The Fall of the West: The Death of the Roman Superpower by Adrian Goldsworthy

Adrian Goldsworthy, The Fall of the West: The Death of the Roman Superpower    (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009) 531 pages Verdict?: 4/5 A compelling contribution in a closely-contested field.

 Those of us interested in the fall of the Roman Empire have had a surfeit of riches over the last five years.  In 2005 we had both Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians and Bryan Ward-Perkins' The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization.  Then last year we got James J. O'Donnell's The Ruin of the Roman Empire: A New History (reviewed here) and Christopher Kelly's The End of Empire: Attila the Hun and the Fall of Rome. So just when we could be forgiven for thinking that no more good books on the subject are likely to appear for a while, Roman history heavyweight Adrian Goldsworthy enters the ring with a 500+ page tome that goes the distance with all of the above.

Goldsworthy's book not only draws on the work of the other scholars mentioned, particularly Ward-Perkins, but it is also a counter and response to them as well, and he has Peter Heather in his sights in particular.  Heather's book was the first major narrative history of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire seen for many years.  The story he tells has all the elements of a ripping yarn - wars, court intrigues, barbarian invasions, battles, plots, assassinations - and, as an unabashed Germanicist myself, I could not help but be compelled by his emphasis on the centrality of the barbarian invasions in the whole affair even while never quite being convinced by his argument.  Because Heather's version of the story, simply put, says the Empire did not crumble from within but was crushed from without.  According to Heather, the Empire in the late Fourth Century was essentially strong, the Army large and highly effective and things were generally stable.  But then the arrival of the Huns triggered a cascade of events that sent large, highly-militarised Germanic peoples crashing into the borders of the Empire.  The Eastern half coped largely by diverting these people westward and so the West was eventually overwhelmed and collapsed.

Goldsworthy, however, is having none of this.  Noting both Bryan Ward-Perkins and Heather's recent books he writes:

Each of these books is extremely good in its own way, but both are restricted in what was possible to cover.  Neither makes much effort to link the empire of the fourth century to the earlier empire.  Yet this connection needs to be made if we are to understand more fully what the Roman Empire was like and discern why it did eventually fall. (Goldsworthy, p.21)

He then spends the best part of the first half of his book making precisely this connection and, in the process, calling into serious question the basis of Heather's argument: that the Empire of the Fourth Century was essentially stable, solid and secure.

The Calamitous Third Century or "Who's Emperor Now?"

One of the reasons Heather is able to present the Fourth Century as comparatively stable, solid and secure is that the Third Century was anything but.  While Heather and Ward-Perkins both begin their accounts in the late Fourth Century, on the eve of the epoch-changing Battle of Adrianople, Goldsworthy takes his story all the way back to the death of Marcus Aurelius in AD 180.  The accession of his feckless and, ultimately, disastrous son Commodus marked the end of the long period of peace and stability of the Antonine Dynasty and the beginning of almost one hundred years of civil war, usurpers, rebellions, fragmentation, and multiple emperors known as "the Crisis of the Third Century" or, more succinctly, "the Military Anarchy".  Goldsworthy argues persuasively that what happened to the Western Empire in the Fifth Century can only be understood in the context of the turmoil of 200 years earlier.

And he tells the story of the turmoil well, while at the same time carefully laying the analytical foundations of the argument of the second half of his book.  Things were already on a downward slide when Alexander Severus succeeded his bizarre, possibly insane and ultimately assassinated cousin Elagabalus in AD 222.  But they went from bad to worse when he was challenged for the throne by Maximinus Thrax and then unceremoniously murdered in AD 235.  What followed was pure chaos.  In the next 20 years the Roman Empire was to have no less than 20 and possibly as many as 25 different emperors in rapid succession  - often several at a time, which is why it is hard to pin down the actual number.  In fact, this section of Goldsworthy's book becomes something of a bewildering succession of rising and falling emperors, with sometimes two or three succeeding to the purple only to be assassinated by the Praetorian Guard within a single paragraph.

By AD 258 the chaos had got to the point where the Roman Empire had broken into three independent pieces: the provinces of Gaul, Spain and Britain split from the Empire in the west while the provinces of Syria, Palestine and Egypt formed the "Palmyrene Kingdom" in the east, with the rump of Rome between the two.  Aurelian managed to pull things back together during his five year reign before he too was assassinated.  He was followed by no less than six more emperors in nine years before some measure of real stability was finally imposed by Diocletian.

As interesting as this rapid cavalcade of emperors, usurpers and assassinations is, Goldsworthy uses it to make pertinent points about the two centuries which followed and which led to the fall of the Empire.  Firstly, he notes how barbarian invasions are a symptom of Roman weakness and instability, not a cause of it.   Over and over again during the Third Century renewed bouts of Roman civil strife invited larger and deeper raids by barbarians over the Rhine and Danube.  This culminated in the massive land and seaborne raids on the eastern Empire by large Gothic and Herulian warbands in the AD 260s that was only finally brought to an end by Claudius II Gothicus in AD 269.  That this barbarian reaction to Roman weakness - the Empire was at the lowest ebb of the Third Century crisis at the time - is a clear prefigurement of the later barbarian incursions and settlements in the west in the Fifth Century is a point that Goldsworthy makes very clearly.

Secondly, he notes that the "reforms" which are often said to have stabilised the Empire and brought the "Military Anarchy" to an end actually weakened it in the long run.  He points out that the Empire was and had always been a military dictatorship.  Augustus had created it out of years of civil war by winning the struggle for military supremacy.  But what he created was what Goldsworthy refers to as "a veiled monarchy".  Though he was a military dictator who won control by force of arms, Augustus and his First and Second Century successors created a facade whereby they (and everyone else) pretended they ruled by consent, particularly by the consent of the Senate and the Senatorial class.  In return, trusted Senators could receive relatively powerful (and rich) provincial governorships and other honours.  The whole arrangement worked well and was in some ways inherently stable.  The small number of Senators with any real power - ie ones who controlled rich provinces with large armies - could be carefully chosen and the remainder stayed in Rome where they could be carefully watched.  The only major instability was the fact that while everyone was pretending that the emperors were not really kings, the whole idea of the succession to the throne-that-was-not-meant-to-be-a-throne was a murky one.  Despite this, civil wars were rare in the first two centuries of the Empire and the whole system worked.

But when it broke down in the Third Century the veil was torn off and the Imperial system was exposed as the military dictatorship it had always been.  So now it became clear that any Senator who could win the support of enough of the Army or, failing that, who could simply bribe the increasingly mercenary and predatory Praetorian Guard, could become emperor, albeit (in most cases) very briefly.  All it took was a reverse in a foreign war against the resurgent Sassanid Persians or the increasingly bold Germanic barbarians and a usurper would appear or the Army or the Guard would mount an assassination and the whole process would repeat itself, seemingly on a shorter and shorter cycle of usurpation, civil war and anarchy.

This cycle became so intense that the primary goal of a Roman emperor was no longer wise rule and stability but mere survival.  As the Third Century progressed changes were put in place - changes that were aimed solely at reducing the threat of usurpation.  Senators were gradually excluded from military commands, since a Senator with a sizeable portion of the Army at his back was a usurper in waiting.  But by giving more and more commands to the lower, equestrian order the emperors simply pushed the opportunity for usurpation down the Roman food chain and actually broadened the numbers of those who took it into their heads to jostle for the purple.  The size, and therefore the garrisons, of the provinces were steadily reduced, since this left a governor of any given province with fewer troops with which to mount a challenge.  But this in turn weakened the Empire militarily and strategically, since a governor no longer had the military force to deal with serious local threats himself.  Incursions over the frontiers by barbarians increased in size and number and only the Emperor had the capacity to deal with them.  Cities which had been unfortified for centuries began building walls for protection, both against barbarians and against the next cycle of civil wars.

So while these and similar changes - often called "reforms" - brought the Crisis to an end, Goldsworthy makes a strong case that in the longer run the Empire was weakened and that the seeds of the collapse of the Fifth Century were sown in the chaos of the Third.

 The Fourth Century - Recovery?

Thus the greater stability of the Fourth Century, from the long reign of Diocletian onwards, is according to Goldsworthy, something of an illusion.  The cycle of constant usurpation and assassination slowed, but it did not stop.  The concentration of military power in the hands of the emperor meant civil wars were fewer, but the sheer size of the Empire meant there was always going to be a subordinate somewhere with sufficient troops to mount a challenge.  Diocletian recognised that no emperor could protect himself by concentrating power in his hands and still rule a territory as large as Rome's effectively, so he created the tetrachy - four subordinate rulers to whom he could delegate authority and military power.  While this seemed fine in theory, in practice the tetrarchs were soon at each others' throats and Diocletian had to come back from cultivating cabbages in retirement to restore order.  Constantine solved that problem by eliminating his brother emperors and ruling alone, but his successors showed that it took a powerful and utterly ruthless individual to do this and before long the informal division of the Empire into eastern and western halves became increasingly formal and, eventually, permanent.  By the end of the Fourth Century the Eastern and Western Empire were increasingly going their separate ways and this was always going to be bad news for the poorer and less populous West.

Goldsworthy is very cautious about making claims about things for which we have scanty evidence.  Grandiose claims have been made about the economy of the later Roman Empire, for example.  But he is careful to note that we simply do not have the data to draw any clear conclusions about the role of the economy in the collapse of the West because we simply do not have enough information.   That said, it is clear that a divided Empire, however much more  manageable it was in the short term, was always going to be less powerful and stable in the long run.  And it was always likely that the less prosperous and less populated Western half was going to have the harder time bearing the burdens of a large army and expensive defences against external threats.

But Goldsworthy also makes it clear that the seeds of the final Fall were sown way back in the Third Century, took root in the supposed "recovery" of the less chaotic Fourth Century and bloomed into inevitable disaster in the calamitous Fifth Century.  Because the reaction of the emperors of the Fourth Century to the upheaval of the previous era was to centre their rule around one thing: survival.  The army was reorganised not simply to defend against invaders and to operate against the Persians, but also to do so without giving generals or provincial subordinates sufficient individual military power to mount a challenge for the purple.  Likewise provinces became smaller not with a view to administrative efficiency (they vastly increased the local bureaucracies in fact), but to decrease the power of their administrators.  So paranoid were Fourth Century emperors about usurpations that a mere hint of disloyalty could spark purges of whole families, informers and spies thrived on rumours and a good way to get rid of someone you disliked was to imply they had designs on the Imperial throne.  Owning anything that so much as looked like Imperial regalia could get you killed, which led to some comical scenes where actual usurpers had to be robed in a cloak of patched-together purple military pennons or crowned with a lady's necklace because having the real items to hand would be too dangerous.

The other way the emperors insulated themselves from the threat of usurpation and assassination was by retreating physically.  This not only meant emperors became increasingly remote figures in inaccessible courts, shielded by layers of courtiers, functionaries and court ceremonial and ritual, but also that by the early Fifth Century the Western Emperor had withdrawn to the well-defended but remote city of Ravenna and ran his dwindling Empire through powerful chamberlains and commanders-in-chief.  It was only a matter of time before the Western Emperor increasingly became little more than a symbol and figurehead and the powers behind the throne became the real players. 

Not with a Bang, But a Whimper

The final third of Goldsworthy's book tells the story of the end - the last 76 years of the Western Roman Empire when things began to unravel and then spiralled increasingly out of control until total collapse was inevitable.  The narrative elements are familiar enough from other treatments of the story from Hodgkin to Heather - the irruption of the Vandals, Alans and Sueves over the frozen Rhine in the beginning of the century, the Visigoths and Burgundians going from settled federates to rebels to political players in their own right, the last desperate defence against Attila's raids, the abandonment of Britain and the loss of Africa and, finally, the deposition of little Romulus Augustulus.  The strength of Goldsworthy's treatment lies in how he ties this accelerating spiral of loss of control to the trends that had their roots in the "Military Anarchy" of the Third Century.

With the Western Emperor now so insulated from potential usurpation that he was effectively politically marginalised, court functionaries and supreme commanders - the Magister Militae - battled for real power.  That is, when they were not fending off the claims of a new wave of usurpers, who appeared to challenge for the dwindling power of a shrinking Western Empire.  At several key points the West was too busy fighting civil wars to defend itself and all too often warbands of invaders - themselves usually fairly small - moved into territory unopposed.  Some provinces were deliberately or effectively abandoned by the military, such as Britain and northern Gaul.  In other cases warbands, such as that of Alaric, were preserved rather than crushed so as to use them as a cheap source of trained troops.  Either way, the effect was slow but accelerating loss of territory which, once Africa was lost to a (small) band of Vandals, became impossible to reverse.

Goldsworthy also has some scorn for the idea that the later Western Roman Army was as large as some modern writers make out.  He has little time for those who take the units listed in the famous Notitia Dignitatum at face value, arguing that this was simply an idealised listing of units that, by that stage, largely existed on paper.  Here Goldsworthy the primarily military historian is worth paying some attention to:

At times, when reading descriptions by modern historians of warfare in this period, it is difficult to avoid the image of Hitler in his last days, planning grand offensives on a map with divisions that had long since ceased to exist. (Goldsworthy, pp. 289-90)

He notes that territories which, according to the Notitia, should have been garrisoned with powerful elite units of comitatenses, such as Spain, are crossed and recrossed by barbarian warbands seemingly at will.  The internal struggles of the Western Empire took up what real troops remained, as effective as they were, and the paper units of the Notitia could not defend Britain or retake Africa.

In the end the distractions of civil war and usurpation meant that an already weaker and poorer Western Empire was nibbled at its edges and then from within by barbarians, who had always taken advantage of Roman weakness.  Finally the loss of territory meant there was no money and no army to hold even what was left together.  The emperorship became so debased that the last puppets who held the title were barely worth deposing.  Even the once coveted supreme military title of magister utriusquae militiae became not worth keeping - the Burgundian prince Gundobad rose to this rank, but gave it up to pursue royal power amongst his tribe instead.  When the last emperor, the teenager Romulus Augustulus, was finally deposed he was considered so worthless and harmless that he was not even seen as worth killing.  He was given a pension and sent to live with his relatives in the country.  The once great Empire of the Romans no longer existed because no-one saw it as worth maintaining.

This is an excellent book and one, even though it comes after a succession of excellent books on the subject, that will be hard to top for some time to come.  Leaving aside the fact that it is a fine narrative history, Goldworthy brings an outsider's eye to the period, coming to it without the assumptions of a Late Antiquity specialist.  But as more of a specialist in the beginnings of the Empire, he brings an interesting perspective to its end.  This book is both a reply and, at the same time an equal counterweight to Peter Heather's equally excellent work and I would encourage anyone who read, enjoyed and was convinced by either one to read the other.  I think they would profit from the exercise.

The Ruin of the Roman Empire: A New History by James J. O'Donnell

James J. O'Donnell, The Ruin of the Roman Empire: A New History
(Ecco: 2008) 448 pages
Verdict?: Provocative, stimulating and entertaining 5/5.


It is rare for a book to give a well-worn topic a new perspective and rarer for one which does so to be as accessible and entertaining as this. Or as provocative. Following in the wake of other excellent recent books on the "Fall of the Roman Empire", notably Peter Heather's weighty The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians and Bryan Ward-Perkins' The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization, O'Donnell takes the reader on a lively and colourful tour of the world of the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Centuries and the people who can give us an insight into the end of Classical civilisation and the beginning of the Middle Ages. In the process, he examines some old ideas from some new and sometimes controversial angles and seems to deliberately and rather gleefully couch things in ways that will raise some hackles. All that makes for a roller-coaster of a read on what could strike some as a fairly dusty subject.

The essence of O'Donnell's thesis, and his provocation, can be summed up in his book's subtitle: "The Emperor who brought it down, the barbarians who could have saved it". The idea that the Empire was brought down by a Roman Emperor (he's referring to Justinian I) and could have been "saved" by barbarians would strike traditionalist Classicists as both heretical and absurd, but the subtitle is a deliberate teaser for what is actually a nuanced and well-argued position, even if it is not always a wholly convincing one on every point.

Essentially, O'Donnell argues that the traditional date for the "Fall" - September 4th AD 476 - is only one of several dates which could be taken as the "end" of the Empire and gives good evidence that it was not seen as the "end" at the time as widely or as fully as modern writers tend to assume. He argues that in many respects, though clearly not all, the "Empire" continued in form, many functions and even in name under Odovacar, Theodoric the Great, the Visigothic kings and the Vandals. What destroyed this post-Imperial "Empire"-without-an-Emperor was Justinian's ill-considered attempts at reconquest, which plunged Italy into decades of destructive war, wrecked the surviving institutions of the Empire and left the west open to barbarians who were far less Romanised and civilised than the Goths and Vandals.

Continuity or Catastrophe?



The old Nineteenth Century idea of the barbarians who entered the Empire in the Fourth to Sixth Centuries as wolfskin-wearing savages from the primeval forests and the steppe has been abandoned long ago. Even the more "barbaric" of the invaders, such as the Angles, Saxons and Frisians who invaded Britain, were from frontier regions which had been heavily influenced by Rome for centuries. And the main players were more Romanised still - by 476 some of them had been living inside the Empire for almost a century and the Goths Theodoric led into Italy or the Vandals Gaiseric led across the Straits of Gibraltar were largely Christian, substantially Latin-speaking or at least bilingual or multilingual and armed, dressed and equipped more or less like the Romans they came to dominate. Theodoric' s men had been soldiers of the Empire for a generation, even if they were sometimes soldiers in various forms of revolt:

If there were any primeval forest dwellers in those communities, they were the ones their smarter, more acquisitive and more ambitious cousins left behind … by the time people like Theoderic’s followers find themselves in Italy, they were there not as barbarians but as Roman soldiers, bearers of the distinctive frontier culture of the north, to be sure, with styles of dress, religion, and speech that differentiated them from the settled southerners, but that made them nonetheless part of the same imperial community.
(O'Donnell, p. 121)

But here is where O'Donnell gets pointedly provocative. He deliberately emphasises this point to a high degree. When introducing Theodoric, for example, he writes of him as a young man from the edge of the Empire who was educated and raised at the Imperial court until the age of 18 and who then took up military roles in the Balkans pretty much like many of the other ambitious Roman soldiers and generals O'Donnell has already mentioned. He manages to describe the career of this canny Imperial player for about a dozen pages without once using words like "tribe" or "warband" or even "Goth". Of course, he knows precisely what he's doing and, at the end of this summary turns to the reader and draws attention to what he has just done and why. Doing this certainly does change the way the reader, who may have read other more traditional versions of Theodoric's story, looks at who he was and how he fitted in with the Imperial system.

And it is not like it is really unusual for a writer to do this about a "barbarian". Many traditional histories of the period write about people like the Emperor Zeno without so much as a hint that his original name was Tarasicodissa and that he was an Isaurian warrior from Armenia. Or that the Emperor Leo I was a member of the Bessian tribe of Thrace. The idea that these men were less "barbarians" than Theodoric and his men does not really make much sense, yet the traditional view means that Theodoric still gets presented as an "Ostrogoth" while Zeno and Leo rarely get presented in the same way.

The first section of the book, therefore, presents a vivid overview of the post-Imperial "Empire" viewed with this "continuity" perspective. It is important to note here, however, that O'Donnell is not plumping for some wholesale "continualist" position and arguing that "the Empire never fell" and that the whole business of the collapse of the Western Empire was a bloodless and pleasant transition from one type of ruler to another. He specifically points to Bryan Ward-Perkins' eloquent counter to that idea and cautions that, in some ways and some places at least, the end of the Empire was every bit as violent, bloody and destructive as the traditional picture would suggest. In Britain, northern Gaul and parts of inland Spain, in particular, this was very much the case from the mid-Fifth Century onwards.

That said, his emphasis on continuity is backed by good evidence. Under Odovacar, Theodoric, Gaiseric and others, traditional offices continued to be filled, poems written, elegant dinner parties attended, games held, ceremonial observed and so on, pretty much as if nothing much of note had happened in AD 476. One example of this is an inscription to Theodoric found by the Appian Way near Rome which begins:

Our Lord the most glorious and celebrated King Theodoric, victor in triumph, ever Augustus, born for the good of the state, guardian of freedom and propagator of the Roman name, who has tamed the nations ...
(O'Donnell, p. 145)

The noteworthy thing here is not simply the act of putting up a dedicatory inscription to commemorate some building work sponsored by a ruler or the traditional formulas being applied to an "Ostrogoth" rather than a Roman, but the use of the formula "ever Augustus" for the Gothic king. Clearly he is not being called an Emperor - he is specifically called "King" - but he has equally clearly slotted fairly neatly into the role of an Emperor nonetheless. And there are many similar examples of how, as O'Donnell argues it, the new rulers of Italy, Spain, Gaul and Africa were restructuring the Roman west in some ways but leaving things much as they were in most others.

In some respects, however, O'Donnell does push this too far. It is true that anyone who combs through the evidence of Ostrogothic Italy looking for elements that are uniquely "Gothic" or even Germanic usually comes up with very little. But O'Donnell de-emphasises the little that can be found to the point of it being virtually invisible in his narrative. As Romanised as the Goths in Theodoric's regime were, they still spoke at least some Gothic or spoke Gothic some of the time. They were still distinctive enough in dress and accoutrements to be identifiable as "Goths" (regardless of whether they actually had any Germanic ancestry at all). And they were still Arians while their Roman neighbours were Catholics.

O'Donnell goes so far as to argue that Theodoric constructed a purely ethnically Gothic identity and history for himself and his Amaling clan only towards the end of his life, when he was frustrated by increasing Eastern Imperial refusal to accept or accommodate his new world order in the west. He never presents any evidence for this interpretation however. All regimes certainly have a tendency to paint a romantic picture of their origins and to shape their image of themselves, but the idea that Theodoric's Germanic roots were largely a "construction" and only emerged at the end of his career does not seem to be based on any clear evidence that I know of. Indeed, Herwig Wolfram - the scholar who, literally, wrote the book on Germanic "ethnogenesis", the fluidity of Germanic tribal identity and the near total obscurity of any of the prehistory of the Germanic groups of this period - still attributes some aspects of Theodoric's reign to distinctively Germanic cultural elements. He pursued some wars against the Rugians, for example, that don't seem to have made much sense in terms of grand strategy but seem to have been driven more by the Germanic rules of blood feud than the chess game of post-Roman relations.

Overall, however, O'Donnell makes his case well enough - prior to Justinian's wars of reconquest things in the West were in battered shape in most places and in total collapse in many. But in Ostrogothic Italy, Vandal Africa and Visigothic Gaul and Spain, at least, the old structures either survived, were patched up or were rejigged and adapted to a new basis for the old civilisation. Not the Empire, of course, but close enough to it to raise an inscription to a Germanic king who had repaired a Roman road calling him "ever Augustus". Then along came Justinian ...

Enter Justinian

Justinian has generally not been treated kindly by many modern historians and O'Donnell is no exception. The picture he paints is fairly typical: Justinian and his uncle and predecessor Justin took the stable and prosperous Empire they inherited from Anastasius and, through a combination of pride, ideological fanaticism and religious intolerance, left it financially bankrupt, religiously polarised and militarily broken. He saw the Germanic rulers of the West simply as heretics and alien usurpers and struck out at them as enemies of Roman civilisation and, in the process, did far more to wreck what was left of that civilisation than the Romanised barbarians had ever done; leaving the West shattered and open to other, far more barbaric barbarians.

Again, there is a lot of merit to this view and overall O'Donnell substantiates it well and with a certain acidic vividness of language, such as when he says of Justinian "as a religious monarch [he] resembles Stalin and as a political monarch he favours Milosevic" or writes:

Hamlet would have made a terrible king. Justinian, intellectually arrogant, priggish, not as well educated as he thought he was and alternating between indecisiveness and rashness, shows us how Hamlet would have turned out.
(O'Donnell, p. 224)

In O'Donnell's view, Justinian failed on several fronts. Firstly, he was an arch-conservative and reactionary who saw all deviation from his views as dangerous dissent to be crushed. He championed the Chalcedonian position on the nature of Christ to a fanatical degree, alienating the Monophysites who made up the majority in his Empire. He also pursued a policy of crushing remnants of pagan culture, driving many intellectuals into exile in Persia, to the benefit of Persian and, later, Arabic intellectual culture. Secondly, he pursued policies against Persia and in the Balkans that were to have dire consequences for his successors. Finally, his policy in the West was quixotic, wrong-headed and wasteful and it ultimately destroyed the very things he thought he was trying to restore, "mistaking Rome for civilization and the opponents of Rome for opponents of civilization", he destroyed both.

Again, some of these views have dissenters - for example, Chris Wickham has recently argued in his The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000 (to be reviewed here soon) that "[Justinian's] Italian war would have been less of a mess if Justinian had put more, not less, money into it" (Wickham, p. 94). The fact remains, however, that Justinian did spend an estimated 21.5 million solidi on the Italian campaign against the Goths and, with it, bought himself a fractured wasteland. And this is in the context of an Empire which, in a good year, brought in just 5 million solidi in tax revenue and consumed most of that in administration. His "victory" in Italy was ultimately a political and financial disaster for which his successors had to pay.

The Ruin of Rome

The final part of the book focuses on the man O'Donnell calls "the last consul of Rome" and who history knows as Pope Gregory the Great. Gregory is depicted vividly as a figure straddling the Roman past and the early Medieval future; a man living - quite literally - in the ruins of the world that Justinian's disastrous policies created. Here is a man who was a vastly wealthy landowner and a member of the old Senatorial class that was now, in the post-Justinian world, finally fading to nothingness. And Rome - long since abandoned as a capital and strangled of the status, the taxes and grain that once artificially inflated its population - has become a city of ruins and the scars of Justinian's wars, with its remnant population clustered around the churches on its outskirts, its centre abandoned and the Forum on its way to becoming a cow pasture. The grim apocalyptic world of Gregory is vividly depicted as both the mournful consequence of Justinian's wrong-headedness, a shadow of what might have been and a hint of new beginnings still some centuries off.

Vividness is the lasting impression O'Donnell's excellent work leaves the reader. Throughout the book he manages to not simply explain complexities such as the convoluted theological disputes of the period or motivations behind Gregory's Moralia on Job, but he succeeds brilliantly in bringing the period to life. Vignettes such as the Emperor appearing on his balcony over the Hippodrome to engage in dialogue with the powerful chariot racing factions of Constantinople or Theodoric's stately and dignified visit to Rome in AD 500, to be greeted with ceremonies and acclamations fit for an Emperor make the characters in O'Donnell's story live and illustrate his themes in a lively manner.

O'Donnell aids this by his conversational and almost chatty tone and some subtle humour. Many of his chapters' subtitles have amusing modern cultural references in them: "Northern Exposures" or "A Country for Old Men". And there are references to current affairs tucked into his descriptions of ancient events. Cosmas Indicopleustes' abortive attempt at establishing a Biblically-inspired flat earth geography is said to have been motivated by his belief that the universe is "intelligently designed". Justinian's doctrinaire and reactionary advisers are called his "neo-conservatives". And O'Donnell draws attention to Julian's campaigns in what is now Iraq, which began with quick victories and ended in disaster thanks to his lack of an "exit strategy.

Overall, the book is a thought-provoking, vivid and dazzling read. True, some of his provocative arguments are a little overstated and the sections of "what if" counterfactual history about Justinian's lost opportunities and their potential implications for our time are a bit high flown. But this is a solid, erudite and remarkable contribution to a topic which has been well-served by other excellent books in recent years. Highly recommended.

The Fall of the Roman Empire: The Military Explanation by Arther Ferrill

Arther Ferrill, Fall of the Roman Empire: The Military Explanation
(Thames & Hudson Ltd: 1986) 192 Pages

Verdict?: A failed thesis. 1/5

On the whole Ferrill's book is a useful resource as a summary of the major events in the collapse of the Western Empire, but the central thesis of Ferrill's work and his final conclusion are both very weak. Ferrill dismisses the longer term economic and administrative failings of the Western Empire, but does so without actually discussing them. He says that to see the later Empire "as a troubled giant .... a decaying Empire .... is to miss the point." (p.164) but he doesn't explain why. In fact, the long term problems of inflation, a declining population and a shrinking tax base, along with a widening gap between rich and poor in the West and a spiralling trend towards ruralisation of the population all combined and accelerated slowly over a long period between the reign of Diocletian and 476 AD.

What we conspicuously don't see in this period is any major military defeats of the Roman army by barbarian invaders. When the weakening, fragmenting and economically anaemic Western Empire is confronted by a military threat in this period it usually defeats it - at least for as long as the failing economy and collapsing administration is still able to organise armed resistance.

The fall of the West was an economic and administrative failing - battles and tactics had virtually nothing to do with it.

But Ferrill simply dismisses all this as "missing the point" without a word of explanation as to why all these highly significant factors are completely irrelevant. He simply tells us they are - end of story.

He writes:

"Many historians have argued .... that the fall of Rome was not primarily a military phenomenon. In fact, it was exactly that. After 410 the emperor in the West could no longer project military power to the frontiers."
(p. 164)

This is quite true, but what Ferrill skips lightly over is the reason for this - the depopulated and cash-strapped Western Empire, having fought five civil wars in the last century and wracked by political instability, was simply in no position to field the armies it needed to protect the border provinces. It's not as though outdated Roman armies were being tackled and beaten by superior barbarian forces. The armies weren't withdrawing after being routed on battlefields by overwhelming or tactically superior Germanic troops. The Empire simply couldn't maintain its centralised military infrastructure any more because it didn't have the manpower or the cash to do so.

Ferrill acknowledges that this so-called "military" collapse, strangely enough, didn't actually involved many battles or any major defeats, but he's not deterred:

"One need not produce a string of decisive battles in order to demonstrate a military collapse. The shrinkage of the imperial frontiers from 410 to 440 was directly as a result of military conquests by barbarian forces."
(p. 164)

Though these "military conquests by barbarian forces" occurred, strangely enough, without any decisive battles. The truth is the barbarians moved, usually without major opposition, into areas that the dwindling and economically starved Roman army had already abandoned or which it could no longer defend in strength. Their "invasions" - actually very small in number - were a symptom of the decline of the Roman army and the economic and administrative decline of the West, not its cause.

Ferrill asserts otherwise, with great boldness. But, again, he doesn't tell us why - he just tell us.

"To be sure, the loss of strategic resources, money, material and manpower compounded the mere loss of territory and made military defence of the rest of the Empire even more difficult. It is simply perverse, however, to argue that Rome's strategic problems in the 440s, 50s and 60s were primarily the result of financial and political difficulties or of long term trends such as depopulation."
(pp. 164-65)

Why is this quite reasonable and sensible conclusion "simply perverse"? Ferrill doesn't tell us, he just says it is.

He goes on to argue that any explanation of the fall of the West has to take into account the survival of the East - which is very true - and seems to believe that this is an argument against the "simply perverse" idea that systemic and economic problems were the real causes. In fact, the East always had a far greater population and a massive concentration of the whole Empire's wealth. The division of 395 made this disparity worse, giving the West more to defend and far less resources with which to do it. Further weakened by civil wars, local warlords and a string of weak or shortsighted rulers, it's actually amazing the West struggled on for as long as it did. So it's very clear why the East survived while the West fell.

Ferrill continually acknowledges key points in the real reasons for the fall of the West without acknowledging (or grasping) their significance. In discussing what the West did wrong while the East got right, he says the East "was better able to afford the heavy subsidies barbarian leaders demanded in the years after Adrianople" (p 166). But he fails to see why this is the case - because the East was far wealthier than the West. This was not a military factor, and it certainly had nothing to do with equipment, training or tactics - it is purely economic. The East was able to pay Attila off for years and then, when he became too much of a nuisance, refuse to pay him anymore. The Hunnic king then decided to make up for his lost revenue by attacking the West, since the more impoverished half of the Empire made an easier target than the still relatively rich and strong East.

Similarly, the East were able to pay off and deflect a succession of potential barbarian problems, usually getting them to afflict the increasingly weak and fragmented West. Ferrill briefly acknowledges the East's significant economic strength, but then ignores it to pursue his ghostly theory of military explanations.

Without giving any good reasons for setting aside significant and relevant factors in the decline of the West such as economics and depopulation, Ferrill blithely declares that they can, indeed, be set aside. But not before lumping them in with "race mixture .... lead poisoning and other fashionable theories" (p. 166), which is a pretty shoddy piece of rhetorical trickery.

He goes on to argue that the real reasons for the fall of the West was a deterioration of the Western Roman Army - not the decline in the infrastructure and recruitment which sustained the army, as I've argued above, but a decline in the tactics, training and quality of the troops.

For the decline in training he relies almost entirely on Vegetius' problematic manual and on a highly dubious report from Jordanes of a pre-battle speech by Attila about the quality of Roman troops. And for the decline in the quality of the troops he simply points to the "barbarisation" of the army and takes it as given that this meant the troops were therefore of low quality. Again, Hugh Elton shows the flaws in this idea. As he argues, the use of barbarian troops had been going on in the Roman army for centuries and continued in both the East and the West in this period. So why did this practice suddenly cause a decline in quality in the West in the Fifth Century?

Secondly, most of the barbarian troops used in the West weren't part of the regular units anyway - they were federate bands hired for specific campaigns or to defend particular territories. Their use and significance certainly did increase as the Fifth Century progressed, but largely for the very economic and administrative problems that Ferrill is so keen to dismiss. So, once again, we aren't seeing a "military explanation" - we're seeing the result of longer term, systemic economic and social weakness.

Ferrill's final sentence reads: "As the western army became barbarised, it lost its tactical superiority, and Rome fell to the onrush of barbarism". This is nonsense. There was no loss of "tactical superiority" - whenever the ailing Western Empire could field a decent sized army it won hands down. In fact the military history of the fall of the Western Empire is a string of Roman victories and barbarian defeats. It's the economic and administrative history of the West in this period which is the tale of woe and its the weaknesses here which robbed the Empire of its ability to field and maintain those armies and led, eventually, to its economic and administrative fragmentation and its eventual political collapse.