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Late Antiquity (ca. 250-600 CE) was a world at war: barbarian migrations, civil wars, raids, and increasingly porous frontiers affected millions of its inhabitants. While military and political historians have long grappled with this history, scholars of late antique society and culture rarely interrogate the consequences of near constant warfare on civilian populations, fighting forces, and the built environment. War and Community in Late Antiquity responds to this oversight by assembling archeologists, art historians, social historians, and scholars of religion to examine the impact of war on communities (households, cities, religious groups, elites and non-elites) and their reactions to ongoing stressors. Topics include the violence of everyday life as backdrop to that of war; the rhetoric of warfare and its significance for Christian authors; the effects of captivity and billeting on households; communal agency and the fortification of civilian spaces; and the challenges of articulating Christian imperial power in wartime.
About the author
Susanna Elm, FBA, is Sidney H. Ehrman Chair and Distinguished University Professor of History and Ancient Greek and Roman Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church: Emperor Julian, Gregory of Nazianzus, and the Vision of Rome (2012) (2013 Goodwin Award), and The Importance of Being Gorgeous: Gender and Christian Imperial Rule in Late Antiquity (2025).Kristina Sessa is Professor of History at The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. She is also the author of The Formation of Papal Authority in Late Antiquity: Roman Bishops and the Domestic Sphere (Cambridge, 2012) and Daily Life in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 2017).
