L. has written what is, in many ways, a solid, even admirable text book: it provides, as Michael Whitby is quoted on the cover, ‘an excellent overview of the period’. Teachers will find it a useful resource; students at all levels will be able to use it to mine facts – and, more important, have a straightforward initial road map across much of the political and military history of two turbulent centuries and the waste lands of brutal and obscurantist religious controversy. I wish I had had it to hand when preparing for my Master’s degree, and even in finalising my last book.

L. achieves this by breaking his material down into four main sections: after an introduction, ‘the Constantinian Inheritance’, which, however, may underplay the importance of the earlier Tetrarchy in determining the form of the late-antique state, he launches into his account of the later fourth century; here I find that, at the end of Chapter 2, ‘Emperors, Usurpers and Frontiers’, I had written ‘clear and lucid’, ‘balanced’ and ‘readable’ in the margin. This is followed by an account of progress towards a Christian empire, focusing mainly on the implications of Christianisation at higher social levels, although the Jews get a brief look-in. A chapter is also dedicated to the two Imperial ‘theatres’, the ‘Old’ Rome and the ‘New’, Constantinople, where the dramas of the later empire were increasingly played out and where the shift eastwards was fundamental to the change in power relationships in the whole Mediterranean region. Part 2, ‘The Long Fifth Century’, makes up nearly half of the book. This tackles, first, court politics and the phenomenon of military commanders, often ‘outsiders’ like Stilicho, Ricimer or Gainas, frequently more powerful than the nominal emperors; then the wider significance, especially for the influence of imperial women, of more palace-bound emperors after the death of Theodosius II. It then returns to mainstream imperial politics and yet more wars – whose narration, as with the politics of the century here and elsewhere, shows L. at his best. Then follows the reign of Anastasius, who receives unusually flattering treatment. This Part also introduces the reader, in Chapter 6, to the impact of ‘barbarians’; and, in Chapter 9, to the successor states in the West. But not until after elucidating, in Chapter 7, with competence and clarity, the extremely complicated religious politics surrounding the Council of Chalcedon and its fallout. L. is rightly clear that more than ‘merely’ religious issues were at stake.

In Parts 3 and 4, L. may have moved outside his comfort zone of narrative, high politics and war. But, in his analysis of longer term economic and social trends, he makes a workmanlike attempt to summarise the profound changes of the period whereby provincial government, chiefly in response to financial pressures, moved from comprising an agglomeration of quasi-autonomous city-states to a more dirigiste bureaucracy and the emergence of a powerful service aristocracy. He even deals, if relatively superficially, with such increasingly important phenomena as the circus and theatre factions, and what he sees as an accommodation between the traditional classical culture and Christianity in the East, though less so in the West. In Chapter 11, he begins by reminding us (and I suspect himself) that, although l'histoire événementielle may seem more fun than economic trends, we should not therefore underestimate their importance. And he succeeds in giving a flavour of such developments, while rightly challenging older ideas about the general impoverishment of the empire. However, his treatment of the evolving political economy – the role of the colonus, for instance – is superficial; the often brutal exploitation of the agricultural workers, the mass of the empire's population, whose discontents created what M. Kaplan could describe as ‘l'anarchie justinienne’, has eluded him (Les Hommes et la Terre à Byzance [1992]).

The three chapters of Part 4 focus on Justinian I: they deal with the Emperor and his connection with the Roman past, the Christian present and the ‘end of antiquity’ respectively. The first covers Justinian's efforts to consolidate his power, all the more necessary in the aftermath of the ruinous Nika riots and opposition to ‘reform’ on the part of those with a vested interest in earlier ways of doing things. And, of course, Justinian's wars. The next reviews, mercifully in language a non-theologian can understand, the Emperor's continuing if ultimately unsuccessful efforts to promote church unity, and to create, in the church of Hagia Sophia, possibly the greatest memorial to his reign, though he is silent about the brutal persecution of Pagans of which we learn in, for example, John of Ephesus or Malalas. The final chapter reverts to politics and wars, not forgetting what L. consistently calls the ‘pandemic’ – not the ‘plague’ – of 562, and reviews where the empire stood militarily and politically at Justinian's death, then looks, all too briefly, at how ‘Rome’ slowly became ‘Byzantium’ afterwards.

There is a great deal of good, well-presented material here. So why my reservations? Partly it is a matter of genre; textbooks are rarely the most exciting type of history, and some big topics are either excessively slimmed down, or fail to appear. Here, for instance, the character of the sources is relegated to a brief annex, and the voluminous footnotes concentrate on secondary materials. I doubt whether a student will get a sense of what it is to write history, especially of such an ideologically contested period, both in ancient and in modern times. Second, there is no mention of differing theoretical approaches to the period, let alone of the widely varying cultural assumptions and practices L.’s actors brought with them. If you are writing a book whose subtitle is The Transformation of Ancient Rome, you need to cut rather more deeply into the society – and its mentalités – you are describing if you do not want to be accused of being a dinosaur. In fact, L. knows all this. In the more restricted framework of his War in Late Antiquity (2007), he addresses many of these issues. Less so here. We learn about monetary reform in Late Antiquity, the emergence of a Service Aristocracy whom P. Heather dubbed ‘The New Constantinians’, the growth of large estates, even – a bit – about coloni. But these are not brought together in the kind of models of the political economy of Late Antiquity developed by J. Banaji, P. Sarris or C. Wickham nor, in the cultural sphere, is the spirit of P. Brown to be found – although all four feature in L.’s footnotes and bibliography.

These criticisms could make the book seem less valuable than it is. So, rather than under-valuing it on account of its limitations, we should perhaps think of it as solid, well presented and readable, although for many, a shade conservative.