A New History of Rome and the Barbarians - The Fall of the Roman Empire

I can all but warn from reading this book because once you'll read it, you'll be hooked on history books for the rest of your life. I originally read other genre books, when my attention fell on a book by Adrian Goldsworthy, "How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower". As the decline and fall of the Roman Empire is a subject of interest for many people, I was intrigued by the title as well and spontaneously decided to read it. It was a nice, easily understandable book that delineated chronologically the time from the death of Marcus Aurelius (180) until the last emperor, Romulus Augustulus (476), stressing thereby the internal difficulties and the consequential developments within the Empire. As I liked this book, I investigated a little bit further and found that there were three books written in the first decade of the 21st century about this subject with similar titles: The book by Adrian Goldsworthy, this book by Peter Heather and "The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization" by Bryan Ward-Perkins. Thus, I thought, three books are not too many. I will read these three history books and then move on to other subjects. I couldn't have been more wrong. I organized this book by Peter Heather from a library, read it as second one, and have since been reading history books for the last couples of years.

Peter Heather does a great job in this book. He firstly sets up the developments in and around the Roman Empire in a first part up to and especially at the times of the emperor Valentinian I. Especially vivid here is his narration of the embassy of Symmachus to the imperial throne in Trier. We thus learn here how the Roman Empire developed and changed from the times of Julius Caesar and Augustus until the time that is now commonly known as Late Antiquity. Peter Heather's point here is that even when changes were significant; the Roman Empire was as strong as ever. In the second part, which starts with the arrival of the Huns at the outskirts of the Roman sphere of influence, at the northern shore of the Black Sea, the narrative starts to trace the developments closely, I even wanted to write "in real time", even though the events happened of course over 1500 years ago. We thus hear about the Huns pushing the Goths over the Danube, leading to severe consequences for the Romans with the Goths eventually ending up in Aquitaine. Moreover, we also hear about the Vandals, Alans and Suevi being pushed over the Rhine, leading to even more dire consequences for the Romans with the Vandals finally ending up in North Africa. In 441, ultimately, the Huns themselves, after the accession of Attila as their supreme leader, show up on Roman soil, first on East Roman territories and after a decade in West Roman provinces, with the Roman armies never really being able to deal with them. Only the death of Attila, after which his successors start to quarrel and fight for the "Hunnic Empire", leading eventually to its collapse and demise, rids the Romans of this constant source of troubles. This comes however too late for the western half of the Roman Empire. In the third part, we learn consequently how it eventually fell; how the Romans had lost control over nearly everything else besides Italy in the meantime, how Visigoths, Franks, Burgundians and Alamanni had divided Gaul among themselves, how Ricimer had tried to save the last bit of what was left and exchanged thereby emperors in a nearly yearly frequency, and eventually how Odovacar disposed of Romulus Augustulus and ended thereby the Western Roman Empire in 476.

Peter Heather has simply a great narrative style. You have the feeling that you are reading a novel and only in the end discover that you have actually learned a great deal about an important episode of our history while reading it. The book thus combines perfectly the enjoyment of reading a book and learning about history. In the end, what I can say is that if somebody wants to read just one book about the end of the Roman Empire, it would have to be this one. I so far have been busy with reading other books about different aspects of this historical episode that I haven't yet found the time to read the third book by Bryan Ward-Perkins.

Overall this book was very informative, educational, and presented very complex difficult material in a new light. I found the book enjoyable to read, even though I disagreed with much of it. My criticisms of this book--which is still worth reading--are as follows:

I'll start with the worst: Heather's inconvenient omissions. What disturbed me most about this book is Heather's deliberate attempt to downplay any evidence that conflicts with his thesis. While I appreciated the many moments when he acknowledges gaps in the historical record and when he theorizes, he simply omits so many relevant historical facts that this book is frustrating. For instance, according to Heather over 100 years of constant civil wars, "usurpations," foreign invasions, and the accumulation of wealth into the hands of a powerful few had little, if any, effect on Rome. Heather begins his account by boldly stating that after Diocletian "restored" the empire after the 3rd century crisis, Rome was back to its former glory. According to him, the Roman economy was plugging along fine. Heather fails to take into account the economic impact of the loss of a stable monetary system, edicts trying roman farmers to their lands and their father's profession. Heather is also guilty of extrapolation at too many points. He discusses archeological finds of a few large Roman villas from the time period in a particular region and then assumes this wealth is indicative of a good economy throughout Europa.

Also, he makes the bold assertion that Diocletian and Theodosius' legions and comitatenses were just as disciplined and effective as Caesar's Legio X. While I admit I do not have Heather's credentials, I am very well read in this area, and I have never seen anyone else make such bold, unfounded assertions. While Diocletian may have "restored" the empire by re-conquering it--one has to acknowledge the effects of 100 years of constant warfare, sieges, invasions, etc. Heather does not take into account the destruction of infrastructure, loss of human manpower or loss of effectiveness of the army that surely must have resulted after 100 years of constant infighting, civil wars, and foreign invasions. This pattern continued during the 5th century. Every generation involved a major campaign of east vs west or the west fighting off a so-called usurper. I cannot even begin to comprehend the loss of resources accompanied by this. Yet, Heather sees no fallout from Theodosius' "victory" over the west or the numerous other civil wars at the time.

A perfect example of this is the Battle of Adrianople. The roman legions in Caesar's time were renowned for their discipline and ability to follow orders. The mere fact that a portion of the army at Adrianople was "goaded" into attacking the goth's left flank before being ordered to do so and before the remainder of the army was fully formed speaks volumes as to the effectiveness and discipline of the army during this time.

Also, Heather has little discussion of the change in military equipment in this period--the change from the rectangular scutum to the oval shield, the change to cheaper, easier to produce armor and helmets, the gradual adoption of the spatha, etc. He also fails to mention or take into account the effect of Diocletian's military reforms on the micro level. I just cannot believe that troops garrisoned in watchtowers along the Danube that had wives and families in the nearby city and were responsible for growing their own food were anywhere near as effective as Caesar's hardened legions who slept in camp and drilled constantly.

Further, Heather seems to believe that anytime barbarian foederati were incorporated in a legion that they were just as effective as Rome's former troops. Again, he fails to even discuss whether battlefield tactics changed. The strength in Caesars legions was that the Romans fought as a unit with a solid shield wall that slowly and meticulously advanced while the front line used short "stabbing" thrusts to kill the enemy. Legions were disciplined enough to "substitute" and rotate out front line troops during a battle. This took an incredible amount of training. While Rome's legions always relied heavily on "barbarian" conscripts--in the past they were dispersed into small groups, assimilated into the legion and took part in the training, etc. The notion that the barbarians that were "incorporated" wholesale into the roman legions in the 5th century could perform these tasks and act as a unit with the same effectiveness as the legions of Caesar's time is quite absurd.

As mentioned by other reviewers, Heather's prose often degenerates into plebian clichés. At times you get the impression he could not decide on his intended audience.

In the end, I enjoyed this book as a great education on late empire Roman-barbarian relations and the structure and societies of the Germanic peoples who invaded the empire. No doubt Heather is the foremost expert in this field. However, as is all too often the case with books on this topic, the author tends to see everything through the prism of his or her specialty. It is no surprise that a study by an economist of the fall of the Roman Empire will attribute it solely to the economy. A specialist in early Byzantine history will attribute the fall solely to the acts of Justinian. Therefore it is no surprise that Heather, a specialist in the "barbarian" tribes finds them to be the primary cause of Rome's fall.

Despite my criticisms, this still is a good book and I found it very educational. However, you need to be well-read enough to separate fact from theory, and see through the bias. As such, I would not recommend this book to someone new to this area of scholarship. While I agree with Heather that Rome's demise was ultimately the result of "exogenous shock" from the multiple barbarian invasions--Heather never attempts explain WHY this occurred. I simply cannot believe that the change from a free market to a state-run economy, change in military structure and organization, constant civil warfare, loss of population, etc. had no role to play in this drama.

In this work, Heather forcefully argues that the fall of the western Roman Empire was a gradual, continuous process resulting from the immigration and subsequent political maturation of outside groups, including the Goths, Huns, Vandals, Franks. As these outside groups grew in size and military might, it became more effective for Rome to negotiate rather than fight. A pattern emerged in which the barbarians conquered additional territories, thus depriving Rome of provincial revenues, and then demanded increasingly expensive concessions. Rome's inability to devote military resources to counter this loss of income-producing territory spelled its fate. By 476, the western empire was rolled back to include little more than the Italian peninsula, and the western imperial throne was abandoned.

The book is extremely informative and, for the most part, an engaging read. Heather tried to write for two audiences, which can create awkward passages for both. He uses modern slang and easily-digested historical parallels to appeal to general readers, but these lead to odd anachronisms. He spends considerable time discussing his sources and their limits to comfort the academic reader that his account is trustworthy, but these passages bog down the narrative and are of little interest to the general reader facing 460 pages of text. Heather does provide a helpful timeline, glossary, and dramatis personae.

All in all, this a very good book by an author who treats the subject with passion and care. While Heather might be too quickly dismissive of the religious and economic explanations of Rome's fall, his own argument is clear and well-presented. This book deserves a read from those interested in the history of the Roman Empire.

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. (I bought this book from the store - only the cover is different because they changed the cover, and thus that one is listed as a separate book. Here's the one with the different cover and shows verification that I purchased it: The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History)

Since Peter Heather managed to do this while earning top marks among peer historians, he easily deserves 5 the store 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 the store 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.

To the numerous thorough and well-reasoned reviews other readers have submitted, I want to add a brief note from a non-academic perspective. Heather's narrative flows well, despite myriad detail, and it will reward the nonspecialist who is interested in the late Roman period and the roots of medieval Europe. He is at pains to demonstrate the sources of his conclusions, and he seems to me not to put more weight on the evidence than seems warranted. This book is enlightening and relatively easy to read, giving a good overview of the disparate elements that influenced events. He also illustrates clearly where his judgments differ from those of other historians, and again, he states his case with appropriate caution and tentativeness where it appears to be warranted.

I have two critical comments. First, Heather is not well-served by his editor. There are numerous minor but grating repetitions throughout the text, and the maps unhelpfully do not include the locations or graphic representations contained in the narrative. For example, in one place he refers to a Germanic tribe occupying "an arc" of territory, but the map contains a different arc and does not label the two geographic reference points he makes. Time and again, my attempts to use the maps to enlighten my path to understanding resulted in frustration. As another reviewer noted, there are also numerous instances of surprisingly casual usage, undoubtedly intended to sound a note of comfortable familiarity, but to this annoyed American reader, many of these appeared to be Britishisms and were opaque. A work of this type requires formal English usage and is not improved by occasionally taking the language down to the latest television witticism. My second criticism is more of a warning to my fellow lay readers: this book is more of a slog than I would have wished, as Heather seeks to follow the threads of many different "barbarian" groups and subgroups, as well as the threads of intrigue at the imperial court. I became lost in some of the detail, frequently hitting a reference and uncertain whether this subgroup was Vandal or Gothic, and where it was located at this point in the drama. I needed to do a good bit of back-referencing, so I would not recommend reading it on an electronic reader.

But all in all, I give it four stars because Heather fulfilled his purpose effectively, and his narrative has sent me off to do more reading on this fascinating era.

Trying to determine the causes of the fall of the Western Roman Empire has been a topic of historical interest for over 1500 years, with little likelihood that any definitive answer will ever be agreed upon. Professor Heather does not agree with the solution provided by Gibbon; namely that systemic change (most importantly the moral decay brought on by the prosperity of the empire and its growth, and the rise of Christianity) was primarily responsible. Instead, Professor Heather believes that a process was at work that united the final collapse in 476 with specific events that happened in the preceding 100 years. Furthermore, he believes that the Huns were a driving force for this process. The key elements of his thesis are as follows:
1) There were two waves (376-380 and 405-408) of bands fleeing the Huns.
2) In the process of fleeing the Huns and entering the Empire, individual bands became amalgamated into "super-groups" that were a much greater threat to the Empire than the smaller individual bands.
3) These super-groups were able to win battles against the Empire (but not yet to destroy it) and thus become client states with considerable political power. This process was considerably accelerated when, in the fifth century, the Huns under Attila attacked the empire in force. In response, the Goths along with other barbarian tribes became allied with the Romans and were able to repulse the Huns. The victories against the Huns and the Empire allowed the Goths to view themselves as no longer subservient to the Empire.
4) The interactions with the super-groups was complicated by various dynastic struggles and the rise of usurpers. This not only weakened the Empire, but the need to have Gothic allies greatly expanded their power and influence. As their power grew, they became a considerable political force that could play a role in supporting one claimant to the throne of the Western Empire versus another.
5) The Hunnic Empire disintegrated with the death of Attila, but instead of leading to calm, it led to more turmoil. The tribes that had been under Hunnic domination entered the Western Empire, struggled with those who had preceded them and eventually also became Gothic kingdoms.
6) The damage produced by fighting against the Goths and Huns, and the fighting between the Goths themselves led to considerable devastation of the Empire. This, and the loss of territory to the super-groups, resulted in a loss of the taxes that the empire needed to raise armies sufficient to deal with the multitude of threats that it faced. While this process weakened the empire it did not destroy it.
7) Throughout the 100-year period covered in the book various generals arose and stabilized the empire, creating periods of relative calm. Unfortunately, the men like Stilicho and Aetius, who became the powers behind the throne, were ultimately killed by the emperors they controlled, thus depriving the Empire of greatly needed leadership at critical times. Flavius Constantius was another of these leaders, but he actually rose to become emperor (although not recognized as such by the Eastern Empire) whose death (this time not by murder) also robbed the Western Empire of critical leadership.
8) At the same time as these super-groups were entering the Western Empire, the Eastern Empire had to contend with the Sasanian Persian Empire. While not in direct major conflict with the Persians during the period of 376-476, the Eastern Empire had to reserve about 40% of its troops for possible fighting against them and was therefore not able to provide the resources necessary to fully support the Western Empire.
9) Of significant importance was the infighting between the Vandals and Alans on one side and the Goths and Romans on the other. The Vandals and Alans eventually invaded North Africa and eventually conquered most of it. This was of supreme importance since North Africa (minus Egypt and the lands to the East which were part of the Eastern Empire) was the major source of food and revenue for Rome; without which Western Empire was doomed. There was an attempt to re-conquer North Africa, but this was forestalled by the need to face Attila's invasion.
10) The Eastern Empire made one last attempt at driving the Vandals and Alans out or North Africa, but their fleet, under the command of Basiliscus, was destroyed by Geiseric's Vandals in 468.
11) With the defeat of this fleet it became apparent to the Gothic King Odovacar, that the Western Empire served no real purpose and that he had no need to be a client king sheltered under the shield of the Western Empire. In 476 Odovacar therefore suggested to the Eastern Emperor, Zeno, that Zeno become Emperor over a single united empire and that he, Odovacar, would administer the west for him. While technically under the command of the Eastern Emperor he thus became in fact the new ruler of Rome, thus ending the Western Roman Empire. (Not all historians consider this the end of the Western Empire, but consider the Gothic state as a reincarnation of it. This is, however, not the view taken by Professor Heather.)
12) Professor Heather ends his book with the observation that the Roman Empire "had sown the seeds of its own destruction ... not because of internal weaknesses evolved over the centuries ... but by its relationship with the Germanic world ...". Furthermore, that the pressure produced by the Huns hastened the process by which the Germanic world threw off the yoke of Roman imperialism.

Professor Heather is clear to state what he thinks, by stating ... I think that ... Thus, the reader is not left with the impression that what is being stated is necessarily accepted by all other historians. I liked this, but it has a downside. Much of the text is spent in defending his thesis (summarized above) and sometimes I got the impression that I was reading a sales pitch. This may be necessary when writing for an audience of skeptical historians, but I feel that it is less appealing to the general reader, like myself.

While there is a summary chapter and a detailed time-line of events, Professor Heather does not provide a simple summary of the sort that I have listed above. He does provide a list of Dramatis Personae, a glossary, notes and an index, in addition to the time-line.

This is a very detailed book, which in addition to describing his view of how and why the Western Roman Empire fell provides a vivid picture of events. It clarified many points for me. The Roman Empire in the west had ceased to be really Roman long before 476. Many of its Senators, leading Generals and even a few Emperors were not of Roman or even Italian stock, but were descendants from Gaul, or Spain, and later on in the case of some leading Generals even the decedents of German tribes. Contrary to the picture painted by popular sources, the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410 and more devastatingly by the Vandals in 455 were not due to invaders who swooped into the Empire and sacked its capitol. Rather, both the Goths and Vandals had been residing in the Empire for quite some time prior to their sacking Rome, and that these acts were due to the reaction to political deals that fell through. Professor Heather does not dwell on these events because Rome had ceased to be the administrative head and home of the western emperors. The sacks, particularly that of the Vandals, attacked the spiritual heart, rather than the administrative heart of the Empire, so that while emotionally devastating, they were not the events that marked the fall of the empire.

While I liked this book quite a lot, I cannot give it five stars - in my opinion the book is in desperate need of another round of editing. There are, in my opinion, perhaps 100 pages of extraneous material that disrupts the flow of the book, which instead of strengthening professor Heather's thesis, distracts from it for the general reader. Professor Heather spends a lot of space on the quality and reliability of the sources that are available. This is necessary to some degree, but I feel that he over did it. For instance, several pages are allotted to analyzing the quality of the writings of Sidonius. I found this to be of little interest and by the time he got back to the flow of the history I had to re-read a portion of the book to get back on track. Unfortunately, I found this sort of thing happening all too often. Another round of editing might have stripped out this material, or at least put it (in an abbreviated form) in the notes. Otherwise, I found the writing clear and straightforward. I enjoyed the book and I learned a lot, it is just that with a little more judicious editing it could have been so much better.

This is my first substantial read on this subject so I cannot offer much color on
some of the contradictions or omissions, as several other reviewers have done (see those
of Mr. Wirtz and Cato). I was attracted initially by Heather's expertise with barbarian
history of this period and wished to learn as much detail as I could regarding the
endless battles, invasions and civil wars of the 4th and 5th centuries. So this book
met my needs very nicely. The book is well written, easy to read; it's a bit long, however,
with many redundancies.

Thankfully there's a glossary and summary profiles of many of the generals and emperors
involved. These saved me.

After finishing, I'm of the opinion that the Empire was simply overwhelmed by 200 years
of constant struggle. Also, having read about the military under Julius Caesar and others
up through 200 AD, I'm also of the view that Roman military training and efficiency must
have deteriorated (critically) as bureaucratization and various financial burdens took their toll.

Heather does a wonderful job pointing out how the various barbarian tribes became a much more
formidable force between 100 and 400 AD as a result of centralization, agricultural productivity
gains and their ability to blackmail the Romans. The Empire's opponents became more sophisticated.

I can see why many take issue with the current European thinking; the book does not adequately
show how culture shifted materially in the 200 years after 476. I heartily recommend Bryan
Ward-Perkins book for a different take.

In this volume Peter Heather attempts to explain that ultimately, the cause of the Fall of the Western Roman Empire was not due to tax inequities, a failure of the economy, internal discord, etc., but rather because of the simply overwhelming level of barbarian invasions which began in the late 4th century. This he proceeds to do very well.

This work is divided into three main parts; "Pax Romana" for chapters 1-3, "Crisis" for chapters 4-7 and "Fall of Empires" for chapters 8-10. I will discuss each of these briefly.

In "Pax Romana" Heather discusses the Barbarians, the Romans, and the Roman Empire briefly. For each of these groups he gives an overview of their development to the latter part of the 4th century, in order to provide us with a starting point for the period of the barbarian invasions. He discusses what it meant to be "Roman" and how even cities far removed from Rome, such as Trier, were fully involved in Roman life and, rather than being rustic frontier outposts, were as fully a part of the Empire as cities of the Italian peninsula. He discusses the increased autonomy of the Emperor and how the Empire changed and adapted to the rise of Sassanid Persia as a threat to the East, including changes in the taxation system to support an increased military presence in that area. He also discusses the evolution of Germanic tribes and their coalescence from small, isolated people into larger, more unified kingdoms, capable of truly threatening Rome rather than just gaining an occasional, ultimately meaningless victory, as had previously been the case.

All of this is to set the stage - to explain the status of the Empire and people within and outside it, and to show that in the late 4th century the Empire had recovered from the tumultous 3rd century and the Persian threat to once again reach a point of balance, able to maintain its prosperity as well as defend its borders.

It is impossible to do justice to section 2, "Crisis," with a summary. Here Heather provides what is simply the most detailed account of the military actions of the late Roman Empire that I have ever read. This section is outstanding. Heather provides a great deal of information, beginning with the Gothic campaign which resulted in the huge Roman loss at Hadrianople and ending with Aetius repulsing the Hunnic invasion at the Catalaunian fields. He discusses various battles, their effect on the Empire, and how the Empire responded to meet these threats. From the initial Gothic Invasion to Alaric, from the Hunnish threat to the Vandal invasion of North Africa, he covers these events and their impacts in great detail.

In the final section, "End of Empires," Heather first discusses the fall of the Hunnic Empire and why this was not of as much benefit to the Empire as might be suspected as it allowed many other Barbarian invaders access to the Empire, as opposed to facing one single threat. He also discusses the Western Empire's last struggles to remain viable, including its efforts to regain North Africa, a region which might have provided the necessary wealth for Rome to restore its military strength. Heather discusses how the failure of the North African invasion fleet in 468 spelled doom for the Empire. Finally he details the last days of Rome and the successor kingdoms that formed to fill in the void in Western Europe.

This is an excellent work. Heather writes well, the narrative is interesting, he references source material extensively and he goes into great detail regarding the last century of the Western Empire. I will say that I believe he proves his thesis rather convincingly. He does not try to minimize internal problems, particularly that so much of the military was focussed on Persia, however it is hard to argue with him when he says that were it not for the sheer size and number of Barbarian invasions, particularly those driven by Hunnish pressure, the Roman Empire would not have fallen when it did. He details this by discussing the relative size of the two forces and showing that the Barbarian fighting men very likely enjoyed substantial numerical superiority over the Western Empire's field armies.

Even if you are not interested in the argument as to "why" Rome fell, this is an excellent, extremely in-depth account of the Barbarian invasions of the late 4th and 5th centuries and how Rome responded to this threat. I would recommend it on that basis alone.

This book explains with amazing clarity how and why the western Roman empire fell apart between 376 and 476 AD. It covers roughly the same ground as the third volume of Gibbon (minus the obsession with Christianity), but with much better analysis of the political and military calculations of the various parties. It also gives a very coherent account of who the various "barbarian" groups were, and how they formed and interacted: a topic which I have found incredibly confusing in other books. (Apparently this is the author's specialty.)

Note that the word "decline" is not in the title. The author's thesis is that the western empire did not collapse from within; it always had its problems, but in the fourth century it was as strong as ever. Rather, what caused it to fall was that unfriendly interaction with the Romans encouraged Germanic peoples on the frontier to become stronger and more unified; these groups were then impelled into the empire by the onslaught of the Huns, where they began taking over parts of the empire. This triggered a downward spiral in which decreased tax revenues resulting from the lost or ravaged territories made it more difficult for the Romans to fund the military, whereby they lost more territory, and so on. This process is explained in fascinating detail in the book. A last-ditch rescue attempt by the eastern empire in 468 failed in a disastrous naval battle, and it was game over for the west. The eastern empire, meanwhile, continued to prosper through the sixth century; while it had internal problems similar to those of the west, accidents of geography protected it for the time being.

In conclusion, if you are looking for clarity regarding what the heck was going on in fifth century Europe, this is the book for you. It is written in a colloquial style which makes it easy and amusing to read. It includes a number of maps, a dramatis personae, a glossary, and extensive notes, all of which are very useful.

The Fall of the Roman Empire claimed that centuries of Roman imperialism turned Germanic peoples into an enemy capable of destroying Rome. Heather discussed how barbarian groups transformed over the centuries and interacted with Roman expansion. The Huns collapsed the Roman frontiers, forcing the Goths to seek refuge within the empire. Generations of struggle ended with the Goths defeating the Roman army at Hadrianople and the sack of Rome. The Vandals followed by devastating Gaul, Spain, and North Africa. Heather argued that Rome was not on the brink of economic or social collapse, but that the barbarians brought it to its end.

Heather's book was well laid out with a timeline, maps, and a glossary to explain names and unknown Latin terms. The book was written mostly for lay-readers, but the personalized stories about famous individualize made the book interesting. Unfortunately, the main argument was hard to follow, and a number of topics did not seem clearly related to his subject. I had to read online synopses after finishing the book just to make sure I completely understood his arguments.

This magnificent book is accessible to the history buff or general reader and provides an extensive, logical and easy to read account of all that went wrong in the last hundred years of the Western Roman Empire. Mr. Heather's extensive research combined with attention to detail has produced a brilliant, well argued revisionist account of why the Empire eventually fell to the barbarians.

Essentially the volume of the various incursions of barbarians from the late 4th century AD was too much for the Western Empire to sustain and gradually wore it down. Heather is able to clarify the external and internal reasons why the Empire was worn down by the barbarians. The Empire was still prosperous with an army but it was not enough to withstand the series of invasions. Heather provides a good explanation of why the Western Roman Empire army was much less formidable after the defeat at Hadrianople.

From reading Gibbon l thought that Stilicho was the last great General of the Western Roman Empire, not so, l enjoyed the account of the life of the general and consul Flavius Aetius. Heather is able to transport the reader back in time and bring ancient persons back to life so l was able to imagine the political and social environment they lived in. Mr. Heather also explains why the end of the Western Roman Empire was not a certain event and how it could have remained viable. The final nail in the coffin was the failed attempt to invade North Africa in 468 AD to regain land lost to the Vandals.

The author's last paragraph in the book is brilliant and challenging but l will not reveal it to spoil the effect for anybody else.

The fall of the Roman Empire has obsessed historians since Gibbon. Many theories have been offered, ranging from excessive taxation, civil wars, corruption and a weakened military to more crackpot notions like lead poisoning, abortion or homosexuality. Gibbon himself pointed to the malign influence of Christianity, which he claimed sapped Rome's martial vigor. Most of these theories point to internal factors as the cause, essentially asserting that Rome rotted from within, requiring only a gentle push from outside forces to bring the whole teetering edifice to the ground.

British historian Peter Heather asserts that Rome in the fourth century was no more unstable than it had ever been. Yes, it suffered from high taxes, incessant political turmoil and other assorted ills, but this had been the case since the crisis of the third century and the reign of Diocletian. In fact, Heather offers convincing evidence, based on recent archeological discoveries, that many parts of the Empire, including the Balkans and Africa, were thriving as never before.

The main thesis of “The Fall of the Roman Empire” is that a growing population of German tribes, pushed by the Huns, invaded Rome in successive waves and eventually destroyed it. These Germans were not savages. In fact, since the time of the Battle of Teutoburg Forest (9 CE), they had grown increasingly rich, well-armed, well-trained and the equal to Rome in many ways. Unlike Gibbon, Heather believes that Rome did not decline and fall--instead, it fell quickly. Mr. Heather does not completely discount internal factors, he merely says that Rome fell because of “an exogenous shock.”

This wonderful book is carefully researched, and Heather is a master story teller. He deftly leads the reader through an incredibly complex narrative involving political intrigue and ambition, rogue generals, competing armies and dozens of nomadic tribes competing for power and territory. With so many main players and so much going on, the book requires careful reading.

What makes this book particularly fascinating and fun to read are the various historical asides Heather offers about topics as diverse as the Hunnic bow, North African agriculture, the lifestyle of nomads, warfare at sea and many other obscure but interesting topics. Did you know that horses require the best pasture, followed by cows, sheep, goats and finally camels? I didn't, until I read this book.

Some commentators have criticized Heather for not dealing adequately with high taxes, official corruption, the state of the Roman army or other topics relating to Rome's demise. These criticisms are unfounded. He deals with each issue, then shows why it is mistaken, for the most part using original sources. Mr. Heather has a specific thesis which he brilliantly defends.

In particular, some critics have claimed that Heather underestimates the weakness of the Roman army. Actually, he spends many pages describing the evolution of the Roman army from the late third century to the middle of the fourth century, providing good evidence on how it increased in size by one-third. If the army was so bad, how did Julian, with 12,000 troops, rout 30,000 Alamanni at the Battle of Strasbourg in 357? How did Stilicho defeat Alaric so many times, and Aetius the Huns? How did Flavius Constantius in 410 defeat various usurpers, then rout in succession the Goths, Vandals, Alans and Suevi? Clearly, the Roman army in the fourth century was a capable fighting force that eventually succumbed to too many enemies on too many fronts.

Mr. Heather writes colorful, almost novelistic prose, and uses a light, playful touch (he often makes light of pedantic academic controversies). If you are accustomed to dull, turgid academic writing, you may be put off. Yes, the book could be better edited, and it is occasionally marred by cliches (tip of the iceberg, straw that broke the camel's back). I'm sure in future editions these stylistic errors will be corrected.

A volume like this of course attracts swarms of pedants, armchair historians and other amateurs who love to make niggling criticisms and point out minor inconsistencies or errors that do nothing to detract from the book's immense authority. Ignore the pedants, read carefully and mindfully, and you will be greatly rewarded.

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.

Heather tells the complex story of the Fall of the Roman Empire in a writing style so accessible that you feel like he is talking to you.

He clearly presents his thesis (oversimplification: there was no "decline". There was a loss in revenue when North Africa was lost. Barbarians eroded the western empire and a disasterous armada ... to get Africa back... nailed the coffin) so that lay people can understand it. When he presents evidence he also notes what is missing from the evidence, or how reliable/unreliable it might be. This way, we know how he came to his conclusion, leaving the door open for future discoveries.

Heather, the editor and publisher (Oxford University Press) have done their team work. The maps are excellent and they are placed with the text they illustrate. There are referals to a previous pages, something you rarely see since books are routinely published in such haste that this is not possible. The biographies (of people and peoples) in the back help you keep the players straight.

Heather says a full study of what happened in the provinces is worth another book. I hope Heather writes it!

The rewriting the history of Fall of the Roman Empire is a feat inself but to do it so well and convincingly makes for an instant classic. From our eyes when we see how advanced the Roman civilization actually was it seems odd that such a vast and organized empire could fall so completely. But seldom do we think of the factors of geaography economics and social differences that the roman empire had to somehow deal with. In all of these factors the issue of the non-Romans probably reigned supreme. This is a factor that Gibbon seems to nearly totally ignore in his assesment. The Barbarians werent a seperate entity from the Roman people - this would have been an impossibility. Pete Heather explores how the Romans used the Barbarians not only as trading partners but also allowed them to enter their society and ultimately destroy it. He also explains that the fall of the Roman Empire was a mix of external factors as well internal issues in a concise manner.

But its all not that simple. Heather Clearly notes that the World of Roman and Barbaarian was not a simple one of "us against them". The Northern Europeans provided labor military force as well as markets for Roman goods. Conversely the Romans bought from the barbarians and ultimatly the diffusion of Roman ideas turned these tribes towards the emapire.

My only real issue with this work is the name itself. There seems to be on the whole genuine scholarship here. Using a name so close to Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" seems like a little too close to home for a work that is so dramatically different. This is a book that really uses the most modern of historical methods and takes into account several factors. Additionally the Author does not rely so heavily on misguiding ancient historians as does gibbon.

This work is a true gem and I was very happy to have found it when I did. It is written beautifully and clearly. While I see others have noted factual errors I have found no others beyond what they mention. This is a great start in the serious study of Rome.

Ted Murena

Heather's analysis is annoying because it is circular, or even contradictory. He claims that the Western Romans were unable to deal with new Germanic "supergroups" invading the Empire, but fails to analyze why the Roman military was no longer able to do so. There is a complete lack of the discussion of military changes in the Empire from the First Century to the Fifth. For example, he refuses to wade into, or even acknowledge, the historical controversy over whether Constantine's military reforms left the frontiers denuded of experienced troops, and led to the permanent invasions of the Fifth Century. He does not analyze the effect of repeated civil wars, flowing from the failure of the Empire ever to develop a secure method of succession following the Antonines, on Roman military readiness and recruitment. He fails to explain why, although the Empire was invaded repeatedly, and subject to worse political anarchy, and suffered severe military losses, in the Third Century it bounced back (mostly) by the end of the Third/beginning of the Fourth Century. (In fact, Heather ignores the Third Century entirely, which is interesting, because the roots of many of the social, economic and political structures of the Later Empire were formed under emperors like Gallienus and Aurelian). Why were the Germans expelled in the Third Century, but allowed to remain in the Empire after 406? Why could the Romans never defeat and expel the Goths during 378-382? He claims at several points that the West Roman army (at least the field army) was still robust, even into the middle of the Fifth Century, but then treats its utter collapse as inevitable, and denies that it was brought down to lack of internal manpower or over-recruitment from foreign ranks. He argues that the Eastern Empire survived, in part, because the Goths and other Germans, and Huns, were not able to cross to Asia Minor and wreak havoc on the heartlands of that half of the Empire, and does not discuss the fact that they were doing precisely that in the later Fifth Century (and had done so repeatedly during the Third). He places far too much emphasis on the renewed Persian threat from the Sassanian Empire without really analyzing whether there was a disproportionate increase of troops across the Euphrates frontier (the troop increase doesn't account for the weakness in Western armies he sort-of, kind-of acknowledges. He simply dismissed economic analysis -- why was the Roman currency devalued terribly during the Third Century, what reforms allowed the reemergence of a stable metallic currency? He ignores the fact that the economy of the Empire in the Fourth/Fifth Centuries differed drastically from the economy of the First/Second Centuries, the growth of enormous estates, the switch to a barter economy, the depletion of silver and gold mines within the Empire.
The study serves at best as a critical review of the factors that, on the German/Hunnic side, enabled those groups to wield more effective military power against the Empire, but as an explanation of the end of Imperial authority in the West, it is circular and focussed too much on "barbarian" political and military developments, dismissing other, primarily internal, factors almost totally. Finally, I understand that the book is written for amateurs, not professional academic historians, but the style verges too much in the direction of the vernacular, and the book suffered (for this non-academic reader) as a result.

The author's thesis is compelling and built upon modern research and its link to former theories. The Roman Empire, set upon by a series of continuous wars, effected by plagues, the slow decline of the agricultural system and the erosion of the tax base, was eventually overcome because it could not maintain the power base it once held. It is a fascinating discussion and laid out extremely well. Once the Romans were first forced to 'buy off' an invader the rot set in and slow degradation began. Waves of barbarian invasions, ongoing fighting in Dacia combined with crippling wars against Persia all drained the treasury to a point where it could no longer be rebuilt with the avaialable tax base. The military strength of the Enpire declined until a tipping point was reached, the defences collapsed and the western Empire was overwhelmed.

There is more of course but the rest is in the book. A worthy addition to our understanding of the Roman collapse.

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.

Two Oxford classicists, working independently, have simultaneously published books on the fall of the Roman Empire. Peter Heather is an historian of the later Empire and of Barbarian Northern Europe. Bryan Ward-Perkins is an archaeologist specialising in rural society during the fall. Both historians decisively contradict recent rather dotty arguments that the Barbarians were not all that bad; that their conquest of the Western Empire would hardly have been noticed by the mass of the people; and that only the rich would have experienced a drop in living standards. Ward-Perkins' conclusion from extensive digging on former Roman villages is stark: the invasions were violent disasters. The drop in living standards was so catastrophic that they would not regain Empire levels for fifteen hundred years. His full title is uncompromising: The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilisation. Despite some empathy with the Barbarians, Heather agrees with Ward-Perkins that the destruction of the Western Empire was an apocalyptic event. His 500 page book employs well-honed analysis combined with splendid narrative, to address the age-old question: why did the Western half of the empire, so apparently all powerful, almost unassailable, worried only by the threat of Persia in the east, fall to the Barbarian invaders from the north in less than a century? In the early fourth century the Western Empire (pace Gibbon) had not been weakened by Christianity, was not in decline, was very prosperous, and the army was far from enfeebled. Heather's analysis, sinewy, cogent and informed, is too complex for adequate summary here but he believes that after the Huns caused a seismic shift in the balance of power in the North Roman failure came less from Roman weakness than from Barbarian desperation. After the destruction the long-term winner, oddly enough, was the Church. With the old Roman bureaucracy destroyed in the West priests came to monopolise literacy for more than a thousand years. Secular culture would reside with the Arabs!

This cogent book is an excellent description and analysis of the fall of the Roman Empire. The collapse of the Roman Empire posseses enduring interest, partly because of its continued use in contemporary debates. Enthusiasts for supply-side economics, for example, point to excessive taxation as a cause of the fall of Rome. Use of Roman history in this way is not new. Gibbon, the greatest historian of the fall of Rome, used Roman history as part of an attack on Christianity.
Peter Heather, drawing on almost 2 generations of scholarship and archaeology of the late Roman Empire, now produces a synthesis aimed at a non-anachronistic understanding of the collapse of the western Roman Empire. Heather discards old notions of the Roman Empire fatally weakened by internal flaws. While describing significant limitations of the Roman state, particularly chronic instability regarding Imperial successions, Heather argues well that the Roman state of 375 AD was no more or less stable than the Rome of preceding centuries. Heather points out the flaws of prior arguments. Drawing on archaeological evidence, he argues for the economic vigor of the later Roman Empire. Excessive taxation did not doom Rome. Ideological arguments such as Gibbon's are disposed of easily.
What changed in the later 4th century and 5th century was not the capacity of the Roman state but rather the strategic demands placed on the state. Under Augustus and his successors, the Empire developed into the most powerful state in western Eurasia. The growth of the Empire, however, elicited responses in surrounding societies that placed new stresses on Rome. The first of these was the emergence of Sassanian Persia as a major power in the 3rd century. The Sassanian challenge provoked a major crisis in the Roman state and required a greatly increased commitment of Roman resources to the Middle Eastern frontiers of the Empire. In Heather's reconstruction of events, an analogous series of events occurred on the Northern frontiers of the Empire. Drawing on archaeological evidence, Heather argues that the Germanic societies of Central and Eastern Europe underwent tremendous change from the time of Augustus to the Fall of the western Empire, with more intensive agriculture, considerably increased populations, more complex/hierarchial political structures, and larger political units capable of challenging the Roman armies.
By the end of the 4th century, then, Rome faced not one but two major strategic challenges, one from the the Sassanian Empire, and a second from the Germanic peoples of Europe. The latter became an actual, as opposed to potential threat, to Rome because of large scale population displacements provoked by the Hunnish invasion of western Eurasia. Heather devotes a large part of this book to a very nice narrative of the recurrent invasions of the Empire by displaced Germanic peoples (and some similar non-Germanic speaking groups like the Alans), and the direct effects of the Huns themselves. Heather demonstrates the cumulative destructive effect of these events. In the western Roman Empire, successive barbarian invasions and occupations resulted in progressive loss of Roman control over the provinces, leading to declining tax income and ability to support the Army and bureaucracy. Even when provinces/territory could be recovered, the ensuing destruction eroded the tax base of the Empire. Heather is careful to show the very contingent nature of this process. Military success in a few campaigns or a period of stable leadership for a couple of generations might well have changed the outcome. It was against this background of severe systemic stress that the structural defects of the Empire really mattered. Its clear from Heather's narrative that the chronic instability provoked by recurrent Imperial succession crises was a major factor in the inability of the western Roman Empire to cope with the problems of the late 4th and 5th centuries.
Heather includes a really interesting discussion of why the fall of the western Empire resulted not just in political dissolution of the Empire but loss of continuity in classical culture in the regions of the western Empire. Heather argues nicely that the Empire itself was the keystone of Classical culture in these regions. With loss of Imperial authority, long distance trade dwindled. Many of the institutions on which classical culture depended on the existence of the Empire. A rigorous Classical education, for example, was a sine qua non for rising in the Empire. With the disappearance of the Empire, many of the institutions and incentives that sustained "Romaness" vanished.
Heather's analysis is convincing but leaves open some interesting questions. The settling of Germanic speaking peoples in the Empire and recruitment of Germanic troops into Imperial armies suggests that demographic factors may have played a role in the Roman collapse. This is quite difficult to assess. Heather's account raises some interesting comparative questions as well. Why did Chinese society maintain continuity of its historic culture after similar events when Rome did not.
This book can be read profitably by anyone with a modest knowledge of Roman history. To get maximum benefit, however, a bit more knowledge of the later Roman Empire is helpful. I recommend David Potter's recent and very readable survey to provide background for reading Heather.

Though Heather is given to slangy expressions on occasion, this is not enough to turn the book into "pop" history. This is a serious work which, making use of the abundant recent archaeological finds throughout Europe, challenges the standard reading of the "Fall of Rome" as dramatic, leading to "the lights going out all over Europe". Instead, Heather builds a case for the fall being a slow-motion event, in consequence of which local elites had plenty of time to make arrangements with the "new management" of the Goths. (For the slaves, of course, life went on exactly as before.)

The book is best read back-to-back with Peter Brown's magisterial The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000, 2nd Edition (The Making of Europe). Brown and Heather share the same interest in "listening" to those archaeological finds, which are lighting up the "Dark" Ages.

This is a well researched book by a knowledgeable Professor on the fall of the Roman Empire. The author took great pains to ensure that his sources are as accurate as possible and produced an interesting and credible account of how the once great Roman Empire came to an end. Due to the problem of lack of written material, there will still be some doubts and unanswered questions but Peter Heather did an excellent job of using sturdy interpretations to produce strong and persuasive arguments to support his propositions and arguments.

The book is well written and easy to follow and understand making it accessible to a wider readership. I found the book interesting to read unlike most books on the subject which tend to be dry and boring particularly to amateur historians like me.

The author successfully explains how the barbarians were decisive in bring the Roman Empire to its demise. The author used the most modern historical methods to come up with a classic on the dramatic and complete collapse of the Roman Empire. This is recommended reading to those who wish to see a different perspective to the conventional wisdom concerning the reasons for the demise of Rome.

This is a well-written and scholarly offering that examines an essential set of ideas about the fate of the Roman Empire. My only disagreement is that I believe at least some internal changes did contribute substantially to the downfall even though I agree with the general thrust of the book--which is that a sophisticated culture (with surprisingly modern notions at times), surrounded by far less advanced ones, gave these neighbors the tools of its own destruction (I'd add, these neighbors did not also assimilate the cultural, intellectual, and ethical offerings of Rome as thoroughly). Bluntly, the internal changes I regard as important were frequently of a type that brought Rome closer (let's even say "down to") the level of many of those less sophisticated neighbors. Rome became far less adult and far more adolescent, a broad statement I'll admit, but one that has been effectively supported elsewhere. I doubt this inner decline went unnoticed by at least some of the some of the "barbarians."

It's good to see traditional ideas about Rome being challenged--especially these days.

Superb book, but absolutely ruined by the horrible transcription of the book to Kindle format. Maps are blurry, even at normal size, so forget enlarging. And maps are critical to following the text of the book. I am very upset.

The "Fall of the Roman Empire" casts a huge shadow. A vast Empire, one of the great civilisations of history, went in barely a century from being the "sole superpower" to a mere plaything of barbarian tribes.

Why did it happen? All sorts of reasons can be offered, and Heather offers several, but what it comes down to is that this is simply what empires do - they rise, they exist for a time - years, decades or (as in Romes's case) centuries - and then they fall. Rome had already had a better "innings" than most, and in the fifth century its luck ran out.

It is usual to blame the Fall on the Empire's internal problems, and say that it became "decadent" or whatever. Heather, probably rightly, focuses more on what was happening outside Rome's borders. The Barbarian tribes, living for centuries with that 800 pound Roman "gorilla" next door, combined into larger units like the Frankish or Gothic kingdoms, which were a tougher proposition for Rome to cope with. Everlasting warfare with these states gradually wore the Empire down, and finally another barbarian, Attila, drove many tribes from their old homes and forced them to try their luck migrating into Roman territory. This proved more than Rome (or at least its western half) could cope with. So down the tubes it went.

No doubt, had Rome not fallen from this cause, it would eventually have fallen another way. Empires are usually longer lived than individuals, but are no more immortal. But Heather does a magnificent job of showing how and why it fell as and when it did.

One minor regret. Perhaps a little more "afterword" about post-Roman Europe might have been in order. For the significant thing about the Roman Empire is not that it fell (which was bound to happen sometime) but that it was never rebuilt. By contrast, China fell to Mongol "barbarians" in the 13C, an invasion probably as devastating as anything Western Rome underwent, yet within a century had gotten its breath back, expelled the invaders, and installed a native Ming Dynasty. Similarly, Egypt was able to spit out the Hyksos and other intruders. Yet Rome's former subjects not only didn't do this, but (unless the Arthurian legends count) seem never to have even tried. Rather, they appear to have largely shrugged their shoulders and made the best of things under their barbarian rulers. While purely external factors can explain the fall itself, they can't explain this apparent acceptance of it. Even when Roman lands were "liberated" by Justinian, the inhabitants seldom rallied round, and when Byzantium's grip loosened they just flopped back into barbarian hands. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that, however traumatic the Empire's fall had been, a lot of its subjects soon found they didn't really miss it all that much. This calls for explanation.

Still, that's quibbling. Heather has written a great book (even if his 21C idioms are irritating at times) and it needs to be read by anyone interested in this subject.

Notice the title of Peter Heather's fascinating study of the final centuries of the Roman Empire. It is a clear tribute to Gibbons, yet the "Decline" is intentionally missing. Because according to Dr. Heather the Roman Empire never declined; its fall was due to external, rather then internal, forces, and the perpetrators were two: the Huns and the Goths.

Heather rejects the theories that see the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire in internal maladies. Contra popular opinion, he argues that the division of the Empire to Western and Eastern parts was rational given the increased size of the Roman population. As the Roman way of life spread, and more and more conquered people became Roman citizens, the patronage that had to be distributed became too enormous for any single Imperial Court - hence, the need for two Courts.

Nor is the fault in the Christianization of the Empire; although he acknowledges that the rise of Christianity brought a Cultural Revolution (separation of the Living from the Dead; Equality of all before the Lord; diminished importance for the educated Romans in comparison with the simple true-believers, pp. 121-122), Heather doubts it effected the functioning of the empire much. The Roman Empire was still perceived as divinely blessed "only the nomenclature was different" (p. 123), Christian theology fitted neatly into Roman Chauvinism, and it was only as consequences of defeat that St. Augustine started to develop his anti-Nationalist theology (pp. 230-232).

The best evidence against the "internal decline" thesis is that the Roman Empire did not actually collapse - only it's western half did. In the East, the Roman Empire soldiered on, until another powerful foreign threat - Islam.

Therefore, Heather suggests, the answer is external: As a consequence of the exposure to the Roman world, the Germanic tribes confronted by the Romans have changed. An agricultural revolution took over the German world, increasing its population and changing its organization: along with surplus, there developed inequality, with powerful leaders and kings solidifying larger and larger groups of so-called "Barbarians" (pp. 87-94).

But the grows of the German population was not in itself, enough to shake and eventually to topple the Western Empire; the fuse for that was a new menace, coming from the East - the Huns.

Heather remains officially agnostic as to the origin of the horse riding people from the Great Eurasian Steppe, although he seems to support the theory that their origin related to the Hsiung-Nu - a Nomadic threat to the Chinese Empire several centuries before (pp. 147-149).

The Huns made their ways into the neighborhood of the Roman Empire in two stages - in the late 4th century, they have arrived at the Caucasus, and in the second quarter of the 5th century to East and Central Europe, culminating in the raids on the Western Empire, by their sole unifier and greatest leader, Attila.

But it was not ultimately the Huns who destroyed the Empire. What the Huns did was trigger a chain reaction of migrating "Barbarians" the greater, richer and more unified Germanic people who fled into the Roman Empire. "As Germanic groups moved on to Roman territory to escape Hunnic aggression, this long standing process acquired new momentum. One of the most important ... phenomena of the fifth century narrative is that all of the major successor states to the west Roman Empire were created around the military power of new barbarian supergroups, generated on the march"(p. 451).

As the Roman Empire faced these threats, it suffered from a vicious circle of damages; the more the Goths invaded the worse the empire's capacity to raise taxes became, thus turning the Empire weaker and more tempting target. The Loss of Africa to the Vandals was a particularly hard stroke in that regard. And every time the empire seemed to be able to overcome one crises, the continued advanced of the Huns pressed new waves of invaders into its boarders, undoing the Roman effort. "[T]he various crises faced by the western Empire ... represented no more than the slow working-out of the political consequence of the earlier invasions" (p. 434)

This short synopsis does not come close to doing justice to Heather's sophisticated and fascinating account. Yet in blaming the fall on an "Exogenous Shock" (p. 450), I think Heather may be ignoring one major change in the Roman Empire - its relative lack of belligerency.

As Heather tells it "Roman expansion was driven by the internal power struggles of republican oligarchs... and by the early Emperor's desire for Glory." But eventually, the provinces that the empire started to conquer were just too poor to be worth conquering "The Roman advance ground to a halt... around a major fault line of European socio-economic organization"... it was not the military prowess of the Germani that kept them outside the Empire, but their poverty" (pp. 56-58).

But as the agriculture revolution took over the Germanic world, did not that arithmetic change? If the Roman Empire's border was initially determined on economic cost/benefit grounds, it seems to have been perpetuated by tradition. New threats lurked in the dark forests of Germania, but new opportunities were there, as well. Why didn't the late Empire move to take advantage of the opportunities? To me, it seems that an answer to that is essential for the discovery of the causes for the Fall of the Roman Empire.

Centered in the last hundred years of the Empire, since the defeat of Adrianople in 378 until the fall of Romulus Augustus in 476 The book is written with great erudition and clarity. It takes us by the hand and slowly describing the events to express its findings at the end. It also brings an extensive introduction about the origins of the empire. Very interesting for those who like these subjects.

This is an exciting and informative journey through the last few centuries of the western Roman Empire, backed up by plenty of archaeological evidence and quotes from people of the time. However, as there are already a few excellent positive reviews out there, I'll now focus on two of the negatives:

* Maps - these don't relate well to the text. Frequently placenames mentioned won't appear in the accompanying maps or are spelt differently. Furthermore, there is no map showing the division of the empire between east and west or explaining why, for instance, Stilicho's demands on Dacia and Macedonia were reasonable.

* The Conclusion - Heather's "pleasing denouement" that "By virtue of its unbound aggression, Roman imperialism was ultimately responsible for its own destruction" mars an otherwise fairly balanced study. Given that at least one Germanic tribe (the Alemanni) created frontier disturbances in 14 out of 24 years, Rome launching expeditions into Germania every 25 years or so doesn't seem like "unbound aggression". As for the western Empire's destruction - apart from the untold deaths, 30 odd million people suffered a precipitous fall in standard of living, technology, and literacy to make a few hundred thousand invaders wealthier. I don't think you have to be a blinkered pro-Roman to call this result horrific.

The Western Roman Empire controlled territory equivalent to France, Italy, Spain, Belgium Switzerland, Morocco Tunisia and Algeria. It was defeated by a number of German tribes who put in to the field armies of around 30,000 perhaps 100,000 in total over a number of years. The defeats of Rome in itself this is probably not that surprising. The Persian Empire which controlled what is now Egypt, Palestine, Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan was defeated by a Greek army of around 40,000. China another huge advanced country was conquered a number of times by once the Mongols and another time by the Manchus.

Whilst large empires have huge resources if they lose a number of battles then things fall apart. Thus in the case of Alexander the Great he was able to defeat the Persians in three large battles, each battle allowing him to nibble off Persian territory and to reduce their base of operations.

In the case of the Romans the question is not so much that the empire collapsed but that a major military power which had had success after success seemed to cave in. Gibbon in his book the Decline and Fall suggested that the empire had "declined". This book tries to suggest another explanation rather than "decline." What it suggests is that the rise of the Huns led to various Germanic tribes such as the Goths and Vandals attacking the empire. The Huns themselves also attacked the empire both in the East and West. What the author sees as key is the development over time of the martial sills of the barbarians fully and well equipped making inroads into the areas which provided tax revenue and then the whole structure collapsing. This in fact is what happened but does it rule out a basic cause of decline?

The point made by Gibbon is that surely this is not the whole solution. During the Second Punic War Hannibal destroyed three Roman armies and his brother another one in Spain. Despite those reverses the Romans were able to put more armies into the field and emerge victorious. At the time of the Second Punic war Roman territory consisted of Italy with the northern part actually part of Gaul a hostile or at best neutral power. At that time Rome was a militarized society with its elite aspiring to military command and its troops drawn from its own citizens. By the time of the fall of the Western Empire the armies were mercenary and often entire tribes of barbarians such as Goths or Huns were drafted to fight. There does not seem to be the same importance of war in the development of the individual careers of aristocrats.

If one looks at the early history of Rome, Rome fought wars of extermination. Wars were pursued till the enemy was destroyed to reduced to servitude. In the fourth and fifth century wars seem to conclude with a treaty or an agreement and in a few years the struggle seemed to break out again.

This book suggests that the theory of the decline of Rome is wrong because if we look at Rome in the fourth century AD it had a huge standing army and a tax base which supported the army. However the notion of decline is not so much about those things as about the way a society worked. In the 4th Century when the Goths appeared on the edge of Empire the then Emperor sought to let one group into the Empire and settle them as future allies. Faced by a similar situation in what is now Switzerland Julius Caesar simply destroyed an entire people the Helvetti. In the 5th Century the Goths rebelled went on the rampage and sacked Rome. In Caesar's time the Helvetti ceased to be a problem.

Perhaps the climax of the book is the failure of an expedition of the Western Empire to re-conquer Africa by then apparently on of the richest provinces. At this point the Western Empire still controlled Italy which according to the book was not rich or populous enough to take offensive action against Africa or the Barbarian groups in Spain and Gaul. However in the time Scripio Italy and been a sufficient economic based to fight a long war against Carthage and later against Macedonia. What is the difference? Presumably something along the lines of Italy having a slave based agricultural system with no peasants to fight as soldiers or to provide a tax base. Also that service in the Army was no longer seen as essential to a public career. Aristocrats did something else with their time instead of attending the gym and learning the arts of war. However if these things are the reason is that not a decline?

It would seem in the past that there have been theories of decline related to impoverishment of the agricultural sector and the collapse of the tax base. This book suggests that in recent times archaeological work has shown these speculations to be false. That at least seems convincing. However one of the weaknesses of the book is that one does not get a real feel of how the system worked and how armies were generated, who were the officers and what was the relationship to the society as a whole. Still easy to read.

It's quite difficult to write a comprehensive and understandable narrative of the years leading up to the end of the Roman Empire in the West because of the paucity of contemporary sources, and the potential inaccuracy of those sources from folowing centuries. This author has taken what he feels are the accurate parts of the sources available, and combined them with the best of historical Roman scholarship, and written a book that covers the years involved, and covers them quite well. Often histories of the distant past tend to be difficult to comprehend to the average reader, but this book keeps the knowledge level just about perfect. You will learn more about the last years of the Western Empire than you probably knew before, and you will learn in an easy to understand manner. The author makes the past come alive, and that's what good histporical writing is all about!

This book is the best recent one-stop shopping-place for anyone interested in the topic. Specialists will cavil about details and emphasis, and any interested specialist and generalist will agree or disgree about interpretation. The author's overarching themes are easily summarized (see blurb and other reviews), and naturally they elicit agreement or argument depending on where the reader (or reviewer) resides on the spectrum of opinion about whether and why antiquity ended and the medieval world began.

That is: does the reader, a la Gibbon and the traditional interpretation, believe the Roman world clearly ended, or does the reader instead believe, with Peter Brown and the more modern school, not in an end to the ancient world but in its transition? (The best recent one-stop shopping-place for a historiographic summary of these antithetical--or complementary--approaches is Ward-Perkins's recent book. Otherwise, Ward-Perkins tells the same story as Heather with much the same emphasis, albeit in a mere 200 pages, and still with plenty of primary-source material and good illustrations, index, and bibliography.) Further, if the reader is a believer in an end to the ancient world, is the primary reason for the end (or are the primary reasons for it, among the dozens or hundreds historians offer) internal to the Empire or external to it?

Abundant detail of the "how" of the end or of transition, whatever the reader may prefer to call it, is among the strengths of this book: Heather quotes liberally from primary sources and tells stories from wide swaths of geography and time. Other strengths: it is long, well organized, easy to follow, accessible and engaging to a nonspecialist (myself), and well indexed. The bibliography is generous, the several maps good. He is enthusiastic, and he encourages the reader to want to continue to read the book and to want to read more elsewhere.

As to weaknesses: first is the author's unfortunate recourse to witticism. Perhaps this reader has a poor sense of humor, and the author himself (in his introduction, I believe) apologizes for what he refers to as addiction (I paraphrase) to puns, but, for me at least, the jokes distract. Funny or not, they don't bring either the subject matter or the writing to life, and sometimes the attendant tone may be jarring. His witticisms often take the form of unusual diction. For instance, he's generous with present-day, hip, idiomatic, or slang terms. This is a minor flaw, but a tighter editorial rein would have made a better book.

The other weakness is one often inescapable in such works: the reader may feel s/he's in the hands of an attorney arguing a brief.

On balance, this book worthy of recommendation to anyone interested in the era.

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.

I really, really enjoyed this book. It is fascinating -- illuminating a period often brushed past by other histories giving people and events their due. It also does a wonderful job of updating (and/or refuting) earlier theories of why the Western half of the roman empire fell. Heather's writing style makes for a good read -- he knows his stuff and presents his evidence in an authoratative way that doesn't come across as stuffy. The writing flows in a way that make this work a real page turner. I think readers interested in this period or Rome in general would enjoy this book -- and while it certainly feels like a work that would hold its own with a serious student of history, a more general reader would hopefully enjoy it as much as I have.

Heather is unquestionably one of our foremost authorities on the role of the barbarian invasions in the fall of Rome, and this book is a welcome overview of the subject. However, the writing style is simply weird.

One can almost imagine Heather sitting down with his publishers for a preliminary chat about how the work might be popularized, then going away determined to use a more chatty and colorful style than in his previous, more specialized studies. The result is simply jarring. He goes along for few pages in a more or less standard scholarly style, and then introduces some slang phrase: ambassadors "do their stuff", or people "bang on about" something instead of insisting on it. He uses trite metaphors ("banana skins" for hazards) and silly allusive chapter titles like "Out of Africa" and (groan) "Thrace: The Final Frontier." None of this adds to the readability of the book but it does take away from its credibility -- and its permanency. That's unfortunate, because it really is an excellent narrative of the last years of the western empire and a welcome reminder that, whatever other reasons might be advanced for the fall of Rome, the barbarian invasions were the proximate cause.

Most company failures come as a surprise to management and shareholders alike. The downdraft is often sudden and devastating -- think Bear Stearns -- but Peter Heather shows C-Level executives everywhere a new way to think about what can happen and the ways it can happen.

The collapse of Rome is like the failure of so many high-cost companies today under assault from many small, low-cost alternatives. They don't often see it coming until its too late, like the recording industry (Rome) so quickly dismembered by Apple (Goths etc).

Heather's great book is every CEO's necessary book. A super lesson in what can happen if you don't understand the structure of your markets. Don't manage your company without it.

Author convincingly details the many issues surrounding the decline of Rome, especially the western empire, with the pivotal year noted as 476 AD (or CE). As detailed in the book's last chapter, it was not so much the external forces of invading barbarians, but the unparalleled aggression and imperialism of Rome that induced these responses from the frontier peoples: to pillage, plunder, and exhaust "the glory that was Rome".

I am a retiree with an interest in the disintegration of the Roman Empire and not a historian. I have an ever-increasing number of books on the subject and this is the best of the bunch. In particular, I liked Heather's clear and entertaining style of writing, the book's scope and depth, and the fact that Heather sometimes explains, in detail, his reasoning as he extracts information form ancient sources.

A number of reviewers have complained about Heather's use of modern vernacular. To the contrary, I very much enjoyed Heather's use of current expressions such as "supergroup", "cover-up", "warm up for the main event" and even "imperial bureaucrats" and was surprised to find that the use of these expressions added both clarity and interest.

This remarkable new work dares to overturn at least two centuries of what we thought about Rome. Relying not on new sourcesbut rather new interretation it offers a startlin new thesis on why Rme died. That Rome killed itself, not through laziness and luxory but because the barbarians became s strong through their cntact with Rome, that in fact the colonization or attempt thereof in fact created 'civilized' Barbarians who then destroyed the empire. With parrallels t modern day this wonderful new study dares t qustion what we have beleved for so long.

Just wonderful.

Seth J. Frantzman

This book is extensive and exhaustive in its examination of the internal and external causative factors for the collapse of the western Roman Empire. Surely, it is not intended as a survey of key events (it is 459 pages long) and should not be read by anyone seeking something along those lines. For an historian like myself, with a growing interest in Antiquity, it is precisely the kind of writing one would expect. Well researched and thought out, it is an excellent choice for the study of the transition from "civilization" to the medieval period.

This is an extremely readable political and military narrative history of the fall of the Roman Empire. I don't have enough expertise to have an opinion as to his larger thesis, though I must say that I wasn't really persuaded. But even if the big picture analysis isn't entirely convincing, in terms of what happened and when you can't beat this book for clarity and readability.

This book is really a gem. Heather really dissects the fall of the Roman empire based on new archeological evidence and a thorough review of the facts that are known. His conclusion is that the empire did not collapse from within as Gibbons surmises, but that it was done in by a number of events cascading from the Huns moving into the Eastern European plain. Heather really explains a lot of the strategic context that the empire was facing at the time. His analysis and logic are first rate.

Peter Heather's work is a triumph. Many have already contributed excellent observations and my comments would only be redundant.

If you are still in doubt, read the first page of Chapter 6. This single page illustrates how Heather can quickly tell a complicated story in a interesting way. The Fall of the Roman Empire in Heather's expert hand is more story than history.

PS: If you have already read Gibbon, then you must read Heather. The differences add to the enjoyment without taking anything away from either writer.

How can one trust his conclusions when he gets so very many facts wrong? No, the emperor Numerian was NOT also skinned and stuffed like Valerian. He's the one who's death was hidden until his body stank too much. The author repeatedly states as facts things that were either untrue, or no longer true by the Times being discussed (decimation, for instance). And the testudo was not common practice.

It's not surprising his conclusion is that the barbarians were so awesome that Rome wasn't even in decline when they singlehandedly took Rome down. His speciality is the barbarians, while his understanding of later Rome is... patchy in spots. (He baldly asserts that, while different, the empire was on a par militarily, politically, and culturally in the fourth and fifth centuries with that of the first and second)

The more I listened (audible purchase) the more frustrated I got. It's unfortunate, because large parts of his argument are compelling, and likely we're a factor. However,simply ignoring everything else going on is not the same as finding the one true reason rome fell.

Well done. I appreciated the overall approach in not just following the status quo but rather looking at root causes and how they had impact on the system. Refreshing to see something other than the narrow direct cause and effect usually associated with this topic.

Peter Heather, an Oxford history professor, offers a "new history" of one of the most controversial subjects in world history - discussing what caused the fall of the (west) Roman Empire. Although this book makes for interesting reading at points, the author's main hypothesis is neither particularly fresh nor well constructed. Heather's main focus is on external factors - Barbarian actions - rather than internal Roman factors such as political corruption or economic disintegration. The author's main thesis revolves around the contention that Germanic society changed rapidly between the 1st and 4th Centuries and allowed the heretofore-weak tribes to form confederations that could challenge Roman power. Once Hunnic aggression pushed these Germanic tribes into Roman territory he argues, the Romans could no longer assimilate or destroy these Germanic "super-groups" such as the Goths, and the resultant loss of territory gradually deprived the empire of revenues. A vicious cycle began with the arrival of the Goths on Roman territory in 378, and eventually resulted in a growing inability of the Empire to defeat the swarm of new foes, such as the Vandals, Franks and Huns. Heather tends to dismiss all other theories about the reasons for imperial collapse out of hand, claiming that internal factors were not essentially irrelevant. Hmmm...not exactly sound historical methodology. Essentially, the author subscribes to the "mono-causal" explanation for this very complex process of imperial collapse - his explanation. It is a telling indictment about the intellectual foundations of this book that the author never questions whether a "mono-causal" theory can even be applied to such a lengthy, complex process.

Heather sees the loss of North Africa to the Vandals in 440 as the crucial blow that ultimately doomed the (west) Roman Empire, although the series of crises began with the Gothic victory at Adrianople in 378. He argues that the loss of Spain and Gaul, followed by the Vandal conquests, deprived the Empire of so much revenue that its ability to defend itself was compromised. However the key weakness in this hypothesis - of the "chicken or the egg" sort - is that it fails to identify whether Roman military weakness led to successful Barbarian invasions or whether successful invasions led to Roman military weakness. Stepping back a bit, Heather sees the growth of Persian "as a rival superpower" in the 3rd Century as diverting Roman military resources away from Western Europe and draining financial reserves. Although Heather tries to link the growth of Persian power to Barbarian successes in the West, this is a non-sequitor since the resources needed to contain the Persians came primarily from the Eastern Empire, which survived the Barbarian onslaughts. Furthermore, the author exaggerates the Persian threat, which did not threaten the heart of the Empire, only border zones.

The author's failure to tackle Roman military or economic issues in a serious manner seriously weakens his ability to support his thesis. First, the author displays a poor understanding of the Roman military, mixing terms like "regiment" and "cohort," claiming that the "testudo" was a common battlefield formation and stating that training in the 4th Century was the same as it was centuries before. The fact is that the Roman Army of the 4th Century was nothing like its forebears in either quantity or quality. In earlier times, the loss of 15,000 Roman troops as occurred at Adrianople would have been regarded as only a setback, but in 378 it was a catastrophe. Why? Simply put, the Empire was incredibly short of troops and could not afford significant losses. The author's claims that the massive influx of Barbarians into the late Roman army had no effect on training or discipline is flatly absurd. The fact is that the Roman Army had gotten quite rotten before Adrianople due to repeated civil wars, mutinies and rebellions that damaged the level of discipline and motivation among the rank and file. That the Romans were desperate to get Barbarian recruits for the army despite the fact that the Empire had a population of 70 million indicates that military recruiting was not inhibited merely by fiscal factors. By 378, the army was a job that very few citizens wanted.

The level of scholarship is surprisingly vulgar at times throughout this book - almost as if the author has chosen to write a juvenile and rather "dumbed-down" history. He describes Saint Augustines' City of God as "the straightforward yah-boo-sucks variety" and describes assassinations as "snuffing it." He also refers to Roman "five star generals" (no such rank), the "year zero" (no such year) and says that legionaries were "just like the Marines, but much nastier." The author also tends to over-use second-rate source material and to draw very broad conclusions from disparate archaeological finds.

It is in the conclusion that the author finally shows his true colors. He writes that, "the Roman Empire had sown the seeds of its own destruction, therefore, not because of internal weakness...but as a consequence of its relationship with the Germanic world...there is in all this a pleasing denouement. By virtue of its unbounded aggression, Roman imperialism was ultimately responsible for its own destruction." Apparently, the author is unaware that Rome was viciously sacked by the Celts in 390 BC, which began cycle of Roman expansion to achieve defensible borders. "Unbounded aggression"? The Roman Empire stopped expanding 200 years before Adrianople. "Pleasing denouement?" Oh, so all the massacres, raping, looting and destruction by the Vandals, Goths, etc - which laid low Western civilization for darn near 1,000 years - was a good thing?? If what the author was saying about the Roman Empire were true, then that civilization would have made no more contribution to human development as the Mongols or the Third Reich. However, the Roman Empire was not just about conquest and this type of "history" - which appears to have some subtle axes to grind -adds little to our understanding of why the Empire fell.

The last chapter of this book was excellent as well as the chapter on the Hunnic invasion. I enjoyed that there was a glossary and timeline as well.

In the long run, I don't think much from this book will stick in my mind though because it was a rather tedious and unprovoking read. Unpronounceable names and insignificant dates begin to blend together after so many chapters.

I would recommend this book for someone who is focused solely on Rome in their regular reading. I read this book for a broad overview of barbarians in Rome, but this book was a bit too comprehensive for my intentions. I'm not knocking the book, it just wasn't what I had expected. It was a pretty dry read.

I agree 100% with the last reviewer - the presentation was awkward, and I found the book to be difficult to read for more than 20 or 30 pages at a time. The content was insightful, and I'm glad I read it...it just wasn't all that "fun" of a read.

In this book author offers us a nice presentation of results of archaeological investigations, which were performed in recent decades. These results collected for all parts of former Roman Empire territory gave us a better understanding of the late antiquity, which was a period of deep social transformations for the inhabitants of Roman Empire and also for the Germanic tribes living near the border on the Rhine river. These two cultures were interfering with each other for many generations before the fall of the Roman world. This is a strong part of Heather's book. The Author's main problem with the topic starts with the explanation of reasons, which caused the fall of the Roman Empire. Ignoring the religious-driven social conflicts, which weakened the vital forces of Roman Empire as one of the reasons of the crisis is irresponsible. Comparison the Roman Empire to the Soviet Union and also pointing at Roman ''imperialism'' (which according to author caused that barbarians as its ''victims'' strongly hated Roman state) as a main reason of the fall of the Empire are really ridiculous.

The so called FAX ROMANA which encompass a period of relative peace in Roman empire did not last very long as barbarians from different directions interminently raided the empire and coupled with the decadent and incompetent reigns of suceeding emperors contributed to the eventual collapse.What the book said is well knowned by even secondary students of world history.but the thorough presentation and careful chronological analyses provided by the author is helpful for contemporary political scientists of today who look back at our cultural past for guidance in trying to understand our present.

I read approximately two hundred books per year - of all kinds - fiction, non-fiction, political, historical and biographical. This book is the most jumbled, disjointed, rambling book I’ve ever read. The maps are awful. The author jumps from 47 BC to 400 AD and back in a flash. There is no thread to follow. No sense of order. The author wrote just what he felt like writing at the moment. If you’re interested in the Roman Empire, this book is not the place to start.

After reading about half of this book the author's blatant pro-Christian bias became so obvious that I could not continue. The continued use of date references using BC/AD instead of the more scholarly BCE/CE notation is a minor detail but is only the beginning. Frequent references to time periods "before the birth of Christ", explications of Christian doctrinal positions to illuminate various events and decisions, and biblical quotes assuming literal truth all provide ample evidence to doubt the objectivity and historical accuracy of this author. This "New History" adds nothing of value to the exciting field analyzing the history of the Roman Empire and its collapse.

Regrettably, it doesn't sound as if this author even considers how economics contributed to/triggered the fall of the Roman Empire. I mean the heavy military SPENDING, taxes, Roman Military/Industrial Complex, Roman Wall Street, Roman Banksters, Roman One Per Centers, Roman corruption. I guess these sorts of things had nothing to do with it.

It also doesn't seem as if the author has any understanding whatsoever that The United States IS the Roman Empire. Not its heir, it IS. Not the remains of the Roman Empire, The United States IS the Roman Empire. The Anglo/American Empire is at an end and the fallout will be horrific, quoth author Chris Hedges.

I also question -- and always have questioned -- this Western valorization, deification, worship and veneration of the Roman Empire. After all, was it NOT the glorious Roman Empire which crucified Jesus of Nazareth and used this cruel and unusual punishment to keep tens of thousands of slaves in line and otherwise oppress everyone else save the elites? Did they invent crucifixion or did they "borrow it"? How can we have a Western Civ which simultaneously adores the Roman Empire and also adores Christ? I mean, isn't this an extremely unstable contradiction?

When I started reading Cicero's speeches, I quit after only two because they were blueprint boilerplate excuses for empire that could have come out of The White House or The Pentagon or Westminster or Wall Street or the pre-Iraq War hysteria and the continuing "war on terror" hysteria and insanity today.

I came to this site to order the book but after reading the reviews, I won't.