Historiography and Space in Late Antiquity

The later Roman Empire was shrinking on the map, but still shaped the way historians represented the space around them.

Space is as much a geographical reality as a representation of the world. For centuries the Roman Empire, depicting itself as the centre of world, had shaped the mindset of its inhabitants. In Late Antiquity, mindset as well as map slowly adapted to political and religious change.The Roman Empire traditionally presented itself as the centre of the world, a view sustained by ancient education and conveyed in imperial literature. Historiography in particular tended to be written from an empire-centred perspective. In Late Antiquity, however, that attitude was challenged by the fragmentation of the empire. This book explores how a post-imperial representation of space emerges in the historiography of that period. Minds adapted slowly, long ignoring Constantinople as the new capital and still finding counter-worlds at the edges of the world. Even in Christian literature, often thought of as introducing a new conception of space, the empire continued to influence geographies. Political changes and theological ideas, however, helped to imagine a transferral of empire away from Rome and to substitute ecclesiastical for imperial space. By the end of Late Antiquity, Rome was just one of many centres of the world.