Product Description

What really marked the end of the Roman Empire? James O’Donnell’s magnificent new book takes us back to the sixth century and the last time the Empire could be regarded as a single community. Two figures dominate his narrative – Theodoric the ‘barbarian’, whose civilized rule in Italy with his philosopher minister Boethius might have been an inspiration, and in Constantinople Justinian, who destroyed the Empire with his rigid passion for orthodoxy and his restless inability to secure his frontiers with peace. The book closes with Pope Gregory the Great, the polished product of ancient Roman schools, presiding over a Rome in ruins.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #118175 in Books
• Published on: 2009-02-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 448 pages

Review
"'A hugely informative and richly rewarding book' Jonathan Wright, Glasgow Herald. 'O'Donnell has written a thoroughly researched and elegant history of this great empire's division and downfall - rewarding and informative' Julian Fleming, Sunday Business Post. 'A vibrant new look at the Roman empire's collapse - a brief review cannot do justice to the lively, teeming canvas - political, religious, social and cultural - that O'Donnell paints, the extraordinary personalities that emerge, and his stimulating judgements' Peter Jones, BBC History Magazine."

About the Author
James OÂ’Donnell is a distinguished classicist who is now Provost of Georgetown University, Washington. He is the author of Augustine: Saint and Sinner (9781861976048).

Customer Reviews

Old material, revisionist spin
There has been such a glut of historians chronicling the demise of the Roman Empire and the immediate aftermath (if the next 500/1000 years can be termed such). On my shelf are Tom Holland (Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom - Sep 2008), Chris Wickham (The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 -Jan 2009), Adrian Goldsworthy (The Fall Of The West: The Death Of The Roman Superpower: The Long, Slow Death of the Roman Superpower - Feb 09) and Peter Heather (Empires and Barbarians: Migration, Development and the Birth of Europe -June 2009). Collectively they catalogue the politics of a marbled empire to descending into brutal muddy village squabbles. For the general reader seeking good writing, not an academic or someone needing to pass exams these books are - at best - dull. The problem is they cover so much, politics and military entanglements, emerging economic, social and ecclesiastical structures. The evidence is complicated and controversial, as are the primary sources and archaeological data. For much of the time it seems we are living with academic bickering. Is there a clever, passionate author with an `angle of attack' to open the door? An example Niall Ferguson "The Pity of War", no means an easy book he gave a unique perspective on World War 1.

And so to James O'Donnell, certainly a book with a clear angle of attack rooted in the sixth century when Rome is generally accepted to have fallen. Amid considerable detail and no shortage of digressions, this book is hard line revisionism. The collapse was in spite of the Barbarians not because of them. As he says in his preface "the stories I weave together will be unfamiliar to most readers". He argues the Empire could have consolidated and flourished accommodating the barbarian kings who sportingly upheld Roman values. Citing the Ostrogoth King Theodoric O'Donnell argues the assimimulastion of aliens was a benefit not a diasaster, that Theodoric created stability amongst his disparate people and came as close to restoring the Western Roman Empire. His successor, Justinian, wasted this inheritance attempting to restore the empire to the power it had been. This meant removing the barbarians from the western empire and uniting it with a dominant Constantinople. Politically inept and arrogant Justinian's strategy was doomed to failure. His military ineptmess wasted resources and internal infighting diverted his attention from the real threat confronting the empire, Persia. So Rome chose suicide, imploded and the incoming agressors were really the solution not the problem. O'Donnell discuses Pope Gregory and deals with the emergence Roman Catholicism and Islam.

I - as other reviewers - found O'Donnell's arguments partisan and style pompous. He is a clever man and makes every effort to let us know he is. He seeks to contextualise "them" with "us", alluding to contemporary politicians and linking them to people we know relatively little about (he is not alone, others go the same way). And it is simplistic, almost a conjuring trick to imply Rome's end presages our own and offers lessons which we should learn. Yes...but when you go beyond the superficial you end up in a cul de sac. This is a work of some scholarship, certainly offering an "angle of attack" and a strong argument, just what was asked for. Sadly it does not result in a good book. O'Donnell asserts " I mean to tell a fresh story with old materials" but the arguments were somewhat stale and the old materials are not improved by revisionist spin.

Magnificent evocation of the 6th century Roman world - just ignore the liberal interpretations
One could be forgiven for thinking that there is a checklist of obligations being handed out to anyone thinking of writing about Roman history these days which must be followed, which we may be able to reconstruct as going something like this:

"- Picture the Romans as terribly beastly and as nasty as you possibly can. Conversely, portray the barbarians, contrary to their bad press, as actually being more interested in dancing, flower arranging, soft furnishings and soppy romantic poetry than in rape and pillage. In short, describe the barbarians as more Roman than the Romans - the Romans as they should have been;

- Moreover, in doing the above, write as though you were the first person in the entire history of the universe to have even conceived of the possibility that, contrary to the Roman histories, the barbarians might not have been all bad and the Romans not all good, even though every historian over the last two decades has been banging on along exactly this theme;

- Place a modern day liberal-leftist interpretation on those events of 1500 years ago in a world with a totally different mindset. In particular, with total lack of relevance whatsoever to the book, explicitly compare Roman policy towards the barbarians to that of modern day USA towards the Middle East, along with plenty of snide remarks about the latter - don't hold back on your vitriol here;

- Similarly, make an exact comparison in your mind between chalk and cheese, namely between barbarian immigration and invasions into Rome, and modern day immigration. Remark how terrible it was that the beastly Romans weren't too keen on letting in all those hordes of wonderful wonderful cultured barbarian people who really enriched the empire. Blithely ignore the unavoidable fact that, despite your totally irrelevant liberal sensitivities concerning modern day immigration, the barbarian invasions and immigration were, and regardless of attempts to rewrite history will always remain, the primary cause of the permanent fragmentation of the Roman empire;

- Be critical about Christianity and the church; conversely be almost sickeningly deferential towards Islam."

Having said this, if you can brush past all this liberal-left tosh, we have here a magnificent evocation of the 6th century Roman world and its life and culture which ranks amongst the best I have seen. It's extremely well and entertainingly written - I could almost imagine the voice of Simon Schama delivering some of the lines with a biting wit and sarcasm.

It's about time that we totally excised the phrase "Dark Ages" from our vocabulary once and for all, for the ages were anything but. O'Donnell for example remarks ("with apologies to [his] Irish ancestors") that the commonly-held notion that the Celts, in a small remote isolated enclave in the north west of Europe, somehow alone preserved literature and learning and thus ultimately saved Western civilisation is utter rubbish. After Theoderic and Justinian, the third major figure in O'Donnell's account and concluding the work is Pope Gregory the Great; here we get a picture of how civilisation, culture and learning continued despite the ravages of the time.

Whilst much of this "rehabilitation" of the barbarians is indeed welcome, we mustn't get carried away with the idea presented in the subtitle of this book that the barabarians could have rescued the empire whilst the Romans themselves were hell bent on self-destruction. There can be little doubt that many of these barbarians fully bought into the idea of Empire and many of its cultural and social norms, but probably what ultimately destroyed the Empire's unity is that many of the barbarian nobility wanted to run the shop themselves. With too many chiefs each wanting a slice of the pie for their own, permanent breakup was inevitable.

A reviewer of a different edition of this book (The Ruin of the Roman Empire: A New History) wrote of the author being a bit smug and self-satisfied. Well I can certainly see where that feeling comes from and occasionally it grates a bit, but it's certainly not a reason to give up on this book.

A must have for those interested in late Roman and early medieval history.

Contoversial but stimulating take on a crucial epoch.
If this book has a hero of sorts it is the Ostrogothic king Theoderic, a so-called barbarian whose benign regime brought stability and prosperity to Italy after the demise of the western Roman empire. And if it has a villain it is the eastern emperor Justinian who never strayed far from his palace in Constaninople and whose misjudgements, according to the author, irrevocably damaged the empire. Indeed from the moment of his appearance Justinian receives a relentless drubbing at the hands of Mr O'Donnell, a hatchet job that reminded me not so much of Procopius on Justinian but of that other notorious attempt to bury an emperor: Tacitus on Tiberius. And Mr O'Donnell's methods are very Tacitean. Even when Justinian does something we might deem neutral or innocuous (such as the building of Santa Sophia) the author puts a malodorous spin on it or he grubs around for the perjorative adjective. In one instance he refers to Justinian's "stubby fingers", just as you might refer to someone's greasy mitts. Stubby fingers? Justinian? Says who? Not according to his portrait in the famous mosaic of San Vitale which happens to decorate the dustjacket of this book.

Mr O'Donnell's view of the "barbarians" is the one that has become fashionable in recent years and was strongly endorsed recently by Tony Robinson in the BBC's Timewatch series. The historians of late antiquity gave them a bad press for obvious reasons, their designation as barbarians does them a disservice, they weren't such bad guys (the beastly Huns excepted although Mr O'Donnell hints that the ancients may have exaggerated even in their case), they weren't so uncultured and in many instances they strove to preserve the best of Roman culture. Indeed Theoderic's Italy was pretty much a continuation of empire and that famous date of AD476 is highly dodgy. But Mr O'Donnell never invites us to spend time with any of the besieged and beleagured citizens of Gaul, Spain and North Africa and as Bryan Ward-Perkins points out in his recent The Fall of Rome (an excellent and concise counterblast) archaeological and other evidence frequently contradicts the "vicar's tea party " lobby.

When things go wrong in history how much is due to poor judgement and how much to accident and the unexpected? Take for instance Justinian's attempt to reconquer Italy for the empire. If the Ostrogoths had been a total walkover like the effete Vandals in North Africa and if the Lombards had stayed out of things then Justinian's reconquest might have been a triumph. If poor or bad judgements are the reason, then why not rope in as co-accused Theoderic for failing to appoint a strong successor, or Valentinian III for murdering Aetius, or Honorius for disposing of Stilicho, or Theodosius for dividing the empire between his dozy sons, or Constantine for dismantling Diocletian's tetrarchy, or Marcus Aurelius for ignoring the adoption principle, or Trajan for overextending the empire? You can fill in the gaps yourself.The fact is that by the time Justinian ascended the throne, the Roman empire was a grand vessel already well and truly holed and which continued to list, with occasional moments of bouyancy, for the next 900 years.

You may get the impression from the above that I didn't care much for Mr O'Donnell's book but you'd be wrong. He is deliberately provocative and both the scholar and layman will find much to disagree with. Ultimately I did not find the thrust of his argument entirely persuasive. But this wide-ranging and ambitious book is on the whole a bracing and stimulating read and there are plenty of fresh insights to be gleaned. Occasionally I found Mr O'Donnell a little too wide-ranging and I experienced the occasional longeur especially towards the end where he discusses the pontificate of Gregory the Great and the cult of the archangel Michael - the mass of tedious facts and observations seems to have little relevance to the book's title (one such superfluous fact produces a classic howler when the author informs us, apropos of the Castel Sant Angelo, that it was used in the late 19th century by Giuseppe Verdi as the setting for the last act of the opera Tosca which in fact was written by Puccini and premiered at the dawn of the 20th century.) But let me not carp too much. The book is an impressive achievement.

Incidentally Mr O'Donnell touches on a point I found interesting, namely how advances in technology, especially the development of oceangoing navigation, tipped the balance of power decisively in favour of Europeans and away from Islam during the late mediaeval period and early renaissance. I have often wondered what part the failure of technological advance (due, for example, to the existance of slavery and the Roman educational system) played in the demise of the empire. Is there a book in this for any scholar out there?