Random Thinking

How Rome Fell
by Adrian Keith

Adrian Keith has written a detailed account of the end of the Roman Empire that makes a good argument for why the Empire fell. The book starts from the high point of the Empire in 150AD and works its way to the end of the Empire in the West in 476AD and beyond. Keith shows us how the Empire ultimately had a weak base simply because the man with the biggest army could make a claim to be Emperor. This meant that any general with a strong army could claim to be Emperor which meant that letting any general have a strong army was risky for an Emperor.

The main problem with the book is simply that so little information is available for this period. Keith explains that information such as the population of Rome or the number of soldiers in the army or the number of dead from a plague are simply not available. The information that is available was often written 100 years after the event or was written by biased authors (Christian authors writing about pagan emperors, for example). This means that there are a lot of blank spaces in the story. What was it like to live in Rome when the power of the Emperor had moved to other cities? What was it like to be a citizen of the Empire when civil wars (60 in the third century) were the normal condition of life? What was it like in the Empire during the transition from paganism to Christianity? But are all of these questions left unanswered because of lack of information or is it that Keith simply failed to discuss them? Surely some information must be available.

For me though, the main problem is the last 75 years of the story. Things didn’t seem too bad in 375AD but then a short time later the house of cards collapses. The Goths are defeated by Theodosius and yet 15 years later they are sacking Rome. I felt that Keith didn’t make it clear as to exactly why this happened. Why the Roman army ended up disappearing to the point where barbarians make up a good deal of the army is not made clear. But perhaps this is unknowable at this point. Was it plague? Was it the effect of civil wars? The effect of the splitting of the empire? All of these things? Keith doesn’t discuss this question in any detail leaving it mostly for the reader to guess.

But all in all I did enjoy this book and found Keith’s theories of why the empire fell to make sense and be presented in a way that makes them understandable. I finished the book feeling that I know a lot more about the fall of the Roman Empire and what replaced it. This is a tough subject for a writer because of the lack of first person narrative available for huge chunks of it but Keith does a good job with the information that is available.