Books : The Ruin of the Roman Empire: A New History
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 937.06
EAN: 9780060787370
ISBN: 0060787376
Label: Ecco
Manufacturer: Ecco
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 448
Publication Date: September 01, 2008
Publisher: Ecco
Release Date: September 16, 2008
Sales Rank: 31066
Studio: Ecco
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Product Description:
The dream Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar shared of uniting Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East in a single community shuddered and then collapsed in the wars and disasters of the sixth century. It was a looking-glass world, where some Romans idealized the Persian emperor while barbarian kings in Italy and France worked tirelessly to save the pieces of the Roman dream they had inherited. At the center of the old Roman Empire, in his vast and pompous Constantinople palace, the emperor Justinian, with too little education and too much religion, set out to restore his empire to its glories. Step by step, the things he did to bring back the past sealed the doom of his entire civilization.
Historian and classicist James J. O'Donnell—who last brought us his masterful, disturbing, and revelatory biography of Saint Augustine—revisits this old story in a fresh way, bringing home its sometimes painful relevance to issues of our own time.
With unexpected detail and in his hauntingly vivid style, O'Donnell begins at a time of apparent Roman revival and brings us to the moment of imminent collapse that just preceded the rise of Islam. Illegal migrations of peoples, religious wars, global pandemics, and the temptations of empire: Rome's end foreshadows our own crises and offers hints how to navigate them—if we will heed this story.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
I will leave this short and to the point, others have already covered the high points. The book is great. Well written and enjoyable to the scholar or the casually interested person.
I only gave it four out of five because I disagree with the author's premise. I ascribe to a more traditional narrative of the Collapse of the Western Empire as found in Peter Heather's or Brian Ward-Perkins' latest books.
Dr. O'Donnell's book is the best defense of modern revisionist history I have read to date. Even if you disagree with the Late Antique theorists do not pass this book up.
Edited to add: I finally finished this book and wanted to warn readers out there that there are several factual errors to be aware of. Almost all of them that I noticed and confirmed were from pages 237-38.
Rating: -
This book - which I greatly enjoyed - also roused in me some deep feelings which, at the risk of self-indulgence, I am moved to share.
As an adolescent, coming of age in a midland city in England, feeling somewhat estranged because I was not English, I became rooted in my new environment by embracing and cherishing its medieval buildings, or what the Luftwaffe had left of them. Mostly this was churches, but also street patterns and a bit of city wall. Always a rather dreamy child, not particularly disposed to work or study hard, I spent a lot of time on my bike wandering the Warwickshire countryside in the early hours of the morning (and perplexing my family by sleeping away most of the afternoon, the better to be ready to set forth again at 3:30 am), mostly drawn - again - to churches, ancient camps and the like. You get the picture.
I thought I understood the middle-ages. It was a world of faith and ignorance and bravery and adventure and romance on which I could superimpose myself being noble, brave, adventuresome and, all-in-all, cutting a fine romantic figure. The more obscure the era, the better the opportunity for superimposition, so I headed back in time past Normans and Saxons to what was then called the "dark ages," a time when pretty much anything seemed possible. My parents - to whom I owe an enormous debt of thanks - may have despaired at my odd hours, but they had promised me early that if there were books that I wanted to read they ... Read More
Rating:  -
Excellent read, sometime in love with his own quirky type of address, one has the suspicion the writer sacrifices a balanced view to the turn of a witty phrase. But the research and the revision of history contradicting a Gibbon-type Fall of the Roman Empire is fascinating and convincing.
Rating:  -
To be fair, I rated this book at 3 stars only because computer software requires a rating. I have not read it, but I happened upon it today at my local bookstore and paged through it for quite a while. It appears very lively and broad-brush and outspoken and interesting in its observations. Just what I normally would like. But I'm getting old so the adjectives "lively and broad-brush" now also raise to me high alert as to whether a book is well-sourced in scholarship. This book is relatively thin on footnotes. And when one of the only two jacket blurbs for it comes from the author's Georgetown neighbor--ex-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who can scarcely be accused of being a Byzantine scholar--one wonders how much you can trust it. Maybe the book is great. I frankly don't know, because I'm not a Byzantine expert. If YOU are and have read it, please speak up on this site and help the rest of us out. Pending that, I for now am going to wait two or three months for the impending publication of the Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire--quite a tome at about 1000 pages (and quite pricey), but likely to be the definitive work for the next couple decades. You won't find it listed yet on the Amazon or Barnes and Noble websites. Look for its description at Cambridge University Press's website.
Rating: -
For a couple hundred years after Gibbon's time, the common wisdom was that Rome's empire in the West finally fell to overwhelming and violent barbarian invasions during the 5th century CE (although the precise date and the underlying causes were much disputed). In the 20th and 21st centuries a newer theory gained much ground, claiming that Rome did not fall but merely transitioned from a more or less unitary classical culture to a very decentralized early medieval world over perhaps 200 years (and with migrations rather than invasions. According to this view, the new rulers in the West were well-assimilated into the Roman polity and perpetuated its culture. James J. O'Donnell, author of this book, is a firm adherent of the "no fall" school, but with something of a twist. He believes that there was a fall, but one that came in the 6th century CE and later and at the hands of fellow "Romans," sent from the imperial capital of Constantinople.
Justinian I's attempt to recreate a united empire under his rule by dispossessing the "barbarian usurpers" in the West and in Africa, says O'Donnell, was not only misguided but catastrophic for both West and East. It resulted in the complete ruin of the City of Rome, the fragmentation and devastation of all Italy and the fatal crippling of all of Roman culture in the rest of Western Europe and North Africa. In the East Justinian's policy uselessly sacrificed large amounts of limited (indeed, irreplaceable) resources in pursuit of ... Read More
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