How Could an Empire Fall So Fast?
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The fall of the Roman Empire is still the greatest event in the history of the West. Before the fifth century, the empire ruled some 70 million people, occupying most of Western Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East – an enormous triangle bounded by Scotland, Spain, and Syria. More, it forged its many subject peoples into a cultural whole, thanks to the immense appeal of Roman civilization. The Latin language, Roman law, and military discipline, supplemented later by Christianity, created an ideal of Romanness whose seduction can still be felt today.
Yet by 476, when the last Western emperor was deposed, the whole immense fabric was in shreds, never to be repaired. Over the centuries, as German-speaking barbarians overran Europe and carved feudal kingdoms out of the corpse of the empire, the achievement of Rome came to seem fantastic, impossible. Not until the Italian Renaissance, some 900 years later, would men begin to feel themselves equal to Rome’s legacy. To this day, no Western government has rivaled it in scope and authority.
As a subject for research and meditation, then, the fall of Rome is bottomless. But the major challenge of writing about the Roman Empire lies in the paradoxical nature of the sources, which are at once too full and too scarce.Thanks to historians like Tacitus and Suetonius, we know as much about Rome’s rulers as we do about any human beings before the invention of print.The charismatic Julius Caesar, the calculating Augustus, the mad Caligula, and the cruel Nero are some of the most familiar personalities in history.
But the monuments of the ancient historians stand alone in a deserted landscape. We know only the versions of events that these highly literary and self-conscious writers wanted to us to know.We have virtually nothing that today’s historians would consider usable evidence: government records, private correspondence, eyewitness testimonies. What does survive is fragmentary and accidental – an official papyrus that was erased and reused by a medieval monk, a treatise that has been abridged by a series of writers over hundreds of years. Here is a 500-year-long, continent-spanning story whose actual written sources can fit on a couple of bookshelves.
For modern historians, that makes it an irresistible challenge. “The Fall of the Roman Empire” (Oxford University Press, 572 pages, $40), by Peter Heather, brilliantly takes up that challenge, offering a rich and dramatic synthesis of the latest research on Gibbon’s old story. In clear, sometimes overly casual prose (he has a weakness for popculture allusions), Mr. Heather describes how the Roman Empire fell under the repeated blows of barbarian invasion; more, he offers a convincing new explanation for why this happened when it did.
The drama of Mr. Heather’s book lies not just in the world-changing story he has to tell, but in his behind-the-scenes view of how historians work. Like a master detective, Mr. Heather employs the most various techniques – everything from pollen sampling to archaeology to literary criticism – to wring the truth from the reticent past.”I love puzzles,” he declares in his introduction, and his treatment of this puzzling period – where “so much of the evidence is either missing, or comes enciphered in the complicated codes of Roman literary genres” – succeeds in communicating his sense of history’s “thrill” and 308 1554 408 1565″intellectual challenge.”
Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall” is such a monument of English literature that its explanations for Roman decay are influential even today. For Gibbon, the fall of Rome was primarily a moral and intellectual failure: Grown fat and happy, enfeebled by Christianity, the civilized Romans lost the courage and stamina needed to fight off barbarians. In making character and willpower the motive forces of history, Gibbon was following a very Roman impulse: For the Latin historians, it is nearly always the virtues and vices of great men that decide events. Mr. Heather’s central argument, however, is that Gibbon’s explanation cannot account for why the empire collapsed just when and in the way it did.
Far from weakening steadily, Mr. Heather insists, the Roman Empire remained militarily and culturally dominant through the fourth century. To understand the rapidity of the Roman failure, which began in the 370s and was complete a century later, Mr. Heather turns outside the borders of the empire.
During the high imperial period, Mr. Heather writes, the empire enforced a stable modus vivendi with the Germanic peoples on the Rhine and Danube borders.Alternating treaties with punitive raids, Rome kept the barbarian threat to manageable levels. It was only the advent of the Huns, a Central Asian people of mysterious origins,that upset this delicate balance. As the Huns swept westward into Europe, armed with a new military technology – a huge composite bow – that made them unbeatable in combat, they put new pressure on the German peoples, who in turn found themselves pushed toward the borders of the empire.
Goths fleeing the Huns first entered the Roman Empire en masse, in the Balkans around 376. The imperial military, already stretched to its limit dealing with the major threat of Persia in the East, simply did not have enough resources to fend off this massive new barbarian presence. The Romans had no choice but to allow what Mr. Heather calls this Gothic “supergroup,” a population of perhaps 80,000, inside its borders; once they were inside, no one could stop them roaming and pillaging at will.
As the Huns under Attila kept pushing west, more barbarian peoples – Suevi, Vandals, Alans – fell dominolike against Rome’s borders. Despite the heroic resistance of a few fifth-century leaders like Aetius and Stilicho, these population movements finally pushed Rome into a death spiral, as the loss of each new province stripped the empire of the resources needed to stop the barbarians from advancing farther. It was barbarian demographics, then, more than Roman morale or military weakness, that led to the fall of the Roman Empire: “Without the barbarians,” Mr. Heather concludes, “there is not the slightest evidence that the Western Empire would have ceased to exist in the fifth century.”
Does Mr. Heather’s book offer any lessons for us today, when America is often compared, grudgingly or proudly, to imperial Rome? If anything,”The Fall of the Roman Empire” only reminds us of how inaccurate and tendentious such comparisons really are. What brought Rome down was not the rivalry of another major power, or even the steady costs of “imperial overstretch,” but the sudden emergence of a wholly new and unsuspected threat. Today, perhaps only an invasion of space aliens would rival the catastrophic surprise of the fifth-century Huns. What Mr. Heather offers is not easy analogies but a realization of the complex strangeness of the past – the achievement of a great historian.