I enjoyed the book. It does a convincing job of making the case that the western Roman empire fell mostly due to pressure from outside rather than a general collapse from the inside. An interesting point the author seems to be making is that the fall of the Hunnic empire may well have been the last straw in the fall of the western Roman empire.
I like history from this period. The author is careful to document his sources as a good historian should. I guess I always thought more written record existed about this period of time, but it turns out that much of the history of this time comes from a very few sources. Given that history even today is often very slanted, I have no doubt that it was slanted toward the historians' employers when the history was written.
It also seems that a fair amount of what written material we do have was put down on paper several generations after the fact based apparently on other works that have not survived, folklore and oral history. Plus whatever fancy the historian may have added on his own.
A quote from the introduction might be instructive. "This type of interpretation requires historians to treat ancient authors, not as sources of fact, but rather like second-hand-car salesmen whom they would do well to approach with a healthy caution."
The book has a few annoyances here and there that make me think it was originally hard copy, scanned, and then re-edited for the Kindle. If that was the case, it was done fairly well. The footnotes and illustrations are hotlinked in both directions. The index is also hotlinked. The illustrations (pictures and maps mostly) were somewhat of a disappointment to me. They are of low quality and poor resolution so were of limited value to me. There are also some curious word choices here and there that may be an artifact of the scanning process if that is what happened, along with some footnotes that seem to be in the wrong spots.
The book was full of fascinating history. I never realized that the eastern Roman empire expended so much of its resources on trying to prop up the western empire. Or how crucial the north African provinces were. The back stories where the author filled in some of the political background to what I did know was pretty interesting to me as well.
I admit I mostly skipped over the Latin poems, speeches, and other surviving writings and their translations after the first few. I just did not get them at all. The author did go to a lot of trouble to fill in the blanks for me though, explaining what the author of these writings was actually talking about. It turns out the politicians back then also had very skillful propagandists at work. I guess nothing is really that new in the world's second oldest profession.
This is good history to me, even though I am not a learned historian and don't feel competent to comment on the scholarship of the work, but the history is fascinating and the writing was actually readable, not something that you always see in a scholarly work. I did learn a lot from reading this long book. I mostly read it during my lunch hour at work and while watching TV at home, so I only got maybe 5 hours a week on it. It is not the kind of thing I can read very fast like most fiction, so it took a long time for me to finish it. I got it back in January and started reading it then. It took me until early May to finish it. I got the book for free in the Kindle edition. Not sure why the author put it up for free, but I am glad he did. This is probably not a book for the casual reader. The length, and my need to consider what is being written in an analytical fashion makes it more of a time investment than many might be willing to commit to read a single book.
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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