author
Charles Le Beau
1701–1778
An 18th-century French historian and teacher, he is best remembered for a vast history of the later Roman and Byzantine world. His career moved between Paris classrooms, learned societies, and the Collège de France.
4 Audiobooks
Histoire du Bas-Empire. Tome 02
by Charles Le Beau
Histoire du Bas-Empire. Tome 01
by Charles Le Beau
Histoire du Bas-Empire. Tome 04
by Charles Le Beau
Histoire du Bas-Empire. Tome 03
by Charles Le Beau
About the author
Born in Paris in 1701, Charles le Beau was educated at the Collège de Sainte-Barbe and the Collège du Plessis. He taught at the latter before becoming professor of rhetoric at the Collège des Grassins, building a reputation as a scholar and man of letters.
His best-known work is Histoire du Bas-Empire, a long, multi-volume history that follows the Roman Empire from Constantine into the Byzantine period. The project was valued less for flashy style than for its patient compilation of events and sources, which helped keep a large stretch of imperial history accessible to later readers.
Le Beau was elected to the Académie des Inscriptions in 1748 and later became professor of eloquence at the Collège de France. He died in Paris in 1778, leaving behind the kind of steady, large-scale scholarship that often outlives its own age.