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A review by aidanhailes
The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians by Peter Heather
4.0
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.
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.