428 AD

428 AD: An Ordinary Year at the End of the Roman Empire by Giusto Traina, translated by Allan Cameron, 132 pages

428 AD was the year the last King of Armenia was deposed and the year Nestorius was installed as Archbishop of Constantinople.  It was two years after the completion of Augustine's City of God and one year before the Vandal invasion of Africa.  It was a year when the Roman Empire seemed more united than divided, when Theodosius II ruled in the East, Aetius fought in the West, and St Simeon Stylites remained atop his pillar.  It was not a crucial year, or a historic turning point, and that is precisely the interest of Traina's portrait of an "ordinary year" in late antiquity.

This is not to say that the book is narrowly confined to a single year - past and future are shadowed everywhere as Traina methodically circles the Mediterranean, from Armenia across Europe to Britain, then east across North Africa to Persia.  At times those shadows grow a little too long, and the author allows his foreknowledge to color his interpretation of the moment.  This impinges directly upon the best effect of the book's conceit - that in the year 428, the future was not yet written.