Book Review by Dr. Philip Matyszak
As the title of the book suggests, and as the author makes plain within, this book tries not only to find the causes of the fall of the Roman empire in the west - itself no easy task - but also to discover if there are any lessons relevant to today which can be drawn from this fall.
Thus, in attempting this book, Goldsworthy attempts an epic task. Firstly the sheer time-scale of the fall of the western empire is impressive. Goldsworthy starts with the death of the emperor Marcus Aurelius in AD 180 and finishes well into the sixth century with a rough sketch of the campaigns of Belisarius, which means that over four action-packed centuries have to be compressed into little more than a year per page. If this book were simply an accurate description of the events of those four centuries, this, given the sometimes violent bias of the scanty sources available, would still be a challenging job. Yet Goldsworthy has set himself the further task of describing not only what happened but also why. In so doing, he places himself squarely on the shadow of the great work of Edward Gibbon whose 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' remains even today in the public mind the definitive work on the subject.
In fact Goldsworthy frequently acknowledges his debt to Gibbon, but also makes it clear that Gibbon viewed the events which he was describing from the perspective of his own times, just as in fact Goldsworthy is re-interpreting the story of the fall of Rome from a 21st century viewpoint - that is what historians do. However the 21st century viewpoint of Goldsworthy is consciously at odds with many contemporary academic studies of the later Roman empire. These studies prefer to call the 'fall' a 'transition' or 'a period of far-reaching changes', whilst the 'decline' part is generally refuted with claims that in reality the empire of the fourth century was as strong and dynamic as that of the first century.
To some extent 'The Fall of the West' can be read as a gentle polemic refuting such views. Goldsworthy is polite but firm in pointing out that there was decline, and that the 'transitions' were sufficiently violent in terms of change and dislocation to count as a fall. He points out that studies of aspects of the fourth century such as bureaucratic organization and social structure have tended to overlook the narrative which expressly shows that something was going horribly and fatally wrong. For example, official contemporary documents show six large army units present in Spain at the time of a Gothic invasion. For all the effect that these six army units had in opposing the Goths they might as well not have been there at all. Which leads inevitably to the conclusion that perhaps they weren't. Continuity can only be taken to mean so much. After all, many post-colonial states have maintained the legal and political structures of their imperialist masters, but Mugabe's Zimbabwe is a very different state to colonial Rhodesia, for all that the police wear the same uniforms.
Goldsworthy is also good at looking at many of the myths surrounding the fall of Rome and pointing out where they do not match with the established evidence. He treats the phenomenon of Christianity with judicious impartiality, and argues that the Roman army remained a highly competent fighting force almost to the end. Nor, he maintains, were the Sassanian Persians a much more potent military power than the Parthians whom they succeeded.
So why, according to this book, did Rome fall in the west? And why did it not fall in the east? Goldsworthy does not treat all the existing hypotheses in detail, which is hardly surprising as there are apparently over 200 of them. He points out that the evidence we have is at best inconclusive and at worst contradictory. Instead he sticks to what he knows. Namely that there was a breakdown of trust in Roman society. Any general or governor who excelled became a threat to the emperor, and Roman emperors were necessarily paranoid. Therefore any elite Roman who gained a position of power and did well in that position had to go on to try for supreme power almost in self-defence. The result was near continuous civil war. The author points out that after Commodus, it was a rare decade without at least one major usurpation attempt, and even the least of these was immensely damaging. Not only did Roman armies fight and destroy each other, but they left borders unguarded whilst they did so.
Any region that hosted a war took major damage to its economic, political and social structures during the fighting. Southern Italy, for example, never really recovered from the eighteen-year long war fought against Hannibal on the premises. So during its repeated wars, the Roman state consumed itself from within. Furthermore, the Roman executive suffered badly through large-scale informer-led purges after each coup attempt whether it succeeded or not. The Roman state functioned best under a single dynasty, as soldiers tended to be loyal to the dynasty. But as the family of Constantine demonstrates, later Roman imperial families slaughtered their own kin with enthusiasm, and seldom lasted for long. Rome became increasingly dysfunctional, and the attempts of emperors to re-jig the administrative machinery to ensure their own survival were often inimical to a well-functioning state.
By this argument, for which Goldsworthy has expertly marshalled and presented the evidence, Rome was not so much killed off as euthanized by the Germanic hordes that were not so different, in either weapons or numbers, from similar hordes which the Romans of the first century BC had held off with minimal damage. The east survived because it was harder to get at. Egypt, Greece and Asia Minor are hard to approach with an invading army and the eastern flank was secured by Persia which was unaggressive through having its own problems at the critical juncture. Furthermore, the eastern empire had the unexpected advantage of a short series of long-ruling and competent emperors to stabilize matters. When these advantages did not apply, as they did not during the seventh century uprising of Muhammed, the east proved itself as easily knocked over as the west had been.
This book is not a comfortable read. Self-interested and short-sighted politicians and a rampart bureaucracy growing like a cancer on the society it is supposed to serve are not phenomena unique to the late Roman empire. However one feels about Rome, Roman civilization was vastly preferable to the barbarism which followed its fall in the west. That a society with so much good and so much potential could be extinguished by folly, venality and cynicism is a depressing story, but Goldsworthy tells it well. Both as a narrative history of the western empire's last years and as an analysis of events this book is an invaluable read for anyone interested in later Roman history.
Book Review by Ursus
Goldsworthy's book already having been reviewed (above) by someone with actual scholarly credentials, I will not attempt to replicate, much less surpass, said review. What I intend to offer is a complimentary review written by a general reader with the interests of other general readers in mind. With that being said, The Fall of the West is a thought provoking book on the latter stages of Roman history.
The introduction and conclusion alone are priceless, wherein the author takes to task the penchant of some commentators, particularly on the European side of the Atlantic, to compare contemporary American hegemony with Roman imperialism. It is further always implied by these comparisons that as the latter eventually collapsed, so must the former. It is further still implied that this would somehow be of great benefit to all noble and enlightened peoples. Despite the post-colonial predilection for eschewing all means of power as inherently exploitive, Goldsworthy points out that:
- American influence and Roman imperialism are different animals
- Despite some pressing problems, American power is not destined to collapse in the same manner as the Roman West
- Roman subjects were not appreciably better for the collapse of the central imperial authority (quite the opposite), and the world should not be so quick to cheer a hypothetical collapse of American leadership given the dubious alternatives that await to fill the vacuum
That a noted British scholar finally has the courage to say this is compelling, and I hope helps to suppress the common occurrences of such cliched comparisons at the various cocktail parties (and also, it must be said, on UNRV's very own discussion fora) where they transpire with annoying frequency.
Aside from the introduction and its related epilogue, the work is divided into three parts. Part 1 traces the reign of Marcus Aurelius through the Crisis of the Third century to the rise of Diocletian. In many ways the reign of Marcus Aurelius was the height of the empire left by Augustus, but the generations that followed witnessed a painful transformative process. Part II begins with Diocletian's attempts to rebuild from the rubble, reorganizing the empire into a new entity. It ends with the political split of the empire between East and West. Part III then details the sordid legacy of the Western Empire as emperors fought rivals, and barbarian warlords fought Roman generalissimos who were themselves often of barbarian extraction. The West increasingly loses ground until it is a patchwork of barbarian kingdoms loosely carrying on Roman traditions. Part III ends with the rise of the Islamic invaders who in turn dismember the outer realms of the surviving Eastern empire.
Goldsworthy's book is largely in response to the most recent scholars, such as Peter Heather, who paint a picture of a vibrant later empire only torn apart by Germanic supertribes and a reborn Persian superpower. Goldsworthy disagrees on both fronts. He claims there is no sufficient evidence to paint the later empire as being as prosperous or as strong as Augustus' Principate. Nor does he see the Persians or various barbarian tribes as being especially larger or more organized opponents than what confronted the earlier emperors. Instead Rome's greatest enemy was itself. The constant civil wars fought after Marcus Aurelius destabilized Roman society and weakened the borders, allowing otherwise weak enemies to exploit Roman instability.
The later emperors cared more about mere survival than about imperial welfare at large, which led to deleterious reforms. Senators were excluded from military command so as to no longer threaten the emperor, but ironically this opened the power struggle to a much wider and far less predictable strata of society below them, namely Equestrian officers and bureaucrats. Furthermore, the split between the civil bureaucracy and the military forces, and the increasing division of both into smaller units, was designed to prevent any one official from having the resources to overthrow the emperor. But this also had the effect of reducing the empire's ability to quickly marshal the necessary resources to oppose foreign invasion. The result was of course an increasing trickle of foreign foes who were allowed to occupy the land, thus depriving the West of needed tax revenue, which in turn weakened the army and bureaucracy, and so encouraging more infiltration and forced settlement.
The tale of western Roman collapse is a long and depressing epic, but Goldsworthy tells it expertly. The prose is enchanting: intelligent but direct and always engaging. Where some saw his Caesar biography as rather needlessly verbose, the author manages in this work to condense about four hundred years of Roman history into as many pages. The books also contains various maps and illustrations, charts and tables, and several pages of photographs. The last hundred pages is populated by a chronology, glossary, bibliography, end notes and an index. This is an excellent narrative for the general reader interested in late antiquity, whether or not one fully agrees with the author's conclusions.
