Articles with the Tag Rome

The Assassination of Julius Caesar – Michael Parenti

Politics
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The Assassination of Julius Caesar
Michael Parenti
276 pages including index
published in 2004

All history is interpretation. That simple truth is hammered home in this book, The Assassination of Julius Caesar, offering a radical new context for the events of the fifteenth of march 44 BCE. The facts remain the same, but the assumptions with which Michael Parenti looks at the murder of Julius Caesar differ so much from the classical interpretation that almost an entirely new history is revealed. It’s a powerful antidote against so much pop history presented as if free from any social and ideological context, usually because it’s written from the safe cocoon of the dominant ideological assumptions of the day.

I picked up The Assassination of Julius Caesar when I saw it in the local library because I recognised it from a review Resolute Reader did two years ago. He described it as an antidote to the much more common interpretation of Roman history as the tales of great men. What Parenti does instead is to place the murder of Julius Caesar in the context of the class struggle going on in the late Roman Republic.

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The Celtic Empire – Peter Berresford Ellis

History
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The Celtic Empire
Peter Berresford Ellis
246 pages including index
published in 1990

This was a bit of a disappointment. The full title of this book reads The Celtic Empire: the First Millennium of Celtic History 1000 BC – 51 AD and I picked it up thinking I would get a full overview of Celtic history, up until the final subjugation of the Celts by the Romans. However, most of the promised history is skipped over in favour of telling the last part of the Celtic story, of how Rome conquered the various Celtic tribes in Italy, Gaul, Spain, Asia Minor, Britain, etc. An interesting story in its own right, but not what I expected.

More disappointingly, this story was told, more often than not, not through Celtic eyes, but from a Roman or a Carthegenian or other point of view, in a context that’s almost exclusively that of Roman history. So not only do you not get the entire Celtic history as the title promises, but the history it does tell of the Celts is somewhat fragmented, shown only where it impacted on the expansion of Rome.

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The Fall of Rome – Bryan Ward-Perkins

History, Rome
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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
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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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