This is history as history should be written. By turns witty, incisive, and far reaching, Heather draws on his broad reservoirs of knowledge of not only of the Barbarians and Rome, but also of modern one-party states and economics--surprisingly relevant topics. I very much appreciated how Heather gave context to the motivations of the sources he quoted, taking nothing at face value and wittily translating the sense of old quotes so that the modern reader could understand them.
The book's main thesis is that growing numbers of Huns armed with devilishly engineered bows caused Goths to scuttle for safety onto Roman territory, and ultimately wreak havoc. Even further havoc was wrought when the Huns themselves showed up at the boundaries of the Roman Empire. Ultimately, the Goths and the Huns proved too much for the Empire to handle, and it fell into disarray. Heather's sweeping thesis is told so plainly and well that it seems, in retrospect, to be obvious. For Heather to have come to such dramatically different, but well-grounded conclusions on such a well-explored topic is really a stunning achievement.
I have only one quibble with the book, which certainly won't change my five star rating.
Heather spends nearly the entire 459 pages of the book making the case for his thesis involving the domino effect of Huns and Goths that toppled the empire. However, he ends the book with a left hook you don't even see coming. The final line reads: "By virtue of its unbounded aggression, Roman imperialism was ultimately responsible for its own destruction." Why spend some 449 pages--the other 98% of the book--expounding the Barbarian domino thesis, then? In fact, earlier, Heather describes how Germania was specifically and purposefully not taken into the Roman Empire because of the logistics and economics involved (this is all described in a section beginning on page 55). Does this sound like Rome had complete and unbounded aggression? Moreover, it was precisely because Rome did not take these areas under its wing that the groups would arise that would eventually bring Rome down.
Heather speaks with rightful wonder of the great technical and social advances of the Roman Empire, including everything from aqueducts to heating to roofing tiles. But, although Heather does discuss the technical innovation of the Hunnish bow that allowed the Huns to be so successful in their predations, he doesn't make the ultimate conclusion "The Fall of the Roman Empire" might quite correctly have made. That conclusion would be--it doesn't matter how many bells and whistles a society has or doesn't have. The only thing that really matters is whether a society has a war machine that provides a distinct edge. Of course, that's not a very politically correct conclusion, but it's a thesis that is nicely explored in Victor Hanson's "Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power."
All in all, however, I believe Heather's "The Fall of the Roman Empire" to be a stunning achievement, and highly recommend it.
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About the author
An Extraordinary Account of How the Western Roman Empire Came to Ruin
Peter Heather, who has written a string of books on the complex interrelationship between the Roman Empire and, especially, the various tribes on its Rhine-Danube frontier, here describes, in granular detail, how these interrelationships led to the gradual deterioration of Rome's position during the fourth and fifth centuries CE. Although Heather pays due attention to the effect of successive waves of Hun invasion, he also is able to convey a much broader perspective of Germanic tribes gradually coalescing into a force capable of overturning centuries of clever Roman imperialism. As he puts it, "There is, I suspect, an inbuilt tendency for the kind of dominance exercised by empires to generate an inverse reaction whereby the dominated, in the end, are able to throw off their chains. The Roman Empire had sown the seeds of its own destruction, therefore, not because of internal weaknesses that had evolved over the centuries, nor because of new ones evolved, but as a consequence of its relationship with the Germanic world."Admittedly, this complex process is difficult to capture entirely, in no large part because the literary sources are quite fragmentary and reconstruction must necessarily be somewhat conjectural. But Heather has an amazingly wide familiarity with his territory, its geographical detail, and the archaeological remains that supplement the literary record; and he is also quite willing to concede the internal political problems that the later Empire confronted, as well as its dependence on an unstable tax base. The result, nonetheless, is almost an exact inversion of traditional accounts of the Empire's decline. The late Empire did nothing dramatically wrong, nor is it characterized by debilitating moral or social weakness. Rather, "The west Roman state fell not because of the weight of its own 'stupendous fabric', but because its Germanic neighbors had responded to its power in ways that the Romans could never have foreseen."This is a challenging perspective that is immensely helpful in fully understanding these tumultuous centuries.
Top reviews from other countries
Sabine
Geschichte scharfsinnig, detailreich und unterhaltsam erzählt und analysiert
Reviewed in Germany on January 20, 2018Nicolas Gaidot
Un excellent livre pour l'honnête homme (ou femme)!
Reviewed in France on December 1, 2013
BobH
' Do not go gentle into that good night' (Thomas)
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 16, 2013
