How Rome fell
"In AD 200, the Roman Empire seemed unassailable. Its vast territory accounted for most of the known world. By the end of the fifth century, Roman rule had vanished in Western Europe and much of northern Africa, and only a shrunken Eastern Empire remained. What accounts for this improbable decline? Here, Adrian Goldsworthy applies the scholarship, perspective, and narrative skill that defined his monumental Caesar to address perhaps the greatest of all historical questions - how Rome fell. It was a period of remarkable personalities, from the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius to emperors like Diocletian, who portrayed themselves as tough, even brutal, soldiers. It was a time of revolutionary ideas, especially in religion, as Christianity went from persecuted sect to the religion of state and emperors. Goldsworthy pays particular attention to the willingness of Roman soldiers to fight and kill each other. Ultimately, this is the story of how an empire without a serious rival rotted from within, its rulers and institutions putting short-term ambition and personal survival over the wider good of the state." -- Publisher description.
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What Hacker News says
- I recommend reading longer histories and reading them on audiobook. Those tell history in a nonlinear way, going events over and over and over from different perspectives, until you get the feeling of what it was like to live in that time. Your intuition about many rivers branching and merging is exactly what good history is written like. Once you have read some good histories, it's easy to fundamentally fall in love with all the stories and realities of the people travelling down these seemingly infinite rivers.
for example, read Adrian Goldsworthy's "Pax Romana" and "How Rome Fell" for a very entertaining and up to date view of rome at its height and decline, with hundreds of little nonlinear story details. The audiobooks are on the audiobook bay. Listen to them view a Smart Audiobook reader with auto-pause for if you fall asleep, and start listening during exercise, cleaning, cooking, and commuting.
If you start doing this, you'll start listening to about 2 histories a month. In a year you'll have a much deeper understanding of history and how it's written.
Unfortunately, audiobook is the best format I've found for overcoming the size of history texts. It really helps me with my reading difficulties and tendency to get stuck on boring passages. The history is much more engaging when someone is reading for me. Also, many passages are going to go over your head, and it may put you to sleep literally - that's also fine!
The goal is to start understanding and enjoying the small little stories that historians write. History is full of millions of them, and many of them are enjoyable!
- True, true. If you read the book who's title is something to the effect of How Rome Fell, "The Military Explanation", there were signs of a different type, like the slow withdrawal of resources from the frontier.
A failure of will? A lack of resources for whatever reason, perhaps including capable and loyal troops? I can't remember if that was addressed in what I read of the book, but in our case, we seem to be doing OK in terms of the output of our recruiting and training. E.g. this article is apparently not about lowering standards but about adjusting training to achieve acceptable standards at the end of it.
- Peter Heather recently wrote a very similar history which I found to be very good: http://www.amazon.com/Fall-Roman-Empire-History-Barbarians/d...
Heather argues that the Roman empire was still internally healthy, but that increasing pressure from the Persians and the European tribes eventually overwhelmed the empire. Archaeological evidence indicates that the population densities of the barbarian regions may have increased by a factor of two or three since the early days of the empire. The population was larger and more sophisticated, and thus harder to handle.
But just this year Adrian Goldsworthy has written a book countering the new revisionist view that Heather and Williams present ( http://www.amazon.com/How-Rome-Fell-Death-Superpower/dp/0300... ). Goldsworthy argues that the barbarian threat really wasn't that much greater, and that the empire collapsed from within, due to civil war and political strife.
I haven't read Goldsworthy's book yet, but it's on my list.
