Video:
Audio:
Recommended Reading:
- Powerpoint presentation
- Alaric Watson’s biography of the third-century emperor Aurelian contains a general overview of the empire’s crisis.
- Joseph Peden’s lecture “Inflation and the Fall of the Roman Empire” focuses on the third century.
- For a recent introduction to Neoplatonism, try Paulina Remes’s Neoplatonism.
- Plotinus’s entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- The Six Enneads of Plotinus (good luck)
Roman Empire: 3rd Century Crisis – Quiz
- At its peak, the Roman Empire probably included about ____________ people.
- Much of Rome burned during the reign of the emperor ________.
- Plotinus is most closely associated with the school of philosophy known as __________.
- The Roman state welfare program of providing free food and entertainment to the masses is known by the phrase _____________.
- The majority of Roman agriculture took place on large estates called __________ that were worked by tenant farmers called _________.
- What policy was a symptom of the Roman armies’ weakening by the second century A.D.?
- ____________ broke the strong of “Good Emperors” in the late 2nd century.
- 50 million
- Nero
- Neoplatonism
- “bread and circuses”
- Latifundi, coloni
- Recruiting from outside the traditional Italian citizenry
- Commodus