Articles with the Tag Peter Heather

The Goths – Peter Heather

History, Rome
Published on

Cover of The Goths


The Goths
Peter Heather
358 pages including index
published in 1996

Most of Peter Heather’s professional output has, in one way or another, featured the Goths. Usually this has been in the context of their contribution to the fall of the Roman Empire in the west, which Heather has long argued they played a central role in. In The Goths his focus is slightly different, more concerned with the Goths themselves than with how they interacted with the Roman Empire, though that still of course is an important part of their story. The Goths is an entry in the Blackwell series The Peoples of Europe and is meant as a one volume overview of their entire history, for people largely unfamiliar with them. As Heather mentions in his introduction, the last book to attempt this was published in 1888, so it was high time for an update.

Heather’s divides his book in three main parts, preceded by an introductionary chapter. In this he discusses why the Goths were important and the problem of social identities, where the old assumptions of unchanging peoples recognisable by some checklist of unique features had been challenged in the 1950ties and 60ties by new research showing how individuals could change their identity when advantageous. Heather applies a synthesis of these approaches to the Goths, arguing that while there was such a thing as a Gothic group identity, it was fluid enough for non-Goths to join into and for the group as a whole to adapt to changing circumstances. He then goes on to first explore the origins of the Goths, thentheir invasion and defeat of the East Roman Empire and further wanderings through the Balkans into Italy and Gaul and finally looks at the history of the two Gothish kingdoms established on parts of the Western Empire. In all three parts Heather puts the search for Gothish identity central.

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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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