A very detailed and well researched book about what is one of the first major pandemics, the black plague epidemic of the late Roman Empire. My primary criticism is that for a book on plague, it takes an awful long time to get to the whole plague thing -- over halfway through the book, in fact. The non-plague bits are an interesting enough review of late Roman imperial history and bacteriology, but I frankly could have used more of an ethnographic and sociological study of the plague and its impacts; this is more a biography of Justinian. ( )

William Rosen is a great editor in his own right, but when he writes, his real talent comes out. Deftly combining history, medicine, sociology, and religion, Rosen posits that the Roman Empire's true demise was a convergence between the first outbreak of Bubonic Plague and the weakened state of the Roman army. The book starts off slow, with a complete history of the empire between Diocletian and Justinian, then gets really good with an in-depth analysis of the evolution of the plague virus. A slowish but ultimately rewarding read. ( )

This book is extremely well-written, and the breadth of knowledge contained in it is simply amazing. Rosen has brought together the culture of the day, conquests, military exploits, architecture, political intrigue, even so far as explaining why the entomology of different species of flea was more (or less) fortuitous in spreading the plague so quickly, and over such a wide area.

If more authors wrote as engagingly as Rosen, history classes across the US would be filled to overflowing. ( )

Justinian's Flea is a great account of the Mediterranean region in the sixth century. Its focal point is the plague that hit the region during the reign of Justinian, which is really pretty obvious now that I think of it. But the book is an amazing look at several regional histories, science, epidemiology and the like. Rosen gives a gripping account of the main events and people of the era.

The historical sections are a pretty straightforward account of the leading events and figures, but Rosen does a great job stringing together many different narrative strands into a compelling story. The sections on the plague were, for me at least, terra incognita. The author goes pretty deep into the science here and while parts of it were over my humanities major head, I enjoyed them nonetheless.

Rosen concludes the book with an account of the rise of Islam. This was, for me, the main point of the book. Without Justinian's flea, and the resultant plagues that hit the Persian and Byzantine worlds, the entire Islamic empire would have been implausible. I'm not sure this qualifies as a random event, but it does make the contrast between historical determinism and human agency blurry for me. ( )