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\nWhen I was googling for some background information on Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire<\/a><\/cite>, Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome<\/cite> was mentioned the most alongside it in reviews. In those reviews The Fall of Rome<\/cite> 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.\n<\/p>\n \nIt 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<\/a> 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.\n<\/p>\n
\nThe Fall of Rome
\nBryan Ward-Perkins
\n239 pages including index
\npublished in 2005
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