The Fall Of The Roman Empire (1997) - Plot & Excerpts
Short chapters help to keep this essay readable. It's designed for the general reader with a brief historical introduction that leads into the main discussion.It seems a little odd to say that the book is about the fall of the Roman empire because the contrast between the fall of the western half and survival of the eastern half is only explicitly made in a short appendix. Rather it is an essay on the role of disunity in the eventual end of the western half of the empire.This disunity is explored by Grant in a series of chapters each looking at an element in the social fabric, be that the attitudes of different social classes towards the state, the tension between the people and the army, what drop outs like monks have to say about attitudes towards society as a whole and so on. After a few chapters the wonder is that the Empire existed at all, but it's hard to say if all of these were unique to the later empire or if like the spread of monasticism and celibacy they were on a large enough scale to make a significant difference to, for example, population levels or patterns of land ownership. Again the effects were not evenly spread throughout the empire but the end results were decisively different.The later Roman empire and it's fall is an interesting topic. Read one book on the subject and you can think that you understand it, read a few and the more complex and engaging the question becomes.However even if you were never to read another book on the decline and fall you would be left with a picture of a world in which the law forbade men to castrate themselves or have their thumbs chopped off as a means of evading military service, the poor sold their children into slavery and the rich used force to drive the tax collectors from their gates while writing letters full of prejudice and learning to each other.
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