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Title: The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization
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Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
List Price: $16.95
Our Price: $9.53
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| Customer Reviews: |
| The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization by Oxford University Press, USA 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 contradicts Himself often. At one point he says that the empire was still quite strong on the V century. Further on he says that lack of money resulted on a diminished and weakened army. Another example: the author compares the roman economy to the 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 government 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. | | The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization by Oxford University Press, USA solid and sensible history of a timely subject | An intelligent book, showing in detail the period immediately following the barbarian invasions - a period when Romans worked for their new Goth and other rulers, and then slow or sudden loss of civilization. Once again, we are facing an invasion of Europe by (Islamic) 'barbarians' from an alien,anti-humanistic culture. Are there useful warnings to be learned by studying the fall of Rome? Probably, yes. The first one being, that great civilizations can be overrun by Dark Age hordes.
In Britain - no more literacy, no coins, no tiled roofs or stone buildings. In Western Europe, literacy confined to the church, lost even to kings, loss of coinage, stone buildings reduced to a fraction their former size and made from crudely redressed stone. Ward-P speculates there was loss of population (we don't know), but certainly loss of a complex economy and comforts.
This book is part of the culture wars, since it seems the politically correct view, from the 1970's till now, is that there was no `decline' and no `fall', just a happy transformation into a multicultural society with beautiful spiritual writings by hermits.
He gives only one chapter to the fall, and left me wanting more. This author's take is that the barbarians were a formidable foe, that Rome kept at bay only by constant preparedness. A disastrous battle in the late 300's in which 20,000 legionnaires lost their lives was followed by the Goths rampaging through Italy and sacking Rome in 410. (Why? How could the Romans let this happen??? He doesn't say.)
He focuses on the downward economic-military-political spiral that followed. Much of Italy was so devastated it was excempt from taxes for a decade or more. Other parts of the empire were in bad shape from barbarian raids also.
Less taxes= less army. Less army= couldn't fight on more than one front. Less central power=rival usurping emperor in Gaul, caused Rome to fight civil war instead of barbarians + slave escapes on massive scale to barbarians + popular revolts (?we know too little to tell). The outskirts weren't getting the protection or the control from the center, and so all hell broke loose internally. Result: death spiral into the Dark Ages.
| | The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization by Oxford University Press, USA Brief, but intriguing analysis of post-Roman world | | Ward-Perkins provides an interesting analysis of the economic and social decline concommitant with the end of the Western Roman Empire. His objective is to refute recent works which interpret the period of the fourth through sixth centuries as an "accomodation" of the Barbarians rather than a "decline" of the Roman Empire. He does a good job of providing both strong evidence to support his central thesis - the fall of Rome resulted in a dramatic decline in civilization - as well as a balanced view that not everything Roman was good ("civilized") and everything Gothic or Frankish bad. The price is a bit high for the length of the book, but if you can afford it, it is a nice find. | | The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization by Oxford University Press, USA Decline and Fall | | I thought this was a good little book that presents archaeological evidence for the old fashion "decline and fall of western civilization" viewpoint. He makes the interesting observation that the decline did not occur uniformly over the whole empire, and in the east, it did not really occur at all. It also seems from his evidence that the loss of technology in the west happened over 50-100 years, which depending on how you look at it, is or is not a collapse. I would recommend this book, and a more critical reading of books focusing on the whole empire(in most cases the more literary eastern empire). | | The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization by Oxford University Press, USA 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. | | The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization by Oxford University Press, USA Product Description | Was the fall of Rome a great catastrophe that cast the West into darkness for centuries to come? Or, as scholars argue today, was there no crisis at all, but simply a peaceful blending of barbarians into Roman culture, an essentially positive transformation?
In The Fall of Rome, eminent historian Bryan Ward-Perkins argues that the "peaceful" theory of Rome's "transformation" is badly in error. Indeed, he sees the fall of Rome as a time of horror and dislocation that destroyed a great civilization, throwing the inhabitants of the West back to a
standard of living typical of prehistoric times. Attacking contemporary theories with relish and making use of modern archaeological evidence, he looks at both the wider explanations for the disintegration of the Roman world and also the consequences for the lives of everyday Romans, who were caught
in a world of marauding barbarians, and economic collapse. The book recaptures the drama and violence of the last days of the Roman world, and reminds us of the very real terrors of barbarian occupation. Equally important, Ward-Perkins contends that a key problem with the new way of looking at the
end of the ancient world is that all difficulty and awkwardness is smoothed out into a steady and positive transformation of society. Nothing ever goes badly wrong in this vision of the past. The evidence shows otherwise.
Up-to-date and brilliantly written, combining a lively narrative with the latest research and thirty illustrations, this superb volume reclaims the drama, the violence, and the tragedy of the fall of Rome.
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