Over the years I have acquired a good number of books on Roman history, in particular for the period 375-450 A.D., which first attracted my interest when I was designing my game Decline and Fall.
I'm posting the catalog here in the hope that it may be of some use to students of this fascinating and pivotal time. I've included some books that are not specific to Late Antiquity but which are of particular value for the Roman period as a whole, or for reading Latin.
This should not, of course, be taken as a comprehensive bibliography for Late Antiquity. It is a purely personal selection that reflects my own interests and investigations. Some volumes are here only because I came across a cheap copy and found at least some value in it. You will find few introductory histories here; there are probably dozens of books about "the fall of the Roman empire" and I don't try to read them all. Ditto for some very good general histories of Late Antiquity that might be styled as textbooks.
In general, my interest is not so much in questions of Rome's fall as in the personalities, the kind of world they lived in, and the great surges of religious and spiritual discourse (not to say conflict) that were sweeping the empire.
As far as primary sources are concerned, the ecclesiastical library that has come down to us is vast: it is said that Augustine alone has left us more than five million words. Much of this library is in print (and a good deal of it has been beautifully presented online in the Christian Classics Ethereal Library and elsewhere), but it is largely barren of interest for anyone but a theologian or church historian. I keep enough around to remind me of the issues and the cast of characters. Secular writing is better represented here: almost all the Latin books from the core period, and most of the Greek, provided they are available in English. The few Latin-only texts are for reference rather than reading; for alas, despite a lifelong acquaintance with Latin, I have never devoted the time necessary to truly master it.
Some of the notes are based on my Amazon reviews.
My own contributions to the field:
The catalog:
The following links entail client-side transformations of the current data and do not work in all browsers.
Note on Purchasing Books
Scholarly books tend to go out of print quickly, and many of the books in my collection are no longer available in new copies.
An invaluable source for hard-to-find books is abebooks.com, which aggregates the catalogs of many independent booksellers around the globe. Two caveats:
(1) Most U.S. credit-card companies now charge a bogus "foreign transaction fee" of 1 percent or more on payments made through Abebooks, which has its headquarters in Canada. This is despite the fact that payments are almost always in U.S. dollars and shipping is from wherever the bookseller is located, most often the U.S. You can sometimes get around this annoying surcharge by contacting and paying the bookseller directly, or by paying through Paypal.
(2) A number of firms advertising new books on Abebooks do not in fact have the titles they are advertising. The implicit message is not "We have it" but rather "We can order it for you." A little browsing will make it obvious who these sellers are; in the meantime, check the reliability ratings before ordering.
As far as new books are concerned, I have had excellent service from the two major U.S. online sellers, and I can also recommend Dove Booksellers, who often offer the best price. Their focus is on the Judaeo-Christian tradition, but they have a very nice selection of secular history and reference as well, in both new and used editions.
Another recent phenomenon to be aware of is "print-on-demand". Rather than printing several thousand copies by conventional press and dealing with inventory, some university presses and other small publishers now run off individual copies by digital means as orders come in. Although the binding may be indistinguishable from that of normal print runs, the quality of the type often suffers, apparently because of slight movements of the paper or printhead as each line is formed. The result is a readable book but one that is not as much a pleasure to own as one that is cleanly and crisply printed. Print-on-demand is a welcome innovation insofar as it enables books to be kept "in print" indefinitely, but if you love the appearance of a well-printed page, you may want to seek out older editions.
It is cause for gratitude that the Loeb Classical Library is still in print and indeed continues to publish new editions, notably those for Vergil and Martial. However, it appears that the original plates for many volumes did not survive the departure of the British side of the Heinemann/Harvard partnership, and in recent years more and more volumes have been reissued in ugly photographic reprints. One cannot blame Harvard for not wanting to reset in type a volume that might only sell a few dozen copies a year; still, my advice is not to buy any current printings sight unseen.