Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire (OUP 2006)

Peter Heather. The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians. Oxford: OUP, 2006.

Heather’s Fall of the Roman Empire is a narrative history surveying political history in the Western Roman Empire from ~375 - ~475 CE. It consists of three major parts: part 1 (“Pax Romana”) outlining the political and cultural background of the Empire c. 375, part 2 (“Crisis”) describing in detail political and military developments during its period, and part 3 (“Fall of Empires”) describing the final political collapse of the western Empire and some historiographical assessments. His approach is conservative: 476 is an important date, and his main thesis is that the West fell primarily because of the shock of external barbarian invasions, not because of internal cultural or institutional failures.

He presents his main thesis and methodology in a telling paragraph:

I take an entirely different view, therefore, from one writer on fifth-century events who has commented: ‘What we call the fall of the Roman Empire was an imaginative experiment that got a little out of hand.’ You can only argue this, it seems to me, if you don’t let narrative history dirty your hands. Any attempt to reconstruct fifth-century events brings home just how violent the process was. In my view, it is impossible to escape the fact that the western Empire broke up because too many outside groups established themselves on its territories and expanded their holdings by warfare. (Heather p. 436)

Accordingly Heather acknowledges the Brown school but largely rejects it: his history is very western, very heavy on politics and military, not big on culture as a historical force, and arranged diachronically (not at all thematically) – things happen one after another in Heather, and the order matters. His metaphor of ‘dirty your hands’ is particularly telling: he’s right, I think, to see some historians as viewing the details of history as being a bit beneath them; not sufficiently analytical, not sufficiently high-level, missing the forest for the trees. By contrast, Heather is a details man, and largely convincing: I walked away surprised by the number and size of military forces that the Empire (sometimes from the East) managed to field as late as the 460s.

Sometimes those details can be overwhelming; the middle section can be a blur of largely interchangeable barbarian invasions and noble Roman resistance. But generally Heather writes in a breezy, light style, and mixes in vignettes of culture and daily life alongside his political and military history. His description of Noricum from the Life of St. Severinus after the collapse of the West is evocative and fun: he quotes soldiers going without pay and going to seek a final paycheck from imperial headquarters. I was surprised to learn how rich in sources the final century of the West was (if not in detailed narrative histories): letter collections like those of Symmachus and Sidonius Apollinaris make it possible to paint compelling pictures of cultural life down to and past 476 (though those sources sound pretty unfun to read). The first and third parts are particularly rich (and fun) in these cultural vignettes.

Overall, a fun, lively read. A bit older now, though I think there have not been major shifts in approaches to late antiquity, and certainly not in his direction (perhaps more environmental history, more DEI work). Though not in line with academic prejudices in 2006 or today – which would rather see continuity and peaceful diversity – Heather convincingly shows that the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 a) happened, b) was important and c) was at least precipitated by foreign invasions.