Customer Reviews

The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians is quite simply brilliant. Heather combines a rich, detailed history with clear writing to argue that Rome fell from without, not from within.

It's clear that Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Penguin Classics) was wrong when he claimed a decline in morals - particularly Christianity - led to the collapse of the Western empire. However, a surprising amount of people still believe this. Some more serious historians, such as Adrian Goldsworthy in How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower, argue that internal political chaos weakened the empire enough to allow the barbarians to invade.

However, Heather makes the case that it was barbarian strength, rather than Roman weakness, that led to the collapse. First, Germanic tribes along the frontier had become more prosperous, populous, and politically organized. Second, the invasion of the Huns pushed several tribes into the empire, where they decided to resettle - permanently. Third, some of those tribes seized key Roman provinces, particularly North Africa, depriving the empire of a key tax base. Finally, the Persian Sassanian threat diverted just enough resources to drain the Roman military machine. In short, it was a perfect storm spurred by the Hunnic revolution. Heather does admit that internal politics may have exacerbated the situation (particularly Constantine III's uprising), but keeps his focus outside.

One of the best features to Heather's writing style is how he seamlessly incorporates archaeological evidence, economic data, written accounts by Romans themselves as evidence for his argument. He is not afraid to guess - or even guesstimate - when the evidence just can't reach a firm conclusion, but he always prefaces such estimates with his reasoning and qualifiers. As such, Heather takes readers not just into the imperial halls of Rome (or Ravenna), but tries to consider the points of view and interests of provincial Roman landowners, Gothic kings, and even soldiers. Again, this nuance shows how domestic political turmoil just doesn't explain all of the events leading to Rome's collapse.

Perhaps the best thing I can say about The Fall of the Roman Empire is that it changed my mind. Going into it, I thought Heather would simply be yet another revisionist. I honestly thought I'd end up writing a review saying that he ignored the ferocity of Rome's civil wars or that the split between Byzantium and Rome sapped the empire's strength. However, I've come away convinced that, by and large, he's right. I'm looking forward to reading his new book, Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe.

I would warn readers that it would be useful to have some conception of Roman history before 375 A.D. Heather doesn't provide much background (which in my opinion is good, because he leaves more room to discuss the period of the collapse). I'd recommend Neil Faulkner's Rome: Empire of the Eagles, 753 BC - AD 476 for a brief but insightful overview.

Not many scholars can take on the monumental task of explaining the fall of the Roman Empire. The body of knowledge required to do so is known to include more than one thousand subjects. A separate book could be written for each of them.

Since Peter Heather managed to do this while earning top marks among peer historians, he easily deserves 5 Amazon stars. Heather's accomplishment stands alongside feats such as sailing around the world alone or climbing Mount Everest in that there is no way you can complete a book explaining the fall of the Roman Empire without uncommon fortitude and perseverance.

I purchased this book at Amazon new in October 2006 for $13.33, and now its $22.95. However, you can now get a used one at a very good price.

Heather opens up with a terrific hook, a story about an attack on Roman baggage guards that propels you for awhile. Unsurprisingly, this high level of interest cannot be sustained in such a 592-page tome. Still, I completed the book in good order and have continued my interest in this subject ever since, having seen every documentary on the underlying subjects that I could get my hands on.

I'm glad I read this book; it gave me a broad perspective that I have been able to build on through many subsequent books and documentaries. I believe every educated person should at some point take time to study the Fall of the Roman Empire. This will help develop critical and independent thinking.

We're constantly bombarded with messages from authoritative sources about how civilization always marches forward. It follows that our current economic decline will turn around within so many calendar quarters and that prosperity will return to us the living, because it always does. The Roman Empire is the big counterexample.

At the peak of the Roman Empire, Rome is said to have had a population exceeding one million. At that time, the Romans enjoyed plenty of fresh water thanks to their wondrous aqueducts. They had a complex economy with great specialization of labor, and ships arrived daily with goods from much of the world, departing empty because the Romans didn't export much.

After the fall, Rome's population is said to have declined to perhaps 50,000 inhabitants. Rome did not again achieve the same volume of water flow until the 1950s, roughly 1,500 years later. Labor specialization went into a sharp reversal and the ships laden with goods ceased to arrive.

The prosperity of Rome itself was reduced for more than just several calendar quarters. Next came the Middle Ages, also known as the Medieval Ages, a bear market which lasted roughly a millennium until the Italian Renaissance. That's a long time.

Peter Heather's book describes many contributing factors to the Fall that have parallels today. He doesn't make the comparison, but the reader can't help thinking about it.

The political powers of the Roman Empire became increasingly corrupt, and they instituted many policies that resulted in an increasing concentration of wealth. Among the things they did was to increase taxes on land (in those days wealth was almost exclusively stored in land, and the Empire passed and enforced laws that gave the strongest possible protections to landholders), but wealthy and powerful citizens were able to get dramatic reductions in property taxes. These policies forced out small landholders, and normally their lands were taken over by the State and sold cheaply to adjacent large landholders in what we might call inside deals.

If there was any one moment when the game was up for the Roman Empire, I think it was when the Vandals took Carthage in 493, which completed their conquest of northern Africa. The Romans never regained northern Africa, which at that time was very productive agricultural land, producing mainly wheat for Rome. Over time this land had become concentrated in the hands of the wealthiest and most powerful Romans. This group lobbied for Rome to make them whole for their loss, and they succeeded to the extent that Rome was able to pay.

One tends to think about our current financial collapse and how our government first had to make whole to the extent it could our own elites by bailing out AIG, for example, in order to bail out GS and MS and enable another year of bonuses. One wonders what Peter Heather must have been thinking when our government responded to the crisis as it did.

Like Rome at the time, our government is tapped out, having bailed out the rich and powerful to the extent that it could. Like Rome, infrastructure projects that create jobs stopped. The Romans stopped building their magnificent roads and other projects, for example. Our government has not made one commitment to build a nuclear power plant to provide electricity that is supposed to power the cars of our near future. Stimulus projects, meant to benefit the society as a whole, get debated only after the till has already been emptied.

Of course, one tends to take this terrific body of knowledge about the Fall of the Roman Empire and perform extrapolation to our own situation, which is quite dramatic. Heather did none of this in his book. I am merely showing how normal it is for one to think about these things when one contemplates the subject of Heather's book.

Nearly everyone "knows" about the "fall of the Roman Empire". This is the first work I have read (not having the stamina to finish Gibbons) that explains just what happened. Working with always inadequate source material, but helped by the results of 20th Century archeology, Heather gives us a fascinating and plausible narative of the one hundred years that saw the end of the Roman Empire in the west, and the beginning of the Middle Ages. A little long, and a bit too detailed for a layman (after all, Heather is a professor writing in the first place for other academics), but still well worth reading for anyone interested in Roman history, or for that matter, in the anarchy which is always waiting out there.

The Western Roman Empire controlled territory equivalent to France, Italy, Spain, Belgium Switzerland, Morocco Tunisia and Algeria. It was defeated by a number of German tribes who put in to the field armies of around 30,000 perhaps 100,000 in total over a number of years. The defeats of Rome in itself this is probably not that surprising. The Persian Empire which controlled what is now Egypt, Palestine, Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan was defeated by a Greek army of around 40,000. China another huge advanced country was conquered a number of times by once the Mongols and another time by the Manchus.

Whilst large empires have huge resources if they lose a number of battles then things fall apart. Thus in the case of Alexander the Great he was able to defeat the Persians in three large battles, each battle allowing him to nibble off Persian territory and to reduce their base of operations.

In the case of the Romans the question is not so much that the empire collapsed but that a major military power which had had success after success seemed to cave in. Gibbon in his book the Decline and Fall suggested that the empire had "declined". This book tries to suggest another explanation rather than "decline." What it suggests is that the rise of the Huns led to various Germanic tribes such as the Goths and Vandals attacking the empire. The Huns themselves also attacked the empire both in the East and West. What the author sees as key is the development over time of the martial sills of the barbarians fully and well equipped making inroads into the areas which provided tax revenue and then the whole structure collapsing. This in fact is what happened but does it rule out a basic cause of decline?

The point made by Gibbon is that surely this is not the whole solution. During the Second Punic War Hannibal destroyed three Roman armies and his brother another one in Spain. Despite those reverses the Romans were able to put more armies into the field and emerge victorious. At the time of the Second Punic war Roman territory consisted of Italy with the northern part actually part of Gaul a hostile or at best neutral power. At that time Rome was a militarized society with its elite aspiring to military command and its troops drawn from its own citizens. By the time of the fall of the Western Empire the armies were mercenary and often entire tribes of barbarians such as Goths or Huns were drafted to fight. There does not seem to be the same importance of war in the development of the individual careers of aristocrats.

If one looks at the early history of Rome, Rome fought wars of extermination. Wars were pursued till the enemy was destroyed to reduced to servitude. In the fourth and fifth century wars seem to conclude with a treaty or an agreement and in a few years the struggle seemed to break out again.

This book suggests that the theory of the decline of Rome is wrong because if we look at Rome in the fourth century AD it had a huge standing army and a tax base which supported the army. However the notion of decline is not so much about those things as about the way a society worked. In the 4th Century when the Goths appeared on the edge of Empire the then Emperor sought to let one group into the Empire and settle them as future allies. Faced by a similar situation in what is now Switzerland Julius Caesar simply destroyed an entire people the Helvetti. In the 5th Century the Goths rebelled went on the rampage and sacked Rome. In Caesar's time the Helvetti ceased to be a problem.

Perhaps the climax of the book is the failure of an expedition of the Western Empire to re-conquer Africa by then apparently on of the richest provinces. At this point the Western Empire still controlled Italy which according to the book was not rich or populous enough to take offensive action against Africa or the Barbarian groups in Spain and Gaul. However in the time Scripio Italy and been a sufficient economic based to fight a long war against Carthage and later against Macedonia. What is the difference? Presumably something along the lines of Italy having a slave based agricultural system with no peasants to fight as soldiers or to provide a tax base. Also that service in the Army was no longer seen as essential to a public career. Aristocrats did something else with their time instead of attending the gym and learning the arts of war. However if these things are the reason is that not a decline?

It would seem in the past that there have been theories of decline related to impoverishment of the agricultural sector and the collapse of the tax base. This book suggests that in recent times archaeological work has shown these speculations to be false. That at least seems convincing. However one of the weaknesses of the book is that one does not get a real feel of how the system worked and how armies were generated, who were the officers and what was the relationship to the society as a whole. Still easy to read.

The author's thesis is compelling and built upon modern research and its link to former theories. The Roman Empire, set upon by a series of continuous wars, effected by plagues, the slow decline of the agricultural system and the erosion of the tax base, was eventually overcome because it could not maintain the power base it once held. It is a fascinating discussion and laid out extremely well. Once the Romans were first forced to 'buy off' an invader the rot set in and slow degradation began. Waves of barbarian invasions, ongoing fighting in Dacia combined with crippling wars against Persia all drained the treasury to a point where it could no longer be rebuilt with the avaialable tax base and military weakness followed.

There is more of course but the rest is in the book. A worthy addition to our understanding of the Roman collapse.

In this book author offers us a nice presentation of results of archaeological investigations, which were performed in recent decades. These results collected for all parts of former Roman Empire territory gave us a better understanding of the late antiquity, which was a period of deep social transformations for the inhabitants of Roman Empire and also for the Germanic tribes living near the border on the Rhine river. These two cultures were interfering with each other for many generations before the fall of the Roman world. This is a strong part of Heather's book. The Author's main problem with the topic starts with the explanation of reasons, which caused the fall of the Roman Empire. Ignoring the religious-driven social conflicts, which weakened the vital forces of Roman Empire as one of the reasons of the crisis is irresponsible. Comparison the Roman Empire to the Soviet Union and also pointing at Roman ''imperialism'' (which according to author caused that barbarians as its ''victims'' strongly hated Roman state) as a main reason of the fall of the Empire are really ridiculous.