VOLUME ONE is the story of the struggle to defend Italian lands against the Eastern Goths and the wave of barbarians from the North. Theodoric the Great dreams of a Roman Empire reinvigorated with Gothic blood, while the imprisoned Boethius, last of the Roman philosophers and first of the Scholastics, writes his immortal work of suffering and consolation. VOLUME TWO portrays an age when men lived intensely aware of supernatural forces, and their savage deeds were countered by the civilizing force of Christianity. Gregory of Tours frets for his "little world of Gaul", while Fortunatus writes poetry of love sacred and secular. Here are St. Radegund, the queen who lived as a nun; Gildas, last of the "British Romans"; and St. Alban, Britain's first martyr. VOLUME THREE is a glowing description of monasticism as it developed under such figures as Columban, "the Saint afire with Irish enthusiasm"; St. Benedict, greatest of the monks, who established a pattern of the religious life still in existence; and St. Gregory, greatest of the popes, who more than any other man prepared the See of Rome for its triumphant emergence in the Middle Ages.