Customer Reviews

How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

The work is divided into three parts. Part 1 traces the reign of Marcus Aurelius through the Crisis of the Third century to the rise of Diocletian. In many ways the reign of Marcus Aurelius was the height of the empire left by Augustus, but the generations that followed witnessed a painful transformative process. Part II begins with Diocletian's attempts to rebuild from the rubble, reorganizing the empire into a new entity. It ends with the political split of the empire between East and West. Part III then details the sordid legacy of the Western Empire as emperors fought rivals, and barbarian warlords fought Roman generalissimos who were themselves often of barbarian extraction. The West increasingly loses ground until it is a patchwork of barbarian kingdoms loosely carrying on Roman traditions. Part III ends with the rise of the Islamic invaders who in turn dismember the outer realms of the surviving Eastern empire.

Goldsworthy's book is largely in response to the most recent scholars, such as Peter Heather, who paint a picture of a vibrant later empire only torn apart by Germanic supertribes and a reborn Persian superpower. Goldsworthy disagrees on both fronts. He claims there is no sufficient evidence to paint the later empire as being as prosperous or as strong as Augustus' Principate. Nor does he see the Persians or various barbarian tribes as being especially larger or more organized opponents than what confronted the earlier emperors. Instead Rome's greatest enemy was itself. The constant civil wars fought after Marcus Aurelius destabilized Roman society and weakened the borders, allowing otherwise weak enemies to exploit Roman instability.

The later emperors cared more about mere survival than about imperial welfare at large, which led to deleterious reforms. Senators were excluded from military command so as to no longer threaten the emperor, but ironically this opened the power struggle to a much wider and far less predictable strata of society below them, namely Equestrian officers and bureaucrats. Furthermore, the split between the civil bureaucracy and the military forces, and the increasing division of both into smaller units, was designed to prevent any one official from having the resources to overthrow the emperor. But this also had the effect of reducing the empire's ability to quickly marshal the necessary resources to oppose foreign invasion. The result was of course an increasing trickle of foreign foes who were allowed to occupy the land, thus depriving the West of needed tax revenue, which in turn weakened the army and bureaucracy, and so encouraging more infiltration and forced settlement.

The tale of western Roman collapse is a long and depressing epic, but Goldsworthy tells it expertly. The prose is enchanting: intelligent but direct and always engaging. Where some saw his Caesar biography as rather needlessly verbose, the author manages in this work to condense about four hundred years of Roman history into as many pages. The books also contains various maps and illustrations, charts and tables, and several pages of photographs. The last hundred pages is populated by a chronology, glossary, bibliography, end notes and an index. This is an excellent narrative for the general reader interested in late antiquity, whether or not one fully agrees with the author's conclusions.

Goldsworthy does a nice job here in giving a good, very up to date, discussion of the collapse of Roman power from the time of Marcus Aurelius to Justinian. Unlike many books, "How Rome Fell" discusses the evolution of Roman power in the East in parallel with the West, and it actually treats the Sassanid Persians with some subtlety.

Goldsworthy's thesis is that the Empire was critically weakened by endless civil war and the insecurity of the Emperors. This instability was greatly increased with the rise of Emperors who were not of Senatorial rank, after the death of Caracalla. From this point onward the number of threats to Imperial power expanded greatly, and because of the Empire's vast scale and lack of any actual equals to its power (Goldsworthy's discussion of Sassanid Persia is premised on proving it was not Rome's equal), each successive Emperor, and later Imperial puppetmaster, saw internal enemies as a greater threat than any outsider. On the whole I think this is pretty much the case and Goldsworthy makes a very good case for it. It is well worth reading the book to understand the considerable nuance of his argument.

So why am I not giving this book 5 stars? The chief reasons are that the book is often sketchy about details, not particularly well cited, but most of all because the narrative suffers from failing to introduce new characters properly, each successive official, soldier, or barbarian chief is just dropped in and sort of left hanging. On several occasions I found myself going back two or ten pages, or even consulting the index to figure out who this person was. This is not helped by a few sloppy proof reading errors, which are more irritating than serious (ie. the text corrects itself), and possibly the worst set of maps I have ever seen in classics book. These of course are minor problems, and it is a great read. just not 5 stars.

Adrian Goldsworthy has crafted a lucid and compelling narrative history of the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire (the author consciously follows in the footsteps of Edward Gibbon).

In recent decades it had become quite fashionable to describe what happened in Western Europe in the fifth century CE as a "transformation" from the Roman imperial state to a cluster of Germanic kingdoms, emphasizing continuity rather than disruption. However, the current generation of Roman scholars once again find that political, social, and economic changes were substantial enough to warrant a description of a "fall". Of course, there is -- and very probably never can be -- a consensus as to what caused that "fall". Literally hundreds of possible factors have been proposed since Gibbon wrote his classic work. A few years ago, Peter Heather in "The Fall of the Roman Empire" argued strongly that the Western Empire fell at the hands of irresistable military force at the hands of Germanic "barbarians" (Goths, Franks, Vandals, etc.), groups that had become more cohesive and formidable thanks to centuries of exposure to the Roman Empire. The suggestion was that external forces, not internal weakness, caused the catastrophe of the fifth century.

Adrian Goldsworthy, on the other hand, contends that the Germans of the fifth century were not substantially more powerful than their ancestors of previous centuries (Goldsworthy takes great pains to point out that the "barbarian armies" of the fifth century most often numbered only a few thousand men), and that the real problem was that the Roman Empire had fatally weakened itself through many decades of civil wars and internal struggles for power. The acquisition of personal power, not service to Rome, had become all. Again and again, emperors demonstrated that Roman rivals were considered a greater threat than any foreign enemy. Such internal wars depleted troop strengths, reduced tax income, and eroded loyalty. In "How Rome Fell", Goldsworthy argues that the eventual result of this internal weakening was that external threats could not be successfully resisted, threats that the Empire of the first through fourth centuries could have repelled with ease by marshalling the unmatched resources at the emperors' command.

"How Rome Fell" is presented as a fast-paced narrative history from the late second century CE through the fifth century. The time period is too lengthy for great detail, but nonetheless Goldworthy has written a vivid account filled with dramatic events and memorable characters.

How Rome Fell is essentially a military history of the Roman Empire from the end of the second century to the end of the fifth century. As someone who is new to the subject, I found the title "How Rome Fell" to be a bit misleading.

Admittedly, the author had a great deal of information to sort, interpret and summarize (including the difficulty of many missing chunks), but he almost exclusively focuses on the Empire's military history. Occasionally the author has an aside about the debasement of the currency or the legislation imposed upon the people, but further development never surfaces. Economic and legal concerns are essential parts of a modern nation's story, and I had hoped How Rome Fell would provide a more circumspect picture of the Empire's decline. As a military history, it is as thorough as one could expect for 400 pages, and it is effective at communicating the disorder that grew within the Empire. After reading, however, I'm still left wondering about factors within the waning Empire unrelated to military campaigns.

I want to start off by noting that any book dealing with the fall of the Roman Empire will be unsatisfactory to some because an author has only two choices: 1) cram as much info into a set amount of space to make the book marketable or 2) publish an academic treatise. In this regard, any commercial work on the subject will not be fully complete.

Operating within these confines, this is a good book. To answer another commentator, this book is intended for the serious amateur or armchair historian and provides a great narrative of the last centuries of the glory that was Rome and a convincing explanation for the primary cause of its collapse. This book is also clearly meant to refute Peter Heather's work, which claims that Rome fell not because of internal weakness, but because of the superiority of newly formed barbarian supergroups.

What I find fascinating is that both authors use the same evidence to reach drastically different conclusions. For instance, a cache of weapons found in a lake in Northern Europe is used by Heather to demonstrate that the Germanic tribes had achieved a new level of sophistication and material wealth, as well as weapons equal to that of Rome. Goldsworthy uses the same find to conclude that only the top echelon of Germanic tribes had access to such weapons.

Although I believe the truth lies somewhere in the middle, I believe Goldsworthy has the better argument. Although I do not find Goldworthy's assessment that the Germanic tribes were no different than those facing Caesar to be persuasive (on this point Heather wins), at the same time I cannot accept Heather's conclusion that Rome post-3rd century crises was as vibrant and stable as before.

Here is where Goldsworthy really shines. To me, it seems a matter of common sense that the main contributing factor to the demise of the Roman Empire was the almost constant civil wars from the beginning of the third century. Almost everything else--debased currency, changed social order, new religious beliefs--all flows from the fact that beginning in the 3rd century, the Roman Empire was operated essentially as a logistics base for the army. The wealth of Rome was based on looting and demolishing of other societies and civilizations. Once Rome stopped expanding, the wealth stopped coming in and the enemies of Rome were no longer worth conquering. However, the army still needs to be paid, and the generals still needed to find glory.

As such, Rome went from conquering other peoples to conquering itself. Unlike past civil wars, these conflicts were not about ideology or social issues--the were purely about money and power. Whereas the troops in Caesar's time were fighting for land grants and citizenship, by the time of Diocletian, citizenship was universal, money was worthless, and land ownership on a small scale was cost-prohibitive due to high taxation. In every civil war more and more Roman troops were killed, more cities were looted, more land was devastated, more "ordinary" people began to see the imperial power as oppressive and turned to new religion. The coinage was debased because emperors needed to pay (bribe) the troops to pay for wars against contenders for the throne; the senatorial order was destroyed to prevent usurpations; resources previously used to build civic monuments and facilities were instead used to build walls and fortify cities; the middle class was destroyed by oppressive taxation, etc. In the end all of Roman society was reorganized for a singular purpose: to provide resources for emperors to fight each other.

Here is where Goldsworthy could have offered more detail and analysis and really thrown a knock-out punch so-to-speak. However, the narrative takes up so much space, that there is little time left for analysis and empirical study. Also, while Goldsworthy should be praised for indicating areas where the historical and archeological records are incomplete (or not known at all), I would have liked Goldsworthy to attempt to fill-in-the blanks using available sources and logical deduction.

However, Goldsworthy's thesis is ultimately sound: For three centuries emperors and so-called usurpers fought over the same pie of resources. After each civil war the pie got smaller and smaller and yet the fighting continued. "Barbarians" were only dealt with once the new Augustus had secured his place (usually by wiping out a significant portion of Rome's available manpower). Eventually, Rome became too weak fighting itself to fight others.

I give this book four stars instead of five because Goldsworthy should have shortened the narrative and expanded his discussion and analysis of the real economic and social effects of constant civil warfare. Also, the "modern analysis" at the end was quite unnecessary and felt like a scrap thrown to the table to appease fellow academics.

What I would really like to see is a book that combines Goldsworthy's narrative and thesis with an economic and sociological analysis of the effects of the three centuries of constant warfare both internally and how this affected Rome's foreign policy. Maybe Goldsworthy, Heather and Brian Ward-Perkins can team up to write such a book.

Long story short (too late, I know)--this is a good book that provides a compelling narrative, but falls short of greatness.

There have been a string of recent books about the fall of the Roman Empire, such as Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire (2006) and this topic has been one which most serious historians have come to consider since Edward Gibbon put pen to paper over two centuries ago. It's the enduring $64,000 question: Why did the Roman Empire fall? Adrian Goldsworthy, perhaps one of the very best Roman-era historians alive today wades into this intellectual contest with his 531-page How Rome Fell. Overall, it is a good book, both for the specialist or general reader and it effectively shoots holes in some of the weaker assumptions made by other authors such as Heather. I was also impressed that a Roman scholar such as Goldsworthy admits how much we really don't know about these events almost two millennia ago, rather than try to pass conjecture off as fact. Yet as a historian myself, I find it difficult to accept an mono-causal explanation for such a complex event as the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Rather than accepting this or that historian's claim that the theory he is championing is the correct cause, it is fairly apparent that there were multiple causes and that Goldsworthy, Heather and others are all partially correct, but also partly wrong. Obviously, the debate will continue.

How Rome Fell consists of three main parts, each of seven chapters, that cover the 3rd, 4th and 5-6th Centuries. The author includes 14 maps, 6 charts (mostly genealogical), a chronology, a glossary, 40 pages of footnotes, a bibliography and an index. The book begins with a survey of the Roman Empire under Marcus Aurelius in the late 2nd Century (ah, the good old days) as a precursor to discussing the factors that led to the Empire's decline. Goldsworthy believes that too many other authors have started their examination of Rome's fall amidst the crisis of the third century, ignoring how the empire functioned when healthy.

The heart of this volume is Goldsworthy's thesis that the Roman Empire in the west fell primarily because of weaknesses created by endemic civil wars, not because - as Heather claims - that Rome was overwhelmed by Barbarian invasions. As Goldsworthy paints it, the crisis for Rome began with a string of bad emperors like Caracalla (211-217) followed by a pair of boy emperors from 218-235. Rome had bad emperors before, such as Nero, Caligula and Commodus, but their reigns were aberrations and usually followed by victorious generals who restored some kind of order. However, by the early 3rd Century, incompetent leadership was becoming the norm. Goldsworthy describes the adolescent Elagabalus as "spending the greater part of his four-year reign in or near Rome and his main concern was to enjoy himself." The author concludes that "the wrong people were gaining power and influence" instead of experienced senators or soldiers and that having adolescents rulers was "not the way the empire was supposed to work." The one thing that incompetent rulers knew was that others wanted to get rid of them, so they moved to reduce the power of senators and generals who were the likely opposition. Nevertheless, the author notes that civil war and revolts became endemic in the Western Empire after 235 and that this gradually sapped the power and changed the nature of government in that half of the Roman Empire. Instead of focusing on civic improvements or maintaining strong borders, weak emperors became fearful and almost solely focused on protecting themselves from threats.

Goldsworthy, who is an expert on the Roman army, doesn't focus too much on the changes in the structure and capabilities of the military, but he does ask some telling questions about where the great Roman army was as Barbarian war bands as small as 3-4,000 men ravaged the provinces. No answer is provided, because nobody knows for sure. The author's argument is essentially based on the thesis that Roman military weakness in the 4th and 5th Centuries was induced by the falling revenue model. However, this thesis cannot be validated due to lack of financial data and I wonder how, if Rome lacked the funds to recruit citizens for the army, it had money to hire tribal mercenaries? Furthermore, Goldsworthy quickly dismisses the `Barbarization of the army' as a `discredited hypothesis,' but readily admits that discipline was becoming a real problem under the later empire.

The main hypothesis, that the western empire was torn asunder by endemic civil strife, is fairly well supported and I have to say that Goldsworthy makes a far better case than Heather did with his Barbarian invasion thesis. Nevertheless, Goldsworthy remains grasping at straws when he can't fill in certain blanks - we simply don't know what happened in some crucial decades. I would recommend readers skip the last chapter as the ending is very weak and annoying. Like just about every other Oxford or Cambridge scholar writing about ancient history these days, the author felt compelled to draw or refute parallels to the modern United States and Rome, which sound more like faculty lounge politics rather than serious historical analysis. In this book, the author does succeed in making his case that recurring civil wars was very bad for the Roman Empire, just as Heather made at least part of his case that recurring Barbarian invasions was also very bad. However, disease, incompetent leadership, corruption, bad luck and a host of other factors also played a part in one of the great catastrophes of Western history and you can expect to see books appear someday employing these theses as well.

First, I'll start this review by admitting that I'm not particularly knowledgeable about Roman history, so reading this book was a bit of a diversion from my more Byzantine interests. Therefore, I can't comment on the validity of Goldsworthy's theory and will focus on my experience reading this book from a neophyte perspective.
I admired Goldsworthy's frequent calls for caution in drawing conclusions which others have perhaps been too eager to draw. Goldsworthy points out that there really isn't enough evidence to ascertain certain facts- even facts that we might be surprised we can't know such as population figures for the Roman Empire or the size of its army at various points or even whether the army grew or shrunk over time. To me, that speaks of a rigorous and mildly skeptical approach and I like that because I'm not interested in reading other peoples' suppositions. Goldsworthy's conclusions may not be unassailable (whose are?), but you can bet that he has solid grounds for coming to them. Not only is he clear about what we do and do not know, he suggests various potential avenues of research for archeologists to explore in order to answer some of these questions.
That said I have a few criticisms of this book. One of the problems I've seen in Byzantine histories clearly (and not surprisingly) plagues Roman history as well: the unending succession of emperors and/or conflicts causes confusion and turns into an undifferentiated blur. Names are introduced, only to disappear two sentences later. The narrative ping-pongs from one border to another to defend against Persia, then Alemanni on the Danube, then Franks in Gaul, then back in Persia, etc. to the point where it becomes all but meaningless. Though it may be historically accurate, this type of presentation can only stick in the mind of the reader via rote memory with no context and no sense that events are going anywhere. Yet the point of Goldsworthy's book is to present his theory regarding why Rome fell. There seems to be a lot of extraneous detail that is tedious, redundant, and unnecessary to forwarding his point.
I would also say the Goldsworthy pontificates a little too much about universals in his conclusion chapter. He has a view that insists that bureaucracies must necessarily grow and become self-perpetuating and less sensitive to facts on the ground. None of this is very controversial or original, but again: I'm not interested in reading other people's suppositions, I'm more interested in reading their assembled evidence and the conclusions they drew from it. Goldsworthy's evidence is Roman history, from which alone you can't draw universal truisms and to do so seems self-indulgent.
Overall I found this book mediocre. Goldsworthy is reliable with his facts, but this book could have used some significant editing and paring down.

Goldsworthy has written an outstanding history of the fall of Rome. He feels that the barbarian tribes and the Sassanid Persian Empire (Goldsworthy rejects the notion that they were as strong as many modern authorities claim)lacked the resources to do more than conduct deep raids in into the Empire. Overthrowing the Empire or even permanent settlement was impossible until the Empire became much weaker. The enormous size of the Empire and its vast resources gave it great recuperative powers, and the ability to repel invades and repair damages.

This ability to respond to invasions declined with time due to deliberate administrative policy at the Imperial level. Emperors' most important concern was staying in power, even at the cost of the welfare of their inhabitants. In this they were similar to modern political leaders. The Emperors felt that generals who were successful against invaders were potential, if not probable rebels. Thus the field armies were often starved of resources unless the Emperor could command in person. This policy was the result of the assumption that eventually the barbarians or the Persians, even if not driven out, would leave with their loot.
and in time the Empire would respond with a counter-raid.

As the Empire became more localized due to changing administrative and miitary organization, it became increasingly difficult to mobilize resources on an empire-wide level. What resources that did exist became less effectively used as the bureaucracy increased in size, declined in quality and became more corrupt(as per Ramsey MacMullen). The Notitia Dignitatum was actually a TOE of the Empire's military at full strength. There was always the possibility that units could be given staffs, recuited up to strength and properly funded if needed. But as a rule the units, particularly in temporarily quiet areas, were starved of men and money to prevent rebellion. An extension of this policy was the increasing use of barbarian mercenaries, whomit was felt could not aspire to the imperial titlr. Only when the Empire became too weak and poorly administrated to marshall its resources did raids turn into invasions.

The book has an outstanding up-to-date bibliography and notes, with many useful maps. There is an error in the geneological table on p.265

Goldsworthy's motivation for writing How Rome fell appealed to me. He describes his prior "dissatisfaction with quite a few of the the conclusions and assumptions" in other works on the topic. I hoped he could satisfy my curiosity and he did. I am glad that I read this book.

The first chapter constitutes an insightful synthesis and analysis of the writing on the topic. It could almost stand alone. Throughout the book, Goldsworthy evaluates the traditional sources for bias in the histories of the period. Are the sources Christian, Roman, Eastern, Western, accusatory or denying? He also assesses their interpreters. For example, were they modern men who never knew the devastation of civil war?

Goldsworthy notes the limitations in archeological insight. For example, the physical evidence can tell us a frontier fortification was destroyed and when? But who destroyed it? Was it a Roman force during civil war or raiding barbarians? Roman armies destroyed much that was Roman in civil war and the civil wars were many. At the same time barbarian expertise in attacking forts developed only very slowly. Goldsworthy also cites more contemporary environmental evidence (arctic ice cores) to estimate economic activity in the later empire. But he plainly acknowledges the great gaps in knowledge about the western empire, especially regarding military and economic issues.

In the end, Goldsworthy finds himself in significant agreement with Edward Gibbon's two hundred year-old conclusion. Given the known extent of internal strife, it is a wonder that Rome lasted as long as it did. This author steps methodically through every successor to every emporor and all the wild branches of succession that sprouted up in the form of the many usurpers. His thoroughness demonstrates undeniably that succession and related violence rendered Rome fundamentally unstable. Goldsworthy mostly rejects the moral decay portion of Gibbon's theory. He makes the case that the internal dysfunction in Imperial priorities resulted from the very basic human instinct amomg the emperors to attain physical security.

To my surprise and appreciation, Goldsworthy frames the fall of Rome in terms of Organizational Development. He explains that administrative changes the emperors made to improve their security actually backfired. His intriguing thesis delves into the pitfalls of segregating functional responsibilities, decentralization, and burgeoning bureaucracy.

Warning: The author's thoroughness in demonstrating the persistence of succession problems and civil war means that no succession or ursurpation goes unnoticed. Although this strengthens the book's conclusion, it occasionally makes the reading tedious. It doesn't help that many of the names of the cameo appearances are very similar. Goldsworthy makes up for this with a chronology, glossary, and excellent bibliography at the end.

Widely acclaimed for his biography of Caesar, which I have not read, Adrian Goldsworthy has a stellar reputation in the ancient history world. Thus, when I had a chance to pick up his latest book, How Rome Fell, I had to jump at it. While I have read many books on the Roman Republic and its fall, I didn't know much about the end of the Roman Empire. Goldsworthy has produced a very readable history of the last three centuries of the Empire, giving an overview of how Rome eventually split into two separate empires, with the western empire completely collapsing over the span of 100 years.

Goldsworthy begins with the most important question: just how did Rome fall? Was it Barbarian invasions? Societal decay and corruption? Opinions are divided on this issue, but Goldsworthy seems to see it as a combination of these things. Ostensibly, the Empire fell in 476 AD when the last Roman emperor who ruled from Italy was deposed by a Germanic invader. However, some see the Empire as having already fallen even before this date, with pretenders to the throne ruling before this. The Roman emperors since Marcus Aurelius died in 180 were much weaker for the most part than those who had preceded him. Throughout a period of 60 years or so in the 3rd century, there were 65 claimants of the Roman throne, some lasting only days. Some say this internal strife is essentially what eventually killed the Empire, with the barbarians just being the executioners. Goldsworthy seems to agree with that viewpoint.

"Long decline was the fate of the Roman Empire. In the end, it may well have been 'murdered' by barbarian invaders, but these struck a body made vulnerable by prolonged decay." (pg 415)

I liked how Goldsworthy began the book in his introduction, discussing not only this question, but also how this question has been addressed in the past, and is now being examined as well. Historians who have tried to answer this question have often brought their own prejudices with them. Gibbon, who wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the 18th century, refused to cite one single reason, mentioning all of the possibilities and also claiming that the advent of Christianity (Gibbon had an inherent dislike of the Papacy) weakened the Empire irreparably.

Once we are past the introduction, Goldsworthy gives a fairly detailed history from the death of Aurelius to 476 and beyond. He goes emperor by emperor, describing how the Senate's power waned as more and more emperors assumed absolute power, and how the military became the source of political power. Soldiers would rise up, kill their emperor, and declare one of their own. Sometimes, if they were in far off provinces, they would just declare their intentions to become emperor and civil war would develop. This was a time period where the Empire was weakened by the fact that much of the fighting the army did was against other Roman soldiers. Yes, there was the occasional powerful emperor, like Constantine and Diocletian, but these were the rarities, even after the seemingly non-stop wave of emperors ended. There were still many challengers to be put down.

Goldsworthy's prose is excellent, rarely boring, and always informative. He acknowledges in the introduction that sources for a large part of the late Roman Empire either don't exist or at most can't be trusted. Even for periods where there are many existing documents, much of the information can be exaggerated. This is especially true when it comes to battles and how many men participated or were killed, but it's also true in regards to how the Roman economic system worked. Goldsworthy pieces together a lot of information but isn't afraid to tell the reader when he's surmising something, and he gives the reader valid reasons for his thoughts.

In covering this large period of time leading up to the Fall, Goldsworthy also gives some really good information about the Germanic tribes themselves. He covers the Goths, Huns, Burgundians, and many others, as well as the Persians, who were a large part of the conflict in this time period in the East. For hundreds of years, throughout most of the span of this book, the Persians were either invading the eastern part of the Empire or the Romans were invading them. Peace did not last long between these peoples. I found especially interesting how the Huns suddenly appear on the scene under Attila, but when he dies it's almost like they fade away.

In the Introduction, Goldsworthy mentions how many people try to use the fall of the Roman Empire in modern context, either talking about the British Empire in the 1800s or the United States now. Toward the end of the book, he says that this comparison is never perfect and doesn't really apply to the modern era except in certain parts. As long as the defeated Presidential candidate doesn't rally armed forces and declare himself President anyway, the modern era doesn't really fit the mold. Roman emperors toward the end of the Empire began to see their own power as more important than the survival of their people, their culture. They became increasingly removed from Rome, not only physically (for a large number of years during this period, Rome really wasn't the center or government), but also culturally. They saw themselves as Romans, of course, but it didn't really mean anything.

The end of How Rome Fell contains the standard bibliography and notes (while I prefer footnotes at the bottom of the page, at least Goldsworthy's end notes are numbered so they're easy to reference if desired). It also includes a full timeline of the period covered in the book. "Legitimate" emperors are in capitals and "usurpers" are in italics, which makes things a lot easier to understand. There is also a glossary of terms, which is very helpful as well.

How Rome Fell is a fascinating book that will never bore you (unless history itself bores you, in which case you won't be reading this anyway). Goldsworthy's readable style makes the book enjoyable, with tons of information to process as well. Whole books could probably be written just about certain time periods covered in this book (or perhaps not, depending on the availability of sources), but this overview is a must read for any with an interest in the Roman Empire.

Originally published on Curled Up With a Good Book. © David Roy, 2009