The Fall of Rome Archives - Martin's Booklog

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.

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.

Articles with the Tag The Fall of Rome

The Goths – Peter Heather

The Fall of Rome – Bryan Ward-Perkins