Reviews for The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians - Peter Heather - Har...

The average rating for The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians - Peter Heather - Har... based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-10-17 00:00:00 Tiffany Scott Admittedly, I have very little knowledge about the Roman Empire. This has not stopped me from creating a construct in my mind about how Rome fell. The image I’ve created is actually very simple, subtle, and elegant. First, picture a room the Coliseum. Now imagine the Coliseum filled with men, women, and goats. Everyone is naked, including the goats. Men are having sex with women. Men are having sex with men. Women are having sex with women. The goats are having sex with everyone. There is an elephant in the corner, watching. Besides the sex, there is food. Long tables groaning with suckling pigs, racks of lamb, and skewered chicken. And the booze! There are flagons of wine and barrels of beer, and it flows like the Tiber. Also, the Coliseum is on fire. There you have it. The fall of Rome as it plays out in my head. Just imagine every porn movie ever made, combined with the binge drinking of The Real World, the overeating of Man vs. Food, and the fires from Backdraft. I came up with this construct because at one time or another, I read somewhere that Rome fell due to its moral decay. And to me, nothing symbolizes moral decay better than a bunch of people having sex with goats, eating turkey legs, and getting drunk while on fire. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the story told in Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire is quite a bit different than the scenario I just described. More importantly, Heather has a different take than that of Edward Gibbon, the author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. According to Gibbon (so I’m told), Rome collapsed because of civic decay, a loss of manliness, the outsourcing of soldiery, and the effects of Christianity. Heather, on the other hand, blames the barbarians. The bulk of Heather’s story (excluding an introductory chapter) starts in the 300s and ends in the 400s. Thus, if you know most of your Roman history from watching movies – like me – you can place The Fall of the Roman Empire sometime after the period covered by Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus and before William Wyler’s Roman Holiday. According to Heather, the fall of Rome was precipitated by waves of migration, brought about by invasion, and not by invasion alone. It began in the north, with the rise of the Huns. The Huns forced other barbarian groups, including the Goths, to flee into Roman territory. Unable to keep the Goths out, Rome reached a tenuous détente with these groups, allowing them to seek refuge within their borders. This worked out fine, until various barbarian coalitions decided to become, you know, barbaric. The lesson: never trust anyone calling him or herself a barbarian. In 378, a Gothic army defeated the Romans at Hadrianople; in 410, they sacked Rome itself. Later, the Vandals vandalized Gaul and Spain and, more importantly, conquered the resource-rich territory of North Africa. As Heather explains, these were not simply military crises; rather, they precipitated political and economic catastrophe that spread to the Empire at large: Every temporary, as well as permanent, loss of territory brought a decline in imperial revenues, the lifeblood of the state, and reduced the western Empire’s capacity to maintain its armed forces…As the Roman state lost power, and was perceived to be doing so, provincial Roman landowning elites, at different times in different places, faced an uncomfortable new reality. The sapping of the state’s vitality threatened everything that made them what they were. Defined by the land they stood on, even the dimmest, or most loyal, could not help but realize eventually that their interests would be best served by making an accommodation with the new dominant force in their locality. In the 440s, the Huns – which had heretofore had an indirect effect on the Empire – rampaged across Europe, and towards Rome itself, under the leadership of Attila. Though Attila’s Huns defeated several imperial armies, Heather downplays Attila’s achievements. Indeed, according to Heather, Rome was hurt worse by Attila’s death than by his conquering armies. Following Attila, the Hunnic Empire fragmented. Suddenly, Rome lacked a stable power with which they could barter, bargain, and sometimes rely on for military assistance. Instead, the Western Empire was forced to expend precious assets attempting to form coalitions with various immigrant groups. Despite great expenditures, Rome was never able to achieve stability. The final gasp of the Western Empire was the disastrous attempt of the Byzantine Armada to recapture Carthage from the Vandals. When this failed, “it doomed one half of the Roman world to extinction.” To be sure, though, this extinction did not occur amidst an orgy of goat sex, gluttony, and flames. On the contrary, it occurred more gradually, as a dawning realization, a new state of affairs. It is also important to note that Heather’s book covers the fall of the Western Empire; Rome itself has not crumbled by the final pages. When I evaluate history books, I look at two things: scholarliness and accessibility. Unfortunately, quite often, these two things do not go hand in hand. A great writer is not necessarily a great historian, and vice versa. Here, a good balance is struck. First, Heather is a renowned historian of the barbarians (I assume there are very few openings for this position). You see evidence of this not only in his amply annotated notes section, but in his analysis of the evidence he presents. It is readily apparent that he is not simply regurgitating the ideas of others. Instead, he presents his own theories and ideas, based on his own extensive research in the field. This wealth of knowledge and experience is especially important when dealing with ancient history, which requires a great deal of extrapolation to cover the gaps in the historical record. Second, Heather writes for the general reader, the common man, a person such as myself who knows only as much about Rome as a two-hour guided tour of the Coliseum and repeated viewings of Gladiator can offer. The book is arranged into three sections. In the first, Heather gives a helpful overview of the Roman Empire before things started going to hell. He devotes a chapter to the Romans, a chapter to the barbarians, and a chapter to the logistical difficulties of running a vast empire when information moved at the speed of a horse over uncertain roads. In the middle section, Heather recounts the wars on the frontier, the devastating loss of the North African breadbasket, and the rise of Attila. Finally, the last section covers the breakup of the Huns and its calamitous effect on the Romans. There are also several helpful addendums, including a dramatis personae (if you, like me, keep confusing Valentinian I and Valentinian III), a glossary, and perhaps most obliging of all, a timeline. In short, Heather does not treat Roman history as a Member’s Only Club, where reading all six volumes of Gibbon is a prerequisite to entry. This is not to say that he is a master prose stylist or that he has crafted a seamless narrative. In fact, I’m not sure that’s possible. The trouble with ancient history is that we have to extract a lot from a little. Entire stories must be spun from surviving fragments of some guy’s diary. Thus, any account of Rome must be constantly interrupted by disclaimers, by hemming and hawing, and by the admittance that, for certain events, no one really knows. I found it hard to really get into a rhythm when Heather kept pausing to examine a shard of pottery or a sword found in a swamp. Heather also has a tendency, which seemed to grow, towards lame humor. He makes the kind of sad, weak jokes that a hopelessly out-of-touch father might make to his teenage daughter’s friends. I suspect that many readers might find this annoying. Frankly, it didn't bother me all that much. There’s no need to be starchy in the presentation of this subject, because it’s starchy enough. We should take a lot of things seriously. The history of Rome is not one of these things. Moreover, the fall of Rome happened so long ago that it’s hard to believe it occurred on the same planet we now inhabit. We are left with ruins, only, to note its existence. The injection of humor, however pale it might seem, is a welcome bit of humanity, a reminder that we are all fellow travelers. As much as I love history, I will never be a student of Rome. It has never truly appealed to me, even after I visited Italy, walked the streets of the Eternal City, and consumed vast quantities of their cheapest wines. At this point, I suppose it will never be more than a passing fancy, something I pick up and put down like a fussy baby. I guess that makes me an honest dilettante. And that is the basis upon which I recommend this book.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-04-18 00:00:00 Tim Miller Narrated by: Allan Robertson Length: 21 hrs and 42 mins Description: The death of the Roman Empire is one of the perennial mysteries of world history. Now, in this groundbreaking book, Peter Heather proposes a stunning new solution: Centuries of imperialism turned the neighbors Rome called barbarians into an enemy capable of dismantling an Empire that had dominated their lives for so long. A leading authority on the late Roman Empire and on the barbarians, Heather relates the extraordinary story of how Europe's barbarians, transformed by centuries of contact with Rome on every possible level, eventually pulled the empire apart. He shows first how the Huns overturned the existing strategic balance of power on Rome's European frontiers, to force the Goths and others to seek refuge inside the Empire. This prompted two generations of struggle, during which new barbarian coalitions, formed in response to Roman hostility, brought the Roman west to its knees. The Goths first destroyed a Roman army at the battle of Hadrianople in 378, and went on to sack Rome in 410. The Vandals spread devastation in Gaul and Spain, before conquering North Africa, the breadbasket of the Western Empire, in 439. We then meet Attila the Hun, whose reign of terror swept from Constantinople to Paris, but whose death in 453 ironically precipitated a final desperate phase of Roman collapse, culminating in the Vandals' defeat of the massive Byzantine Armada: the west's last chance for survival. Peter Heather convincingly argues that the Roman Empire was not on the brink of social or moral collapse. What brought it to an end were the barbarians. Always enjoyable to romp through the roman civilisation and see where renditions differ according to author spin. I wouldn't call this tome revisionist, yet I would say that it was probably a culmination of everything that finally did for the empire.