The Decline of Ancient Rome: Examining the End of a Great Empire

allan clark: The book is great shape as advertised.

United States on Nov 25, 2023

Amazon Customer: The book arrived on time and in perfect condition

Canada on Jan 29, 2021

Ky Thompson: I had high hopes when I began to read this book. It makes, no doubt, a contribution to our knowledge of the Roman Empire in its latter years. Regrettably, I found it dry and more like a text for a graduate level course in Roman history. The facts, name, and dates are all there, but their sheer numbers make reading the book like trying to drink from a fire hose. I bogged down and lost interest about two thirds of the way through the book.

United Kingdom on Jan 08, 2015

Umar Ahmed: Brilliant. Exceptionally well written and one of the most well researched and objective history books Ive ever read. There's no question the author knows his stuff, but the way he puts it all into context for the reader and really sucks him into that timeframe.

My one qualm was an insufficient analysis at the end of the causes of Rome's fall. While he chronicles the history of the empire through until its end, some more analysis and thought at the end wouldve been nice. As it is, he leaves it to the reader to draw his/her own conclusions.

Canada on Jul 26, 2014

Thomas J. Burns: The answer to the question of how Rome fell depends in large measure on how one defines "Rome" and "falling." Adrian Goldsworthy's entertaining account of this era depicts the considerable change of conditions in the Western Empire from the second century through the sixth century while at the same time downplaying the popular picture of a sudden demise. Odoacer's Gothic mastery of Roman leadership in 476 was as much symbolic as substantial, a milestone in the evolution of Western Europe.

Goldsworthy begins his tale with the reign of Emperor Marcus Aurelius [161-180]. We remember him as a kind of philosopher king, but in truth it is his travels more than his writings that merit attention. Aurelius fought much more than he wrote, and he did so in many different parts of the empire. Many of his subjects never knew where he was, and many thought he was dead long before his time.

One very basic problem for Aurelius was the size of the Empire: it was too big. The author never quite explains how it got this way. In some instances expansion had been critical: North Africa, for example, became the Iowa of the Empire, sending barges of foodstuffs to the Italian peninsula...

United States on Jun 26, 2010

Cato: I want to start off by noting that any book dealing with the fall of the Roman Empire will be unsatisfactory to some because an author has only two choices: 1) cram as much info into a set amount of space to make the book marketable or 2) publish an academic treatise. In this regard, any commercial work on the subject will not be fully complete.

Operating within these confines, this is a good book. To answer another commentator, this book is intended for the serious amateur or armchair historian and provides a great narrative of the last centuries of the glory that was Rome and a convincing explanation for the primary cause of its collapse. This book is also clearly meant to refute Peter Heather's work, which claims that Rome fell not because of internal weakness, but because of the superiority of newly formed barbarian supergroups.

What I find fascinating is that both authors use the same evidence to reach drastically different conclusions. For instance, a cache of weapons found in a lake in Northern Europe is used by Heather to demonstrate that the Germanic tribes had achieved a new level of sophistication and material wealth, as well as weapons equal to that of...

United States on Sep 21, 2009