Because Ideas Matter...
The faculty and staff of Butler University's College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences presents
Recommended Readings
Justinian's
Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe
by William Rosen, Viking, 2007
Reviewed by George Geib
Few experiences have evoked greater fear in
history than plague. For nearly two millennia, the Black Death kept
returning to Europe to ravage cities and civilizations. One of the
earlier, and more terrible, outbreaks came during the reign of the
last important ancient Roman emperor, Justinian. Rosen merges the
stories of pandemic and imperial decline into an engaging narrative
targeted to the general reader. Most accounts of that age mirror
Procopius and his sixth century contemporaries, interested in
Justinian as law giver, builder of Hagia Sophia, reconqueror of the
western Roman empire, and source of great personal anecdotes. Rosen
deftly retells these tales, but adds the larger context of the
terrible pressures upon the ancient eastern empire that saw its
rapid fragmentation into a recognizably medieval world. Chief among
these pressures is the bubonic plague outbreak that struck
Constantinople in 542 and eventually killed an estimated 25 million
people. Big picture history is at least as old as Edward Gibbon,
and as current as Jared Diamond. If you like such introductions to
people and ideas, Rosen should entertain and inform you.
- George Geib is Professor of History at Butler University.