Rome

The Later Roman Empire — Averil Cameron

History, Rome
Published on

Cover of The Later Roman Empire


The Later Roman Empire
Averil Cameron
238 pages including index
published in 1993

As you may have noticed if you’re a regular reader of my booklog, is that I’ve developed a mild obsession with Late Antiquity and the Roman Empire, fueled by the two excellent books I got out of the library last year, Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire and Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome. Before that I’d only read about Rome in a few history lessons at school, a couple of popular history books for kids and a shedload of Asterix comics, all of which emphasised the early days of Rome, up until Caesar and Augustus, with perhaps a bit of Nero thrown in. Everything after the first century CE was largely ignored or at best only mentioned briefly; the later centuries of the Roman Empire are seen as an afterthought, a long slide into barbarism ala Edward Gibbon.

Yet if you start reading more academic treatments of Roman history, you soon discover that this view has long been abandonded, ever since the publication of Peter Brown’s The World of Late antiquity in 1971. That was the first popular book to do away with the idea of the dark ages,
re-emphasising the continuity between the Christianised empire of the third century CE and the Early Middle Ages, as well as the continuing survival of the Eastern Empire centered around Byzantium, as opposed to the Western Empire’s breakup. Averil Cameron’s The Later Roman Empire is one product of this re-emphasis. Published in 1993 as a volume in the Fontana History of the Ancient World, it shows that the view put forth by Peter Brown has won mainstream acceptance. It is meant as a standard textbook on the late Roman Empire, because none such was yet written in English, as the preface explains.

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The Fall of Rome – Bryan Ward-Perkins

History, Rome
Published on

Cover of The Fall of Rome


The Fall of Rome
Bryan Ward-Perkins
239 pages including index
published in 2005

When I was googling for some background information on Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire, Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome was mentioned the most alongside it in reviews. In those reviews The Fall of Rome was described as a much more agressively counter-revisionist attack, compared to Heather’s book, much more scathing in its rejection of the view that the fall of Rome was not that big a deal. Therefore I thought it would be interesting to read, to see what the more traditional view of Rome’s collapse would look like.

It turns out however that Ward-Perkins’ rhetoric here is actually stronger than his actual disagreement. He’s scathing about those historians who go too far in arguing that the transition from Roman Empire to the post-Roman, Germanic west was a relatively gentle affair, but his own view isn’t quite the Gibbonesque tragedy of traditional history either. He argues that the transition period was violent, that there was a decline in civilisation, that the death of the western Roman Empire was a tragedy, but that this was far from the end of civilisation. But because Ward-Perkins spent much of this book arguing against the more rose-tinted views currently in vogue of the transistion from a Roman to a post-Roman world, his disagreements may seem bigger than they actually are.

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The Fall of the Roman Empire – Peter Heather

History, Rome
Published on

Cover of The Fall of the Roman Empire


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.

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