New Book from Adrian Goldsworthy: How Rome Fell

[Robert Vermaat]

Hi David,

Thank you for a great review.

For instance, I liked this sentence, which is a good example of his style:

The restless, aggressive and very numerous Germans were always trying to push westwards into the rich lands of Gaul and beyond.

The sentence also demonstrates a very large portion of the book: military affairs.

And it also demonstrates his mindset. That rather outdated view of 'land-hungry tribes, pushing across the borders, threatening an endangered West'.. I don't think that the Germans were more (or less) aggressive than any other enemy of Rome. And geographically, when you look at the maps, the Germans were not so much pushing westwards as they were pushing southwards. From Scandinavia to Italy, Spain and Africa is not exactly pushing into the West.. But that's the Anglo-Saxon worldview of course, and also pushing modern buttons: The West Under Attack! Beyond Gaul was Britain of course (and America ), and Goldsworthy is writing for readers from those lands..

In fact, the enormous and complicated bureaucracy, both civil and military, is frequently damned.[..]
The massive bureaucracy was a system of patronage that bred corruption and incompetence. The layers of ministers were so bad that that often the emperor simply didn’t know what was happening.

A huge bureaucracy for those times, but totally incomparable to modern bureaucracies, and very incompetent. Teachers had to apply to the emperor for their salaries - how much of a bureaucracy is that? Also, as mentioned elsewhere on this forum recently, the total budget of the Roman state was rather small comparable to the gross national product. A few rich folks had a comparable income to that annual budget.. I agree that this was a problem, but that was more due to the corruption and other signs of an incompetent system than to the sheer size of it I think. One can look at this as a failed attempt of the Roman state to rule the empire, or as a sign of a bad society, which I think is how Goldsworthy looks at it. But what he did not do (I think, still have to read it in full) is to compare this to the 'other' empire, which i think developed its bureaucracy into an even more complicated and sizeable system. Yet, it survived.

As examples Goldsworthy cites all the times an emperor left a dangerous frontier to instead focus on an internal usurper.

A rather odd view. What was an emperor to do if not deal with the usurper? Of course, there's a weak system of government and succession behind it, and Goldsworthy would have done better to address that than blame the emperor for looking out for his personal safety.

Goldsworthy does not believe that the enemies Rome faced were any more formidable than those of earlier periods, so dismisses this argument.

I think this is a weak and debatable argument. The Sassanid Persians were perhaps not more formidable than their Parthian precursors, but they had different political goals and were much more aggressive towards to Romans. Also, the development of the German 'supertribes', who also developed their organization and military tactics, surely made them into a much more formidable enemy than their ancestors had been.

In both the front and the back of the book Goldsworthy briefly draws parallels regarding the world today, especially America’s place as the sole superpower. These sections, while interesting, seem somewhat out-of-place, and I wonder if the publisher asked for something like this to be added and they were just tacked on.

Of course he does, it's fashionable today. Compare this to Luttwak, for instance. We’ve discussed this before on this forum and I think there are very few grounds for comparison because the underlying examples differ too much. But it sells. :|