The Fall of the Roman Empire
Peter Heather
572 pages including index
published in 2005

I found I hadn't read enough about ancient history in recent years, so I went looking for some interesting books on Roman, Greek or other ancient cultures. The Fall of the Roman Empire was what I found, a new look at how Roman domination came to an end. I'd been interested in that topic again since watching Terry Jones' excellent series The Barbarians, which revised the traditional picture of hordes of uncultivated barbarians coming over the borders for an orgy of rape and plunder. The Fall of the Roman Empire is in a similar revisionist vein. Though Heather goes much less far than Jones in revising the traditional relationship between Romans and barbarians.

Now my knowledge of Roman history is not extensive, to say the least, mostly build on having read the usual popular history books everybody with the slightest interest in history reads at age twelve, which tend to be fairly conservative in their outlook, often a generation or so behind academic consensus. Therefore I wasn't that surprised that while I thought Heather's main point, that the Roman Empire didn't so much collapse because of structural defects, but because of several contigent factors coming together at the worst possible moment, was quite radical, a little bit of googling seems to show Heather is actually somewhat of a counterrevolutionary. His position as set up here is that the Western Roman Empire did in fact collapse, at roughly the time tradition has always set it had, but that this wasn't the overwhelming catastrophe of myth and that this wasn't a pre-ordained outcome. This is halfway between the traditional view of the End of Civilisation for a Thousand Years and the revisionist view of denying that a collapse happened at all, that the Roman Empire continued as Byzantium and in the west more or less morphed into its succesor states.

For Heather then Rome did fall in 476 AD, but its fall wasn't the end of the world. The Fall of the Roman Empire therefore is about why Rome went under, whether or not this was inevitable and who or what was responsible for it. The book starts by setting the scene so to speak, by showing what the Roman Empire and the barbarian states that surrounded it were like before the crises in the late 4th and 5th century broke out. Again, the conventional view as I learned it was that the rot had set in the empire long before it ended, with it gradually declining from its glory days in the first century AD, becoming both much more political instable as well as much less able to mount the kind of conquests it had undertaken previously. Heather explains that this view is wrong, that in fact the empire's territory remained stable and didn't expand not so much because it was no longer capable of doing so, but because it had already subjugated all the worthwhile countries and further expansion just wasn't cost effective.

Simularly, the political instability at the top of the empire was not a bug, but a feature of the system, which remained remarkably stable over the centuries. As Heather explains it, the empire mostly existed as a tool to keep a top layer of aristocracy wealthy and in power, with emperors only being able to reign if they had the support of this aristocracy, or at least a significant part of it. With each succession there was another opportunity for various groups to renegotiate their share of the loot so to speak, while rebellions were often motivated by having been denied this share. This was also, together with the difficulties of governing such a huge empire with the primitive Roman bureaucracy, was also the reason why there was a tendency for two or more emperors to share the job in the late Roman Empire. Meanwhile ordinary life in the empire largely remained undisturbed, with a continuing romanisation of local elites in conquered countries. Occasionally there would of course be trouble, either internal or external, but on the whole the empire managed to weather these crises, including the rebirth of Persia as a powerful competitor in the East.

However, this still was an empire stretched almost to its limits, especially in the west, and when the crisis period hit in the late 4th century, it managed to deal with them, but at a cost. What Heather shows is that the empire could and did recover from a major barbarian attack, but that it took time to recover from each. It was the rise of Hunnish power on the eastern edges of Europe that propelled the invasions in the late 4th century and early 5th century, which meant the empire faced several crisises in a relatively short succession, each of which it overcame, but because it didn't have time to recover properly from a crisis the next crisis would be less ably dealt with. Largely Heather argues this is due to the loss of revenue generating provinces to Goths, Vandals and other barbarian supergroups moving into the empire, where these groups become nominal subjects of the empire, but who take over the taxes from the provinces they settled in, leaving the central state with less resources to fight the next group with.

Ironically, it was the disappearances of the Huns, after having cut a swathe through the western empire, that helped move along the collapse. Because late Roman power depended a lot on using Hun mercenaries to keep the other barbarian groups in line; without them the Romans did not have enough power to evict these groups from their territory anymore. Some attempts were still made to accomedate all these various power groups in the empire, but in the end it was the barbarian kings realising that they no longer needed the empire that ended it for real. Meanwhile Roman values did continue in its succesor states, to a lesser or greater extent.

But Heather argues that this sequence was not inevitable: had the Huns not collapsed, or had they not moved westward at the time they did, the Roman Empire might very well have overcome the earlier crisises, win back its territories and continue onwards for several more centuries. Without the continuing shock of barbarian invasion, Heather says, the Roman Empire was in good health, unlikely to be brought down by internal factors, as there were just too many powergroups who benefited from its existence. However, he also argues that, ironically, it was the centuries of Roman pressure ont he barbarian hinterlands and its trade with them that created these barbarian supergroups that would later destroy it, out of self defence against continuing Roman aggression...

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