THE FALL OF ROME AND THE END OF CIVILISATION
by Bryan Ward-Perkins
OUP £14.99 pp229

Why did the Roman Empire decline and fall? Since the time of Gibbon, who scandalised his contemporaries by blaming it all on the Christians, a truly bewildering array of explanations has been proposed for Rome’s collapse. One academic, totting up the various theories, recently arrived at a grand total of 210, ranging from impotence caused by lead piping to the enervating effects of hot baths. No wonder many historians, wearying of the endless controversy, have seized with gratitude over the past few decades on a suggestive counter-notion: that there was never, properly speaking, a decline at all. Roman Europe, it is now widely accepted, did not expire but evolved. Far from collapsing into anarchy, it was — in a faintly Blairite formulation — “transformed”.

Two new books both, in their different ways, seek to demolish this upbeat new consensus. Peter Heather, in his monumental history, has no doubt that what he terms “the strange death of Roman Europe” constitutes “one of the formative revolutions of European history”. Bryan Ward-Perkins goes even further. In his book, he argues for the traditional perspective: that “with the fall of the empire, Art, Philosophy and decent drains all vanished from the West”.

The wit of this phrase is typical of Ward-Perkins’s style, but not even a taste for cricketing metaphors unusual in books on ancient history can obscure the apocalyptic quality of his arguments. No mealy-mouthed talk of transformation for Ward-Perkins. Instead, all is violence, horror and cataclysm.

Which is, of course, to restore to the history of the 5th century AD both a corpse and a mystery. Heather, presenting his solution, consciously employs the language of the courtroom thriller. “To get to grips with what was actually going on, the reader is invited to become a member of the jury . . . to become involved in the process of evaluating and synthesising the different kinds of evidence that will be presented.” Nor does it take him long to finger the prime suspects. Far from tottering effetely beneath the weight of its own greatness, he argues, the 4th-century empire was in fact as strong as it had ever been, and only an immigration crisis beyond Michael Howard’s worst nightmares served, in the following century, to bring about its ruin.

The barbarians, who are portrayed in current academic orthodoxy as integrating themselves seamlessly into a still-Roman world, are restored by Heather to their more traditional role of violent assassins. They may not have set out to destroy classical civilisation — most wanted only to share in its benefits — but they destroyed it all the same. As Ward-Perkins, who concurs in this analysis, puts it, “the invaders were not guilty of murder, but they had committed manslaughter”.

For Heather, in particular, this renewed emphasis on the role played by the barbarians has numerous literary benefits. It justifies him in shining a powerful searchlight upon the whole shadow-dimmed panorama of the empire’s end, from the bejewelled splendour of the imperial court to the dripping forests of “Barbaricum”, the lands of the barbarians. Even more refreshingly, it enables him to impose upon the complex events of the 5th century what academics so often shrink from: narrative. By tracing the exploits of Stilicho, Alaric and Attila, he provides the reader with drama and lurid colour as well as analysis. Like a late Roman emperor, he is determined to impose order on a fabric that is always threatening to fragment and collapse into confusion; unlike most late Roman emperors, he succeeds triumphantly.

Both his and Ward-Perkins’s book are part of what is a hugely encouraging trend in classical scholarship: a determination by specialists to communicate their passion and expertise, rather than hug them to themselves. Certainly, for anyone interested in an episode of history as momentous as it can appear perplexing, the publication of these two studies is a godsend. They complement each other perfectly, for, if Heather provides the grand narrative, then Ward-Perkins provides a sobering portrait of what happened in the aftermath of collapse, with the inhabitants of Europe thrown “back to a standard of living typical of prehistoric times”. The effect is to restore to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire the status claimed for it by Gibbon: that of “the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene, in the history of mankind”.

Available at the Books First price of £20 (Heather) and £11.99 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585

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