How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower [Paperback]

The work is divided into three parts. Part 1 traces the reign of Marcus Aurelius through the Crisis of the Third century to the rise of Diocletian. In many ways the reign of Marcus Aurelius was the height of the empire left by Augustus, but the generations that followed witnessed a painful transformative process. Part II begins with Diocletian's attempts to rebuild from the rubble, reorganizing the empire into a new entity. It ends with the political split of the empire between East and West. Part III then details the sordid legacy of the Western Empire as emperors fought rivals, and barbarian warlords fought Roman generalissimos who were themselves often of barbarian extraction. The West increasingly loses ground until it is a patchwork of barbarian kingdoms loosely carrying on Roman traditions. Part III ends with the rise of the Islamic invaders who in turn dismember the outer realms of the surviving Eastern empire.

Goldsworthy's book is largely in response to the most recent scholars, such as Peter Heather, who paint a picture of a vibrant later empire only torn apart by Germanic supertribes and a reborn Persian superpower. Goldsworthy disagrees on both fronts. He claims there is no sufficient evidence to paint the later empire as being as prosperous or as strong as Augustus' Principate. Nor does he see the Persians or various barbarian tribes as being especially larger or more organized opponents than what confronted the earlier emperors. Instead Rome's greatest enemy was itself. The constant civil wars fought after Marcus Aurelius destabilized Roman society and weakened the borders, allowing otherwise weak enemies to exploit Roman instability.

The later emperors cared more about mere survival than about imperial welfare at large, which led to deleterious reforms. Senators were excluded from military command so as to no longer threaten the emperor, but ironically this opened the power struggle to a much wider and far less predictable strata of society below them, namely Equestrian officers and bureaucrats. Furthermore, the split between the civil bureaucracy and the military forces, and the increasing division of both into smaller units, was designed to prevent any one official from having the resources to overthrow the emperor. But this also had the effect of reducing the empire's ability to quickly marshal the necessary resources to oppose foreign invasion. The result was of course an increasing trickle of foreign foes who were allowed to occupy the land, thus depriving the West of needed tax revenue, which in turn weakened the army and bureaucracy, and so encouraging more infiltration and forced settlement.

The tale of western Roman collapse is a long and depressing epic, but Goldsworthy tells it expertly. The prose is enchanting: intelligent but direct and always engaging. Where some saw his Caesar biography as rather needlessly verbose, the author manages in this work to condense about four hundred years of Roman history into as many pages. The books also contains various maps and illustrations, charts and tables, and several pages of photographs. The last hundred pages is populated by a chronology, glossary, bibliography, end notes and an index. This is an excellent narrative for the general reader interested in late antiquity, whether or not one fully agrees with the author's conclusions.

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.

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. Again and again, emperors demonstrated that Roman rivals were considered a greater threat than any foreign enemy. Such internal wars depleted troop strengths, reduced tax income, and eroded loyalty. In "How Rome Fell", Goldsworthy argues that the eventual result of this internal weakening was that external threats could not be successfully resisted, threats that the Empire of the first through fourth centuries could have repelled with ease by marshalling the unmatched resources at the emperors' command.

"How Rome Fell" is presented as a fast-paced narrative history from the late second century CE through the fifth century. The time period is too lengthy for great detail, but nonetheless Goldworthy has written a vivid account filled with dramatic events and memorable characters.