, and an  empire-wide pandemic, the ‘plague of Cyprian’. There was sustained  persecution of the Christians. A central theme of the book is that this  was a period of moral and spiritual crisis in which the traditional  state religion suffered greatly in prestige, paving the way for the  eventual triumph of Christianity.

The sensational recent  discovery of extensive fragments of the lost Scythica of Dexippus sheds  much new light on the Gothic Wars of the period. The author has used  this new evidence in combination with in-depth investigations in the  field to develop a revised account of events surrounding the great  Battle of Abritus where the army of the emperor Decius was annihilated  by Cniva’s Goths. New light is shed on a period which is pivotal for  understanding the transition between Classical civilisation and the  period known as Late Antiquity.