Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History [Ungekürzte Ausgabe] [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians is quite simply brilliant. Heather combines a rich, detailed history with clear writing to argue that Rome fell from without, not from within.

It's clear that Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Penguin Classics) was wrong when he claimed a decline in morals - particularly Christianity - led to the collapse of the Western empire. However, a surprising amount of people still believe this. Some more serious historians, such as Adrian Goldsworthy in How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower, argue that internal political chaos weakened the empire enough to allow the barbarians to invade.

However, Heather makes the case that it was barbarian strength, rather than Roman weakness, that led to the collapse. First, Germanic tribes along the frontier had become more prosperous, populous, and politically organized. Second, the invasion of the Huns pushed several tribes into the empire, where they decided to resettle - permanently. Third, some of those tribes seized key Roman provinces, particularly North Africa, depriving the empire of a key tax base. Finally, the Persian Sassanian threat diverted just enough resources to drain the Roman military machine. In short, it was a perfect storm spurred by the Hunnic revolution. Heather does admit that internal politics may have exacerbated the situation (particularly Constantine III's uprising), but keeps his focus outside.

One of the best features to Heather's writing style is how he seamlessly incorporates archaeological evidence, economic data, written accounts by Romans themselves as evidence for his argument. He is not afraid to guess - or even guesstimate - when the evidence just can't reach a firm conclusion, but he always prefaces such estimates with his reasoning and qualifiers. As such, Heather takes readers not just into the imperial halls of Rome (or Ravenna), but tries to consider the points of view and interests of provincial Roman landowners, Gothic kings, and even soldiers. Again, this nuance shows how domestic political turmoil just doesn't explain all of the events leading to Rome's collapse.

Perhaps the best thing I can say about The Fall of the Roman Empire is that it changed my mind. Going into it, I thought Heather would simply be yet another revisionist. I honestly thought I'd end up writing a review saying that he ignored the ferocity of Rome's civil wars or that the split between Byzantium and Rome sapped the empire's strength. However, I've come away convinced that, by and large, he's right. I'm looking forward to reading his new book, Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe.

I would warn readers that it would be useful to have some conception of Roman history before 375 A.D. Heather doesn't provide much background (which in my opinion is good, because he leaves more room to discuss the period of the collapse). I'd recommend Neil Faulkner's Rome: Empire of the Eagles, 753 BC - AD 476 for a brief but insightful overview.

Not many scholars can take on the monumental task of explaining the fall of the Roman Empire. The body of knowledge required to do so is known to include more than one thousand subjects. A separate book could be written for each of them.

Since Peter Heather managed to do this while earning top marks among peer historians, he easily deserves 5 Amazon stars. Heather's accomplishment stands alongside feats such as sailing around the world alone or climbing Mount Everest in that there is no way you can complete a book explaining the fall of the Roman Empire without uncommon fortitude and perseverance.

I purchased this book at Amazon new in October 2006 for $13.33, and now its $22.95. However, you can now get a used one at a very good price.

Heather opens up with a terrific hook, a story about an attack on Roman baggage guards that propels you for awhile. Unsurprisingly, this high level of interest cannot be sustained in such a 592-page tome. Still, I completed the book in good order and have continued my interest in this subject ever since, having seen every documentary on the underlying subjects that I could get my hands on.

I'm glad I read this book; it gave me a broad perspective that I have been able to build on through many subsequent books and documentaries. I believe every educated person should at some point take time to study the Fall of the Roman Empire. This will help develop critical and independent thinking.

We're constantly bombarded with messages from authoritative sources about how civilization always marches forward. It follows that our current economic decline will turn around within so many calendar quarters and that prosperity will return to us the living, because it always does. The Roman Empire is the big counterexample.

At the peak of the Roman Empire, Rome is said to have had a population exceeding one million. At that time, the Romans enjoyed plenty of fresh water thanks to their wondrous aqueducts. They had a complex economy with great specialization of labor, and ships arrived daily with goods from much of the world, departing empty because the Romans didn't export much.

After the fall, Rome's population is said to have declined to perhaps 50,000 inhabitants. Rome did not again achieve the same volume of water flow until the 1950s, roughly 1,500 years later. Labor specialization went into a sharp reversal and the ships laden with goods ceased to arrive.

The prosperity of Rome itself was reduced for more than just several calendar quarters. Next came the Middle Ages, also known as the Medieval Ages, a bear market which lasted roughly a millennium until the Italian Renaissance. That's a long time.

Peter Heather's book describes many contributing factors to the Fall that have parallels today. He doesn't make the comparison, but the reader can't help thinking about it.

The political powers of the Roman Empire became increasingly corrupt, and they instituted many policies that resulted in an increasing concentration of wealth. Among the things they did was to increase taxes on land (in those days wealth was almost exclusively stored in land, and the Empire passed and enforced laws that gave the strongest possible protections to landholders), but wealthy and powerful citizens were able to get dramatic reductions in property taxes. These policies forced out small landholders, and normally their lands were taken over by the State and sold cheaply to adjacent large landholders in what we might call inside deals.

If there was any one moment when the game was up for the Roman Empire, I think it was when the Vandals took Carthage in 493, which completed their conquest of northern Africa. The Romans never regained northern Africa, which at that time was very productive agricultural land, producing mainly wheat for Rome. Over time this land had become concentrated in the hands of the wealthiest and most powerful Romans. This group lobbied for Rome to make them whole for their loss, and they succeeded to the extent that Rome was able to pay.

One tends to think about our current financial collapse and how our government first had to make whole to the extent it could our own elites by bailing out AIG, for example, in order to bail out GS and MS and enable another year of bonuses. One wonders what Peter Heather must have been thinking when our government responded to the crisis as it did.

Like Rome at the time, our government is tapped out, having bailed out the rich and powerful to the extent that it could. Like Rome, infrastructure projects that create jobs stopped. The Romans stopped building their magnificent roads and other projects, for example. Our government has not made one commitment to build a nuclear power plant to provide electricity that is supposed to power the cars of our near future. Stimulus projects, meant to benefit the society as a whole, get debated only after the till has already been emptied.

Of course, one tends to take this terrific body of knowledge about the Fall of the Roman Empire and perform extrapolation to our own situation, which is quite dramatic. Heather did none of this in his book. I am merely showing how normal it is for one to think about these things when one contemplates the subject of Heather's book.

Nearly everyone "knows" about the "fall of the Roman Empire". This is the first work I have read (not having the stamina to finish Gibbons) that explains just what happened. Working with always inadequate source material, but helped by the results of 20th Century archeology, Heather gives us a fascinating and plausible narative of the one hundred years that saw the end of the Roman Empire in the west, and the beginning of the Middle Ages. A little long, and a bit too detailed for a layman (after all, Heather is a professor writing in the first place for other academics), but still well worth reading for anyone interested in Roman history, or for that matter, in the anarchy which is always waiting out there.