This not only limited the number of potential rival claimants to the throne-to members of the Senate-but also tied the Empire back to the Republic to some degree.Īt a basic level the emperors and government officials of the Late Roman Empire had forgotten what the empire was for. The point of all the murders and wars was not to advance ideas, but to advance the men behind them.įrom Augustus to Marcus Aurelius there had been some effort made to pretend that the emperor still ruled jointly with the Senate. In the end, he identifies one simple explanation-the one that emerges from reciting the history in the first place-that the Empire had become nothing but a stage for acting out petty personal ambition. Goldsworthy diminishes or dismisses them all. There's plenty of analysis here of the trends that other historians have identified as causing the decline and fall : moral lassitude the emasculating quality of Christianity immigration overextension of the Empire fearsome new opponents etc.

Nonetheless the overwhelming sense that one gets is of the near daily instability at the top of the Empire. This is not a book that I could use in the classroom-too thick, too well-written, and perhaps most dangerously, too clear. Goldsworthy relates the history as lucidly as anyone could. It perhaps tells us all we need to know that it becomes impossible to keep track of all the emperors of this period and of the enemies they faced. The Eastern Empire, Byzantium, would linger on for centuries longer and always identify itself as Roman, but for purposes of analysis, the Roman Empire as a recognizable entity had passed He then marches us through centuries fraught with assassinations, civil war, 'barbarian' invasions, wars with Persia, the rise of Islam, a splitting of the Empire into East and West, and so on, until there's a brief period of productive stability under Justinian and then the Western Empire is unofficially declared dead when a German warlord, Odoacer, is crowned King of Italy by his troops (476 A.D.). Goldsworthy begins with the death of Marcus Aurelius (180 AD), when the Empire is considered to have reached its high tide. So if Edward Gibbon's was once the authoritative account of the 'Decline and Fall', this new book will likely serve as a new standard.Īs Gibbon, Mr. His narrative histories of ancient Rome are immensely readable for the layman, but detailed enough and sufficiently referenced for even professionals to have to reckon with. Adrian Goldworthy is one of our great popular historians.

Goldsworthy how rome fell