Why Rome fell

I n the decade before his death in 1982, the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick was afflicted with a powerful delusion. He became convinced that the Roman empire was still in existence; that despite what was written in all the history books it had in fact never fallen. Nineteen-seventies California was merely a false projection, a fantasy world concocted to mask the ongoing and malevolent reality of Rome, AD 70.

Modern scholars of late antiquity do not suffer from this delusion. But many of them nonetheless argue that the Roman empire didn’t fall — rather, that it went through a ‘transformation’ from a Roman-led civilisation into a Germanic-led one. Such a perspective deliberately avoids the temptation to treat the post-Roman successor states as uncivilised, acknowledges the continuity of Roman administrative practices, and gives the barbarians their due for arriving with semi-sophisticated cultures of their own.

Oxford historian Bryan Ward-Perkins, however, feels that these scholars go too far when they describe this process as one of peaceful immigration and accommodation — as the historian Walter Goffart did in 1980 when he wrote that ‘what we call the fall of the Western Roman empire was an imaginative experiment that got a little out of hand’. So in The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization Ward-Perkins sets out to prove something no schoolchild would have thought to doubt in the first place: that the Roman empire really did fall.

And fell hard. Ward-Perkins deliberately emphasises the violence that attended invasion and collapse: the barbarians abducted farmers, raped nuns, sacked Rome. ‘The whole of Gaul smoked on a single funeral pyre’, wrote a contemporary poet. What’s more, he argues, the collapse of the empire resulted in a sharp economic and cultural decline, as a single complex economic system reaching from Hadrian’s Wall to Asia Minor shattered into a myriad of simpler local economies, a process reflected archaeologically, for example, in the shift from centrally manufactured, high-quality Roman pottery to the rougher, weaker, locally crafted pottery of post-Roman Europe.