Axios! Dobra książka o możliwych przyczynach upadku zachodniej części Cesarstwa Rzymskiego. Na całe szczęście państwo rzymskie przetrwało jeszcze wiele wieków w Konstantynopolu. Warto byłoby napisać książkę (i może Peter Heather to zrobi) o ostatecznym końcu Rzymu, zniszczonego przez łacińskie rycerstwo w XIII wieku.

This book is not an easy read. Its long (in pages), spans hundreds of years, and has a very large number of characters and places with likely unpronounceable names. If you are an amateur historian of ancient times, it goes a long way in bringing you 'up to date' on current thought about the period. However, don't think if your sole knowledge of the late Roman world comes from reading [author:Robert Harris|575] novels that you'll have an easy time of it.

Coincidentally, I happened to be reading this at the same time as Luttwak's, [book:The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire|7062170]. I found this book to be more readable, when I compare and contrast the overlapping areas. That is why I think that's the strongest suite of the this book: its how clearly it laid-out its themes in not-too complicated language. It also takes the time to clearly explain in-detail key concepts and technologies.

If, I have an issue with this book, its with its contemporary interpretation of events. Modern technology has extracted more information from the archaeological record then was available in the past. Heather also criticizes past interpretations of the 'Fall of the Roman Empire' (his analysis of [book:The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire|19400] comes to mind), as being framed by the 'then' contemporary mindset. I think his new Millennium analysis is equally colored, although it benefits from more data provided by modern science. (The thoughts, words, and deeds of a man, or woman dead for over a millennia and a half are bound to have different origins than from today.)

If you can to invest the time, have an interest in late ancient history and are not already a scholar of the period, this book is worth reading. You'll get an orderly, credible description with an explanation of its causes of the 'Fall of the Western Roman Empire'. Although, as I mention above, this is in hindsight, a 21st century man's analysis.

This is drier than other histories I've given five stars to, but I still want to give it the highest rating because of the comprehensive nature of its vision. The author, Peter Heather, takes to task the idea that the Roman Empire collapsed because of internal weaknesses brought on by decadence and corruption (i.e. the Edward Gibbons line of thought). Instead he paints a canvas of the late Empire as having very effectively reformed itself in the 3rd and 4th Centuries in response to the rise of the Sassanian Persian Empire. It was as powerful as it had ever been in 376 C.E. when the migration of the Huns into Europe began a century worth of invasions by unifying Germanic peoples. The subsequent chaos and loss of tax base turned the Western Roman Empire into dust. Heather lays out the state of the late Empire's structure and capabilities before showing every step of this massive and dizzying collapse. I had only vague ideas about this huge period in Eurasian history prior to reading and set the book down feeling like I had gotten as comprehensive a reading as is possible in one book.

4.25-ish. Reading this immediately after Adrian Goldsworthy's "How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower" made for an interesting contrast. Heather is (generally) of the mind that Rome fell because of outside forces; Goldsworthy because of internal. Both make some great points, but overall I found myself finding fewer logical gaps or leaps of logic in this (Heather's) book. Obviously with any sort of social construct as large as an empire there's not going to be a "right" answer - let alone an empire that left relatively few direct historical records - but both presented interesting perspectives on the challenge of explaining why the Western Roman Empire turned out the way it did. Heather's for the most part made more sense from my perspective, but that's probably mostly my own biases.

Between the two though, I did find three points of historical contention that I think Heather's book addresses less realistically than Goldsworthy, which are worth noting.

1. The nature and impact of the crisis of the 3rd century. Goldsworthy put a lot of time into documenting this crisis, how it resulted in a radically different political, economic, and military structure than during the Pax Romana era. Heather tends to gloss it over, jumping over it for the most part, or writing it off as the result of inherent limitations of rulership in the pre-industrial era. Yet Heather fails to explain why these issues were not relevant to Augustus through Marcus Aurelius. Or explain at all how the Republic managed to build such a massive administrative edifice to start. Goldsworthy's point that this crisis irrevocably changed the nature of the empire is a solid one.

2. The threat of the Sassanid Empire. Goldsworthy outright says that the Sassanids were not a rival superpower. Heather says they were. Whether this was true or not has massive implications for your understanding of why the western empire fell. If the Sassanids were in any way equivalent to the empire in terms of military power, then the empire's inability to deal with the barbarians that had found their way past the Danube and Rhine makes a lot of sense: they were busy keeping an eye on the Persians. If the Sassanids are not equivalent and no more than a regional power, then the inability for either Eastern or Western empire to deal with an army of (at Heather's largest estimate) 25,000 fighting men makes no sense. I tend to think Heather overestimates the Sassanids, if only because if they were truly that big of a threat, they would have actually intruded. That there was a major peace for the largest portion of the downfall of the west doesn't vibe with the idea that the Sassanids were actually capable of challenging Roman hegemony.

3. The source of the manpower crisis in the Roman army. Neither deals satisfactorily with this, but Goldsworthy seems a bit more open to actually analyzing where this shortage came from. Heather says the economy reached a natural plateau, meaning there was no surplus with which to feed and arm an army. But on the whole the empire had a smaller army in the 5th century than it had in the 1st. This despite (maybe) a larger population, and probably a more productive economy overall (by Heather's own admission). It doesn't seem internally consistent, and I think it's a point that Heather doesn't dwell on nearly enough.

To be fair, Goldsworthy for his part skips over many important pieces that Heather goes into detail about (most importantly IMO is the massive increase in agricultural output from beyond the empire's borders - greatly equalizing the disparity between Rome and barbarian groups). And overall, again, I found Heather's book to be more focused, logically consistent, and reasonable in its assertions. But some questions of Goldsworthy's (which was written after Heather's book) continually irked me as I was reading Heather's.

Overall, I'd highly recommend the pair as a good introduction to what happened in the fall of the western roman empire.

More like 3.5 stars. An exciting rundown of Ancient Rome's relations with its barbarian neighbors, and how these relations lead to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.

One of 2005's two great books on the fall of Rome, a very well-rounded approach to the topic. A worthy 21st century successor to Gibbon.

An excellent book, Heather does a good job reaffirming and further proving that the Roman empire collapsed due to large scale barbarian invasions, led primarily by Germanic tribes (pushed across the Rhine by the Huns) who united and reformed into cohesive, advanced groups over the centuries. Their cohesion, of course, being driven by Rome's aggressive imperial expansion and policies towards them; thus they created their own destroyers.

It's a nice contradiction to the peaceful assimilation theories that have circulated over the last 20 years, which stated that there was no conflict or collapse, just a peaceful transition to a different society. Heather shows it was quite the contrary, an often violent series of conflicts in which the empire lost massive tracts of land and tax revenues, tried to retake those lands by force, only to repeatedly fail. Internal factors are also looked at, but without the external factors, he shows there never would have been a collapse.

The only reason I gave this book four stars is because Heather tends to jump around a little to much for my liking, i.e., starting with a characters death in one chapter, changing topics, then picking up in the middle of their life in the next, changing topics again then finally going into the causes behind their death. He also seems to jump between narrative and academic styles page to page at times.