New Book from Adrian Goldsworthy: How Rome Fell

[Epictetus]

How come that the fall of the Roman Empire is always compared to a crisis in the historian's own age? From Gibbon through Pirenne to Goldworthy, there's always a moral for contemporaries.

Well, I suppose the reason for this is that the Roman Empire is the standard for Western civilisation. It is so deeply entwined in our collective consciousness that it is hardly separable from our concept of a civilisation. It has everything one could want – the selfless philosopher-king, the evil tyrant, successful general, scheming assassin… every story for warning or encouraging someone from a later age.

I think it is easy to find a moral for contemporaries, including in the fall of Rome.

Since theories about the fall of Rome invariably turn out to be incorrect, I no longer believe that there can be a moral here, and I seriously start to think that scholars who say that there is a parallel, ought to go back to the schoolbanks.

Yes, doubtlessly it looks good on a dust jacket and helps to sell books. But I don’t think that authors should stop making theories simply because people in the past were wrong. We need theories to be tested, dissected, and critiqued. And of course they have to be published before we can do that.