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Books : The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization
Rating: 
- History as it should be written.
Ward-Perkins makes his case (that the Fall of Rome really was an epochal catastrophe) so concisely and elegantly, and without any loss of detail or academic rigour, that it shames many an academic historian whose works are heavy going, even for other historians. The seamless interweaving of documentary and archaeological evidence, the graphics and clear pursuit of a particular historiographical view and its relvance to us today - leavened by occasional donnish humour - make this an easy read.
Particularly interesting to read this alongside Peter Heather's (another Oxford historian) book on the Fall of Rome, coincidentally published around the same time but taking a different angle.
Rating:
- Not quite.
Mr. Perkins is a arqueologist who writes a book on history (for those who d'ont know history studies documents and archaeology studies objects). The result is not convincing: the work is not properly suported by document research and the archaeology part seams to be resumed to pottery finding.
The author contradits himself often. At one point he says that the empire was still quite strong on the V century only to further on saying that lack of money resulted on a diminished and weakened army. Another example: the author compares the roman economy to the west's XX century one; but then he goes on to compare it with the soviet one - the second is defendable; the first is absurd.
Mr Perkins has a soft spot for the romans wich I share with him. But that doesn't stop me from recognising their weaknesses: it was extremely centralised, the governement being responsable for most economic activity wich resulted on a lack of enterprise (remember that a large part of the population was enslaved and that roman citizens did not look well on business entrepreneurship). All this resulted on lack of flexibility to meet the financial crisis of the III and V centuries.
Rome did us the favour of falling at the right moment. And it was the political fragmentation that followed that created the basis for the competition that made europe great.
Rating: - Elegant and readable introduction to a complex period
This concise and elegantly written little book makes an excellent introduction to more detailed analyses of a complex period. Ward-Perkins views are trenchant, logical, well-argued and even witty; he refuses to toe the politically correct line which would have us evaluate a crude hand built pot at the same level as Samian ware... the picture he paints of the period between the Roman Empire and the re-emergence of a literate civilisation restores most convincingly the congency of the concept of the Dark Ages.
I recently visited Venice to see the wonderful 'Rome and the Barbarians' exhibition, and it is significant that the monograph discussion of this period in the catalogue raisonne refers to this book several times with high praise.
Rating:
- One Man's Civilisation Is Another Man's Third Reich
Professor Ward-Perkins has done an interesting, if short, book on a majestic theme - the fall of one of history's greatest empires, and its aftermath.
His main concern is to debunk a notion, apparently fashionable among historians, which I'm not sure many other people ever shared - the idea that the Fall of Rome wasn't such a big deal. Apparently, there is an historical school which regards the whole business as a mostly peaceful transition from the tail end of the Ancient World into the beginning of Medieval Europe. He collects an impressive pile of evidence that it was far from peaceful, and was indeed pretty catastrophic for many of those who had to live through it. Roman civilisation did not die of natural causes. It was killed, and mainly by the military force of the Barbarians.
Well, so far, so good. I doubt if the inhabitants of Italy, Gaul and Spain, who spent most of the years from 405 to 420 having one set of barbarians after another marching and counter-marching all over their homelands, would have any trouble agreeing with Ward-Perkins. Over the next couple of centuries many others would have cause to feel the same way. Nor was this temporary. For several centuries more, comforts that the Romans took for granted would become available only to a tiny few, and sometimes not at all. Pottery making virtually died out in Britain until about 700, tiled roofs, previously common, were little-known in the Middle Ages, and even coinage gave way to barter over wide areas. In short, standards of living, as usually measured, took a prolonged nosedive.
And yet - -. This is all very well, but if the Empire's fall was such a terrible loss to those who lived in it, how come it was never restored? The Chinese Empire "fell" lots of times, but was always rebuilt. When Rome fell, it stayed fallen, and its people seem to have soon become reconciled to doing without it.
Nor can the Barbarians be held solely responsible for what happened. In Asia Minor, which was virtually untouched by barbarian invasion, Colin McEvedy's "New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History" shows four cities - Ephesus, Miletus, Sardis, Smyrna - of between 15,000 and 50,000 people in AD 528. On the map for AD737, not one of them remains. Here at least, the Barbarians were not to blame for the decline, and other factors need to be considered.
At times, Ward-Perkins himself gives significant hints at this. He quotes ancient sources to the effect that, during Alaric's siege of Rome in 408/9, "almost all the slaves that were in Rome poured out of the city to join the Barbarians". And nine years earlier, when the rebel general Tribigild marched across Asia Minor, then a peaceful and prosperous region, his force was soon swelled by "such a mass of slaves and outcasts that the whole of Asia was in great danger, while Lydia was in utter confusion, with almost everyone fleeing to the coast and sailing across to the islands or elsewhere with their whole families". Clearly not all the Empire's subjects loved it.
But perhaps the most revealing incident is from 393, when "the Roman aristocrat Symmachus brought a group of Saxon prisoners to Rome, intending them to slaughter each other in gladiatorial games in honour of his son. However, before they were publicly exhibited twenty-nine of them committed suicide by the only means available to them - by strangling each other with their bare hands! For us, their terrible death represents a courageous act of defiance, but Symmachus viewed their suicide as the action of "a group of men viler than Spartacus", which had been sent to test him. With the self-satisfaction of which only Roman aristocrats were capable, he compared his own philosophical response to the event to the calm of Socrates when faced with adversity."
If Symmachus was at all representative of its ruling class, one can easily get an inkling of why the Empire failed, and see why not only the Barbarians, but many of its own less privileged subjects, might not have been sorry to see it go. One man's civilisation can all too easily be another man's "Third Reich", and one may suspect that many were ready enough to try and get along without the Roman State, even if it did mean having to make their own pottery.
Rating: - Pottery is fun!
Don't be put off, as I initially was, by the technical illustrations and discussions of pottery types that at first sight may make this look like the drier kind of archaelogical textbook. It is in fact a witty and stimulating exposition, with skilfull deployment of supporting evidence of both "hard" and "soft" varieties, of the view that the end of the Roman Empire was indeed a violent, traumatic and destructive episode. His view can be summed up as being if it looks like a collapse, sounds like a collapse and feels like a collapse then that is exactly what it is. Seems fair enough to me!
This is not, nor does it claim to be, an in-depth examination of why the Empire fell or a narrative of that fall. Instead, it is an attempt, in my view a successful one, to show that this was indeed a "fall" and not just a transformation or transition from one form of society to another. Despite some of the hype around the book, at least going by the description on the back of the paperback version, I am not sure that this view ever really went away although recent years have undoubtedly seen a strengthening of the contrary view that it was essentially a largely peaceful "transformation".
I found particularly interesting Ward-Perkins' use, of evidence like the aforementioned pottery, to show that the end of the Empire was manifested not just through the immediate and obvious impact of large numbers of greedy warriors with big swords taking over the land, but the resultant loss of links between the various parts of the Empire and thus of the flows of goods and services that enabled the Roman civilization to flourish.
This is not to say that Ward-Perkins denies that the "barbarians" were incapable of any positive achievements. Clearly they were so capable, and he admits as much. But what clearly emerges is a picture of a sophisticated and reasonably comfortable civilization falling into an abyss, admittedly deeper in some places than others, from which it took centuries to recover. (Try Alfred Duggan's "The Little Emperors" for a fictional, and to my mind very effective, treatment of what this must have fet like to those living through it.)
- History as it should be written. Ward-Perkins makes his case (that the Fall of Rome really was an epochal catastrophe) so concisely and elegantly, and without any loss of detail or academic rigour, that it shames many an academic historian whose works are heavy going, even for other historians. The seamless interweaving of documentary and archaeological evidence, the graphics and clear pursuit of a particular historiographical view and its relvance to us today - leavened by occasional donnish humour - make this an easy read.
Particularly interesting to read this alongside Peter Heather's (another Oxford historian) book on the Fall of Rome, coincidentally published around the same time but taking a different angle.
Rating:
- Not quite.Mr. Perkins is a arqueologist who writes a book on history (for those who d'ont know history studies documents and archaeology studies objects). The result is not convincing: the work is not properly suported by document research and the archaeology part seams to be resumed to pottery finding.
The author contradits himself often. At one point he says that the empire was still quite strong on the V century only to further on saying that lack of money resulted on a diminished and weakened army. Another example: the author compares the roman economy to the west's XX century one; but then he goes on to compare it with the soviet one - the second is defendable; the first is absurd.
Mr Perkins has a soft spot for the romans wich I share with him. But that doesn't stop me from recognising their weaknesses: it was extremely centralised, the governement being responsable for most economic activity wich resulted on a lack of enterprise (remember that a large part of the population was enslaved and that roman citizens did not look well on business entrepreneurship). All this resulted on lack of flexibility to meet the financial crisis of the III and V centuries.
Rome did us the favour of falling at the right moment. And it was the political fragmentation that followed that created the basis for the competition that made europe great.
Rating:
- Elegant and readable introduction to a complex periodThis concise and elegantly written little book makes an excellent introduction to more detailed analyses of a complex period. Ward-Perkins views are trenchant, logical, well-argued and even witty; he refuses to toe the politically correct line which would have us evaluate a crude hand built pot at the same level as Samian ware... the picture he paints of the period between the Roman Empire and the re-emergence of a literate civilisation restores most convincingly the congency of the concept of the Dark Ages.
I recently visited Venice to see the wonderful 'Rome and the Barbarians' exhibition, and it is significant that the monograph discussion of this period in the catalogue raisonne refers to this book several times with high praise.
Rating:
- One Man's Civilisation Is Another Man's Third ReichProfessor Ward-Perkins has done an interesting, if short, book on a majestic theme - the fall of one of history's greatest empires, and its aftermath.
His main concern is to debunk a notion, apparently fashionable among historians, which I'm not sure many other people ever shared - the idea that the Fall of Rome wasn't such a big deal. Apparently, there is an historical school which regards the whole business as a mostly peaceful transition from the tail end of the Ancient World into the beginning of Medieval Europe. He collects an impressive pile of evidence that it was far from peaceful, and was indeed pretty catastrophic for many of those who had to live through it. Roman civilisation did not die of natural causes. It was killed, and mainly by the military force of the Barbarians.
Well, so far, so good. I doubt if the inhabitants of Italy, Gaul and Spain, who spent most of the years from 405 to 420 having one set of barbarians after another marching and counter-marching all over their homelands, would have any trouble agreeing with Ward-Perkins. Over the next couple of centuries many others would have cause to feel the same way. Nor was this temporary. For several centuries more, comforts that the Romans took for granted would become available only to a tiny few, and sometimes not at all. Pottery making virtually died out in Britain until about 700, tiled roofs, previously common, were little-known in the Middle Ages, and even coinage gave way to barter over wide areas. In short, standards of living, as usually measured, took a prolonged nosedive.
And yet - -. This is all very well, but if the Empire's fall was such a terrible loss to those who lived in it, how come it was never restored? The Chinese Empire "fell" lots of times, but was always rebuilt. When Rome fell, it stayed fallen, and its people seem to have soon become reconciled to doing without it.
Nor can the Barbarians be held solely responsible for what happened. In Asia Minor, which was virtually untouched by barbarian invasion, Colin McEvedy's "New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History" shows four cities - Ephesus, Miletus, Sardis, Smyrna - of between 15,000 and 50,000 people in AD 528. On the map for AD737, not one of them remains. Here at least, the Barbarians were not to blame for the decline, and other factors need to be considered.
At times, Ward-Perkins himself gives significant hints at this. He quotes ancient sources to the effect that, during Alaric's siege of Rome in 408/9, "almost all the slaves that were in Rome poured out of the city to join the Barbarians". And nine years earlier, when the rebel general Tribigild marched across Asia Minor, then a peaceful and prosperous region, his force was soon swelled by "such a mass of slaves and outcasts that the whole of Asia was in great danger, while Lydia was in utter confusion, with almost everyone fleeing to the coast and sailing across to the islands or elsewhere with their whole families". Clearly not all the Empire's subjects loved it.
But perhaps the most revealing incident is from 393, when "the Roman aristocrat Symmachus brought a group of Saxon prisoners to Rome, intending them to slaughter each other in gladiatorial games in honour of his son. However, before they were publicly exhibited twenty-nine of them committed suicide by the only means available to them - by strangling each other with their bare hands! For us, their terrible death represents a courageous act of defiance, but Symmachus viewed their suicide as the action of "a group of men viler than Spartacus", which had been sent to test him. With the self-satisfaction of which only Roman aristocrats were capable, he compared his own philosophical response to the event to the calm of Socrates when faced with adversity."
If Symmachus was at all representative of its ruling class, one can easily get an inkling of why the Empire failed, and see why not only the Barbarians, but many of its own less privileged subjects, might not have been sorry to see it go. One man's civilisation can all too easily be another man's "Third Reich", and one may suspect that many were ready enough to try and get along without the Roman State, even if it did mean having to make their own pottery.
Rating:
- Pottery is fun!Don't be put off, as I initially was, by the technical illustrations and discussions of pottery types that at first sight may make this look like the drier kind of archaelogical textbook. It is in fact a witty and stimulating exposition, with skilfull deployment of supporting evidence of both "hard" and "soft" varieties, of the view that the end of the Roman Empire was indeed a violent, traumatic and destructive episode. His view can be summed up as being if it looks like a collapse, sounds like a collapse and feels like a collapse then that is exactly what it is. Seems fair enough to me!
This is not, nor does it claim to be, an in-depth examination of why the Empire fell or a narrative of that fall. Instead, it is an attempt, in my view a successful one, to show that this was indeed a "fall" and not just a transformation or transition from one form of society to another. Despite some of the hype around the book, at least going by the description on the back of the paperback version, I am not sure that this view ever really went away although recent years have undoubtedly seen a strengthening of the contrary view that it was essentially a largely peaceful "transformation".
I found particularly interesting Ward-Perkins' use, of evidence like the aforementioned pottery, to show that the end of the Empire was manifested not just through the immediate and obvious impact of large numbers of greedy warriors with big swords taking over the land, but the resultant loss of links between the various parts of the Empire and thus of the flows of goods and services that enabled the Roman civilization to flourish.
This is not to say that Ward-Perkins denies that the "barbarians" were incapable of any positive achievements. Clearly they were so capable, and he admits as much. But what clearly emerges is a picture of a sophisticated and reasonably comfortable civilization falling into an abyss, admittedly deeper in some places than others, from which it took centuries to recover. (Try Alfred Duggan's "The Little Emperors" for a fictional, and to my mind very effective, treatment of what this must have fet like to those living through it.)