The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

...nor did it fall in a day. For a long time, the standard-bearer for the history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire has been the monumental work of Edward Gibbons, written in the eighteenth century. While it is a very worthwhile and interesting text, it suffers from two primary flaws: first, it is of a different historical period than our current one, where the standards for writing (particularly in history) were rather different, and much historical and archaeological research available today was not present; second, it is very long, and filled with Greek and Latin references generally untranslated. It is not a book for the historically or linguistically uninitiated. However, the period of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire is a pivotal time in history, and worthy of study and consideration even by non-historians. To meet this need, the Greenwood Guides (fast becoming one of my favourite general history series) enlisted the aid of scholar James Ermatinger to provide an accessible text covering the same period. In response to this, Ermatinger has supplied a very suitable and interesting text. The Roman Empire's history stretches for many centuries (and, depending upon how one defines things, a few millennia). The Roman Empire grew out of Republican/expansionist times to reach a period of monarchical rule during the same century as the beginning of Christianity; Augustus and Jesus were contemporaries. For all their power, the emperors were rarely a secure and stable lot; as the centuries progressed, the effort to keep up a unified empire under one rule became too much to bear. Even under such leaders as Diocletian and Constantine, the stress of single leadership was too great for stability for any length of time. Ermatinger introduces the subject with a timeline showing the key events, beginning with the year 230 and ending with the 526. It might have been nice to extend the timeline to include Justinian, so that this book would link more directly to the companion volume in the Greenwood Guides series on Justinian. Ermatinger's text begins with a brief discussion of this context for the decline and fall. Rome was not just a city or an empire, but rather an ideal and a culture. Ermatinger quotes the character of Maximus from the recent film 'Gladiator' saying this; he might just as well have quoted the character of Crassus from the earlier film 'Spartacus', who said that Rome was in fact an eternal dream in the mind of God. Certainly the influences of Rome from imperial times continue to be felt in many ways around the world to this day. But Rome as a city and centre of the Empire was not destined to be eternal. Ermatinger begins in earnest in the middle of the third century, looking at the aspects of culture, economics, social order, religious influences and conflicts, and political/military issues in the decline and fall. The dating continues to be controversial. Ermatinger cites arguments for the year 284 (w