Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4733 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 560 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780300137194
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, May 2009: Adrian Goldsworthy's Caesar: Life of a Colossus was a masterly fusion of vivid historical biography and scholarly detail, an impeccably researched work that also succeeded as a compelling read. With How Rome Fell, Goldsworthy's eye turns to the forces that ultimately destroyed the Roman Empire, challenging the traditional assumption that Rome was sacked by ultimately irrepressible foreign armies. Goldsworthy asserts that Rome's foes in the death throes of empire weren't any more formidable than those at its peak, but that the cutthroat nature of its political system fractured and diverted forces better spent maintaining the integrity of provincial borders--it was civil war and paranoia that destroyed the empire from within. Drawing parallels to modern societies might be tempting, but Goldsworthy is interested in Rome and resists foreboding or moralistic tones--even making a point of acknowledging the different dynamics that drive the rise and fall current powers. In just over 400 pages, How Rome Fell speeds the both the casual and Rome-savvy reader through 400 years of tumultuous and world-changing history--it's a worthy successor to the triumph of Caesar.--Jon Foro

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. At only 40 years of age, British historian Goldsworthy's (Caesar) ninth Roman history offers the same high level of scholarship, analysis and lucid prose as the previous eight. After a superb survey of Roman politics and civilization, Goldsworthy begins with the death in A.D. 180 of emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose reign is traditionally viewed as the apex of Roman power. During the disastrous century that followed, emperors rarely ruled more than a few years; most were murdered, and civil wars raged, though there was some stability during the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine. Invasions slowly chipped away at the empire until it vanished in A.D. 476 with the abdication of the last Western emperor. Goldsworthy makes sense of 300 years of poorly documented wars, murders and political scheming. Highly opinionated, he presents surviving documents and archeological evidence to back his views such as that Constantine became Christian because Roman leaders traditionally believed that divine help won battles, and the Christian god seemed to Constantine like the front-runner. This richly rewarding work will serve as an introduction to Roman history, but will also provide plenty of depth to satisfy the educated reader. Illus., maps. (May)
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From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Diana Preston In his monumental "History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," Edward Gibbon wrote that the reasons for Rome's debacle were "simple and obvious." He blamed the empire's "immoderate greatness," by which he meant that "the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight." Gibbon looked for messages in the Roman experience for late 18th-century Britain, faced with the revolt of its American colonies. Subsequent generations have been equally eager to seek analogies with their own times. In "How Rome Fell," Adrian Goldsworthy suggests that this is because Rome's fate seems to carry a warning that "strength and success will always prove transitory in the end, and that civilisation will not automatically triumph." In these present troublous times, thoughts of decline and fall strike an obvious chord, and, as Goldsworthy notes, the power now most often compared with Rome is the United States. However, a comforting suggestion from Goldsworthy's meticulously researched, complex and thought-provoking book is that, whatever its causes, the end of the Roman Empire was a long time coming. His starting point is the death of the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius in 180 A.D., when the Roman Empire was at its height. He traces the events that led to the empire's division in 395 into western and eastern halves and describes how the Western Empire fell -- the last emperor was toppled in a coup in 476 -- while the eastern part lasted another 1,000 years, evolving into the Byzantine Empire. Goldsworthy argues that the problems besetting Rome were neither simple nor obvious and that what ultimately made Rome vulnerable to the ambitions of such "barbarian" tribes as the Goths, Huns and Vandals was its own internal weakness, especially its continual civil wars. He shows that from 235 until the fall of the Western Empire, very few decades were free from major civil conflict. Between the years 235 and 285, over 60 men claimed imperial power -- more than one per year. For successive emperors the priority became simple survival, with no time to consider their real responsibilities. Though the following century saw a period of greater stability, the price was such a centralization of power that one orator moaned that imperial bureaucrats had grown "more numerous than flies on sheep in springtime." This relative calm proved only a temporary break in the cycle of internal rivalries leading to civil wars, in turn further weakening the empire's structures -- a cycle that the empire's adoption of Christianity did nothing to mitigate. The cumulative effect, Goldsworthy believes, was a fatal corruption of the institutions of government. With usurpations, murders, executions, betrayals and general incompetence as the norm, the Roman Empire dissipated so much of its strength and resources in fighting itself that it became incapable of withstanding external pressures it could otherwise have resisted. When, in 476, the Western Empire ceased to exist, it might well have been "murdered" by barbarian invaders, according to Goldsworthy, but they "struck at a body made vulnerable by prolonged decay." In making a case that Rome rotted from within, Goldsworthy presents a memorable parade of claimants and counter-claimants to the imperial throne, from pathetic boy emperors manipulated by others to eccentrics such as the Emperor Elagabalus, who, when making appointments, chose men with the largest penises, and psychopaths such as Marcus Aurelius's son Commodus, familiar from the film "Gladiator," who astonished his senators by decapitating an ostrich in the arena, brandishing its bloodied head and threatening them with the same fate. Strong emperors capable of holding things together -- Diocletian and Constantine, for example -- were the exception. Goldsworthy's argument is persuasive, though in such a long and intricate span of history where scarcity and sparseness of sources make it particularly hard to distinguish cause from effect, questions inevitably remain. For example, even with more effective government, could the empire have long resisted the unprecedented external pressures upon it? Perhaps it was all just a matter of time. Analyzing the lessons of the collapse of the ancient world's superpower for today, Goldsworthy rightly avoids simplistic comparisons, pointing out how profoundly different the Roman Empire was from any modern state, culturally, institutionally and politically. The speed of communications is but one obvious example. Nevertheless, he finds some disturbing messages about inefficiency and corruption, about what happens when the selfish desire for personal advancement overrides thoughts of the common good, when bureaucracies become so swollen that they lose touch with their overall purpose and when institutions grow so large and powerful that their sheer size conceals their errors and inefficiencies. Goldsworthy completed his book before the real extent of the world's current financial crisis was known, but he quotes a complaint by the Emperor Diocletian that seems especially relevant and shows that human nature may not have changed much since Roman times: "There burns a raging greed, which hastens to its own growth and increase without respect for human kind." Goldsworthy sensibly concludes there's nothing to suggest the United States must inevitably decline, but that it's up to those at the top -- our 21st-century emperors -- to ensure it doesn't.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

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

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

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

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

Good narrative history of the Fall of the Western Empire
Goldsworthy does a nice job here in giving a good, very up to date, discussion of the collapse of Roman power from the time of Marcus Aurelius to Justinian. Unlike many books, "How Rome Fell" discusses the evolution of Roman power in the East in parallel with the West, and it actually treats the Sassanid Persians with some subtlety.

Goldsworthy's thesis is that the Empire was critically weakened by endless civil war and the insecurity of the Emperors. This instability was greatly increased with the rise of Emperors who were not of Senatorial rank, after the death of Caracalla. From this point onward the number of threats to Imperial power expanded greatly, and because of the Empire's vast scale and lack of any actual equals to its power (Goldsworthy's discussion of Sassanid Persia is premised on proving it was not Rome's equal), each successive Emperor, and later Imperial puppetmaster, saw internal enemies as a greater threat than any outsider. On the whole I think this is pretty much the case and Goldsworthy makes a very good case for it. It is well worth reading the book to understand the considerable nuance of his argument.

So why am I not giving this book 5 stars? The chief reasons are that the book is often sketchy about details, not particularly well cited, but most of all because the narrative suffers from failing to introduce new characters properly, each successive official, soldier, or barbarian chief is just dropped in and sort of left hanging. On several occasions I found myself going back two or ten pages, or even consulting the index to figure out who this person was. This is not helped by a few sloppy proof reading errors, which are more irritating than serious (ie. the text corrects itself), and possibly the worst set of maps I have ever seen in classics book. These of course are minor problems, and it is a great read. just not 5 stars.

Lucid and compelling narrative history
Adrian Goldsworthy has crafted a lucid and compelling narrative history of the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire (the author consciously follows in the footsteps of Edward Gibbon).

In recent decades it had become quite fashionable to describe what happened in Western Europe in the fifth century CE as a "transformation" from the Roman imperial state to a cluster of Germanic kingdoms, emphasizing continuity rather than disruption. However, the current generation of Roman scholars once again find that political, social, and economic changes were substantial enough to warrant a description of a "fall". Of course, there is -- and very probably never can be -- a consensus as to what caused that "fall". Literally hundreds of possible factors have been proposed since Gibbon wrote his classic work. A few years ago, Peter Heather in "The Fall of the Roman Empire" argued strongly that the Western Empire fell at the hands of irresistable military force at the hands of Germanic "barbarians" (Goths, Franks, Vandals, etc.), groups that had become more cohesive and formidable thanks to centuries of exposure to the Roman Empire. The suggestion was that external forces, not internal weakness, caused the catastrophe of the fifth century.

Adrian Goldsworthy, on the other hand, contends that the Germans of the fifth century were not substantially more powerful than their ancestors of previous centuries (Goldsworthy takes great pains to point out that the "barbarian armies" of the fifth century most often numbered only a few thousand men), and that the real problem was that the Roman Empire had fatally weakened itself through many decades of civil wars and internal struggles for power. The acquisition of personal power, not service to Rome, had become all. Again and again, emperors demonstrated that Roman rivals were considered a greater threat than any foreign enemy. Such internal wars depleted troop strengths, reduced tax income, and eroded loyalty. In "How Rome Fell", Goldsworthy argues that the eventual result of this internal weakening was that external threats could not be successfully resisted, threats that the Empire of the first through fourth centuries could have repelled with ease by marshalling the unmatched resources at the emperors' command.

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