From certain passages in the Desert Christians by William Harmless, I got a striking sense of the bleakness and despair which hangs around late antiquity. Something about that fascinates me. I would read Gibbon’s decline and fall, but it seems a little antiquated, but I’m not interested in something like Peter Brown’s work on the subject, which I’ve heard downplays the real pathos involved in the decay of the empire. Basically, everything I’ve heard about is is something along the lines of: hey, you know those so-called dark ages? They weren’t so dark after all! And that’s fine, but I can’t believe that there was literally no retrogression involved.
I guess I’m looking for something which provides a good picture of everyday life in the collapsing empire, as it happened.
I’d recommend ‘The World of Late Antiquity’ by Peter Brown and if you’re feeling adventurous there’s his much longer book ‘The Rise of Western Christendom’. Brown popularised the term late antiquity in reference to the period from roughly Diocletian to Charlemagne/Abbasid Revolution. In my opinion he’s very good at stressing continuity while also analysing why and how societies changed.