Cover 2007 paperback edition published by Oxford University Press – the edition I own

(7) PETER HEATHER –

THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE: A NEW HISTORY OF ROME & THE BARBARIANS (2005)

Once again it’s the titular fall of the Roman Empire, that “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, retreating to the breath of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world”.

As I said in the previous entry, the usual discourse or debate over the decline and fall of the Roman Empire is as to which of those two predominate – that is, whether it was more a matter of internal decline or external fall. Proponents of the latter have been dubbed the Movers – tracing “the collapse of the Western Roman Empire to external migration” – to be contrasted with the former as the Shakers, tracing “the collapse to internal developments within the empire”.

Heather falls squarely in the camp of the Movers.

“Heather contends that it was the movements of “barbarians” in the Migration Period which led to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. He accepts the traditional view that it was the arrival of the Huns on the Pontic steppe in the late 4th century which set these migrations in motion. Heather’s approach differs from many of his predecessors in the late 20th century, who have tended to downplay the importance migration played in the fall of the Western Roman Empire…According to Heather, the idea that the invading barbarians were peacefully absorbed into Roman civilisation “smells more of wishful thinking than likely reality”.

In a nutshell, Heather’s thesis is that the barbarians did it. Well, perhaps not quite the barbarians the Romans knew them, as his thesis is that the barbarians had changed to match Rome in military capacity.

“Centuries of imperialism turned the neighbors Rome called barbarians into an enemy capable of dismantling an Empire that had dominated their lives for so long… Europe’s barbarians, transformed by centuries of contact with Rome on every possible level, eventually pulled the empire apart…the Huns overturned the existing strategic balance of power on Rome’s European frontiers, to force the Goths and others to seek refuge inside the Empire. This prompted two generations of struggle, during which new barbarian coalitions, formed in response to Roman hostility, brought the Roman west to its knees… the Roman Empire was not on the brink of social or moral collapse. What brought it to an end were the barbarians.”

With this nutshell comes eye-opening nuggets. There’re those new barbarian coalitions with their capacity to mobilize critical masses of military force that were able to match those of the Romans – and which in a perfect storm of a combination of critical masses outmatched and overwhelmed the empire. It’s always intrigued me how the barbarians, with such tiny populations in proportion to the empire, were seemingly able to punch so far above their weight.

I also gained a new appreciation of the resilience of the western Roman empire, particularly in the ability of the strongmen who actually ruled it in the fourth and fifth centuries to repeatedly stabilize the chaos that invariably ensued from the collapse of the previous strongmen – although it was something of a ratcheting down effect, as each successive stabilization lost that little bit more.

Heather also persuaded me that the eastern empire was not entirely supine sleeping through the fall of the western empire, as it did lend military aid at more points than I had sneered at it for, but I stand by it was not much more – and with poor effect, luck or timing – such that it mostly slept through the fall of the west, particularly under the emperor Theodosius II.

That’s right – the Theodosian dynasty, the dynasty I love to hate, the dynasty in which the only good members (Constantius III and Marcian) married into it.

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)