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How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower Hardcover – May 12, 2009

4.0 out of 5 stars 84 customer reviews

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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 560 pages
  • Publisher: Yale University Press; First Edition edition (May 12, 2009)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0300137192
  • ISBN-13: 978-0300137194
  • Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1.8 x 9.2 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (84 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #172,919 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Top Customer Reviews

Format: Hardcover
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.
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Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
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.
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Format: Hardcover
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.
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