The Ruin of the Roman Empire: A New History by James J. O’Donnell (PDF)

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“Anexotic and instructive tale, told with life, learning and just the right measure of laughter on every page. O’Donnell combines a historian’s mastery of substance with a born storyteller’s sense of style to create a magnificent work of art. Perfect for history-lovers and admirers of great writing alike.” — Madeleine K. Albright, former U.S. Secretary of StateThe dream Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar shared of uniting Europe, the Medi-terranean, and the Middle East in a single community shuddered and then collapsed in the wars and disasters of the sixth century. Historian and classicist James J. O’Donnell—who last brought readers his masterful, disturbing, and revelatory biography of Saint Augustine—revisits this old story in a fresh way, bringing home its sometimes painful relevance to today’s issues.With unexpected detail and in his hauntingly vivid style, O’Donnell begins at a time of apparent Roman revival and brings readers 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 today’s crises and offers hints how to navigate them—if present leaders will heed this story.

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Editorial Reviews: Review “O’Donnell’s richly layered book provides significant glimpses into the many factors that leveled a mighty empire.” — Publishers Weekly“A vigorous history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.” — Kirkus Reviews“Poetic, haunting and humane: a learned and often visceral account of how the Mediterranean ceased to be Roman which serves simultaneously as charge-sheet and lament.” — Tom Holland, author of Rubicon“James O’Donnell’s The Ruin of the Roman Empire: A New History takes as its centrepiece the period of Ostrogothic rule in sixth-century Italy. . . . [It is] revelatory: scholarly and original, unafraid to tackle profound issues of cultural and religious identity, and often hauntingly poetic.” — Times Literary Supplement (London)“An exotic and instructive tale, told with life, learning and just the right measure of laughter on every page. O’Donnell combines a historian’s mastery of substance with a born storyteller’s sense of style to create a magnificent work of art. Perfect for history-lovers and admirers of great writing alike.” — Madeleine K. Albright, former U.S. Secretary of State From the Back Cover The dream Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar shared of uniting Europe, the Medi-terranean, and the Middle East in a single community shuddered and then collapsed in the wars and disasters of the sixth century. Historian and classicist James J. O’Donnell—who last brought readers his masterful, disturbing, and revelatory biography of Saint Augustine—revisits this old story in a fresh way, bringing home its sometimes painful relevance to today’s issues.With unexpected detail and in his hauntingly vivid style, O’Donnell begins at a time of apparent Roman revival and brings readers 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 today’s crises and offers hints how to navigate them—if present leaders will heed this story. About the Author James J. O’donnell is a classicist who served for ten years as Provost of Georgetown University and is now University Librarian at Arizona State University. He is the author of several books including Augustine, The Ruin of the Roman Empire, and Avatars of the Word. He is the former president of the American Philological Association, a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, and the chair of the Board of Directors of the American Council of Learned Societies. He is seen here at an ancient monastery on the eastern frontier of the Roman Empire, in Syria. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Why did the Roman Empire collapse, and what lessons could the U.S. learn from that? For 200 years after Caesar’s death in 14 BC, the Roman Empire maintained an impressive prosperity. Then a series of lost opportunities, blunders, and wars brought about its end.The most prominent citizens of the Roman empire in its most prosperous times lived far from Italy (mainly in the cities of the east) and owed their wealth to many factors, of which the Roman peace was only one, and not indispensable. Local cultures were distinct from each other. Dissolution often threatened the hold of the imperial regime over its far-flung realms – between 235 and 284 dissolution very nearly prevailed, when the longest-reigning emperor of that period was a usurper too marginal for more serious but shorter-lived contenders to bother taking time to exterminate. The remaking of empire in 284 and after, first by emperor Diocletian and then by Constantine, was intended as an expression of continuity, though much had to change in order to create a stable new regime.If Rome did not fall in 202 BC (its victory in the second Punic War) or 476 AD, when did Rome fall? The sacking of Constantinople in 1453 is suggested by Gibbon. The balance of power in medieval Asia Minor had tilted strongly toward the Turks 200 years earlier, when the other Roman Empire and its allies and friends, the crusaders, overthrew the Christian empire of Constantinople. Mehmed the Conqueror dismantled the dilapidated city’s rump of an empire in 1453, securing Turkish domination. Mehmed saw himself as the successor to the Roman emperor, and thus in a way Constantine’s fundamental vision was sustained intact till 1924 – the last gasp of the Ottoman empire.Nero’s death let fall a crown, and in the year 69, provincial generals Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and finally Vespasian grasped at it, from outside Rome. After 69, emperors spent more and more time with their armies and on the frontiers. Hadrian in the early second century and the Severan emperors around 200 were away almost as much as they were home. Rome was a military backwater and many successful emperors never saw it during their reigns. Constantinople, on the other hand, was a palace town, almost constantly aware of the presence of an emperor after Theodosius’s death in 395. The military cities in the west lost their prestige when in 402 emperor Honorius retreated to the Italian city of Ravenna, with its Adriatic port offering ready sea communication to Constantinople. He and his brother Arcadius in Constantinople stood at the front of a long line of emperors who were mostly figureheads, living in the capital and delegating military leadership to the able.Rome’s emperors continued to care for the city when they had time, but dramatic losses befell the city as well. The senate still met, traditional offices were filled, and the old families clung to wealth and position – but their numbers were greatly diminished. By the sixth century, there may have been only a very few dozen active senators, linked together in less than a dozen families. Their pedigrees were often sketchy as many rough-bred military husbands post Constantine married into distinguished but impoverished families grateful for protection and the sometimes ill-gotten wealth of their new sons.Rome had a population of 1 million or so in the second century, but it was estimated to fallen to 800,000 by 400, when Constantinople and Ravenna eclipsed Rome’s function as a capital. Rome lost half of that in the next 50 years, marked by Alaric’s brief sack of the city in 410, and it lost another half or three-quarters by the late 400s, when the Vandal raid of 455 distinguished itself as the world of a half century of indignities. There may have been only 100,000 left by A.D. 500. The fortunate followed power to other capitals, while others died, fled, or failed to reproduce.To the historical eye, change was everywhere and continual. The Rome of Augustus had acquired, in the 3rd and 4th centuries, sturdy new perimeter defense walls towering 40 – 50 feet. Fourth-century sources counted 28 libraries, six obelisks, eight bridges, eleven forums, ten basilicas, eleven public baths, eighteen aqueducts, nine circuses and theaters, two triumphal columns, fifteen fountains, twenty-two equestrian statues, eighty golden statues, twenty-four ivory statues, thirty-six triumphal arches, 290 granaries and warehouses, 856 private baths, 254 bakeries, and 46 brothels.The sixth-century brought farmers diverting some of the aqueduct water for mills and irrigation (allowed because maintain the aqueducts was expensive and difficult, especially as demand fell), the grain supply no longer flooded the city at the tax collector’s command every year – the government in Africa kept its grain or sold it at market prices. Gladiatorial contexts in the Colosseum ended under mainly Christian emperors, probably because they lost popularity or competition from chariot racing. Wild beast hunts lasted into the sixth century, with loses devoured by their would-be prey. In the 470s individual senators and families had their names carved on their own particular seats.Rome and much of what it had conquered were unready for empire – the Romanization of the west came about through establishment of colonies of retired soldiers and the extension of institutions of Roman government and taxation to the new countries. A little emperor worship and a lot of taxpaying were enough to satisfy the government, and Latin was the language of prestige among elites – unless you knew Greek. Carthage, destroyed in 146 BC, then reborn from the ruins, might claim to be the second city of the west, but there was no serious candidate for third. Much of the countryside of Gaul and Spain, as one moved farther from the Mediterranean, was still underdeveloped. Bordeaux and Tours marked the rough limits of real urbanization and Romanization in Gaul, the their rivers flowed westward, away from the Mediterranean and thus were not good trading partners for the rest of the empire.Frontier societies on the Rhine and Danube were the liveliest places in the Roman west – a thriving military where tax revenues gathered elsewhere were spent to support soldiers and officials who were in many respects economically idle and useless. Those living across the river were immune from Roman taxation, but attracted by the spending on the frontier. They also learned from the Romans, especially the German barbarians.No Roman ruler seems to ever have had a coherent notion of what would become of the world beyond Rome’s northern frontiers (Britain and Ireland). The Arabs seemed eternally negligible, the Sahara made a satisfactory defensive barrier to the south. Rome settle for stasis and imagined that could be permanent. Rome chose to be the captive spectator and passive victim of events across the Rhine and Danube. Every emperor from Augustus on shares blame for that passivity.It all started with a refugee crisis. Stretching from the Dnieper River in Ukraine to the Great Wall of China is the natural home of those who flourished on the grasslands of the steppes. Horsemen of the steppes moved across the map at speeds unimaginable for human transport anywhere else in the world; they also learned raiding and elbowing locals aside. Their western enemies called them Huns.In 373, the Huns began to move into lands where the Romans would hear of them. Locals moved deeper inside the Roman territory. Eventually, the Roman army set out to make an example of the visitors, whom they had offended with their own high-handedness – only to be themselves thrashed. The expanse beyond the river turned into a non-man’s land – nothing but threats for the Romans. Rome would fight the rest of its wars on the northern frontier inside its own boundaries.Then came the Vandals, and others. Once they (and the Visigoths) crossed Roman boundaries, they sensed their own power – and their unity was strengthened by being demonized by the Romans. Losing Africa and its abundant grain, meant the Roman Mediterranean would never again be a unified empire.Marcellinus wrote that after 476 A.D., Gothic kings held Rome. Never mind that there was another western emperor (Julius Nepos) whom Constantinople recognized, and was still in business as late as 480. There also came a push to establish a single form of Christianity throughout the world. This led to ruinous wars of the 530s through the 550s, and made the desired unity impossible to attain. It did, however, ensure its subjects would worship Christ for 900 years, though not with one voice.In the 6th and 7th centuries, Roman emperors were compelled as never before to attend to worlds beyond their frontiers.Emperors flunked basic economics. No Roman emperor had a reasonable idea of the prosperity of his realm, except in the most general terms and mainly long after the fact. No emperor could say, if asked, what steps he/his government might take to improve or weaken the economic fortunes of a region, except that conquest of neighbors might provide plunder and imported wealth, and that tax relief would make the emperor popular. It is a miracle, therefore, that Rome survived as long as it did.Justin II should have made peace at the eastern frontier on a basis of agreed spheres of influence and a common interest in trade. Justinian should have made his way to the eastern front – Persia, where he would have been welcomed. Likely contact with India and China would have occurred. Instead, Muhammad’s heirs did so, and the world hasn’t been the same since. Justinian also should have cemented relations with the west.Peacemaking east and west would have left Justin II ready for the most critical task – pacification and development of his homeland in the Balkans. O’Donnell also suggest that Justinian should have taken religion a bit less seriously. Instead, he ended up confirming Egypt in its hostility to the throne and his religion, and seeing Syria turn decisively against the metropolis as well. Overall, Justinian never fought a war he should have fought, and was too eager to fight the ones he needed have. Thus, a self-inflicted ruin of the Roman empire.

⭐I’ve been reading revisionist histories of Rome (and Christianity for 40 years). O’Donnell is right up to a point: Justinian made decisions in diplomacy, on matters of religion and warfare with serious consequences that weakened the Eastern Empire. For one thing he hoped to restore the Roman State to the Ocean, but he tried to do it without the resources to accomplish the goal he had set for himself. His use of precious resources weakened defences in the Balkans and the eastern frontier areas. His religious policies further alienated large sections of the population who were already disaffected well before his reign, religious issues among Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Christians which have only recently be dealth with after 1,500 years.Justinian’s Wars and other policies were the last kick of the old Roman Empire: they were the policies of a bygone age of Roman universal sway and power which demanded uniformity and obedience. In 535 AD this kind of thinking was an anchronism (from our point of view in hindsight), but it hadn’t occurred to many people then. People in the 7th century during the Muslim invasions were wondering what was happening to “Romania” (= the Roman Empire).O’Donnell believes Justinian and Theodora ruined the Roman Empire or what was left of it with consequences for centuries. Yes and no. It’s hardly a new opinion. J.B. Bury, A.H.M Jones, John Julius Norwich and many others have already said it. It’s not new history to write that Justinian in his misguided ambitions ‘ruined’ the Roman Empire, but to blame him for the subsequent development of history in that corner of the world for the next 1,000 years is a bit much. How was Justinian supposed to know about Islam? Justinian was Roman Emperor: in his mind he had a right to all the lost territories. It’s easy for us in hindsight to judge him. If only he had done this, things would have turned out for the better. Would they have? Possibly.The author has many great insights into the period. I found these valuable to add to the wealth of knowledge provided by other writers on the history of Late Antiquity, but I am not convinced that the realms of Theodoric the Great (Ostrogoths) and Clovis (Franks) and Euric (Visigoths) in Spain (and their successors) were still part of the Roman Empire; certainly not in the realms of the Vandals in North Africa or the statelets in Britain. Those who replaced legitimate Roman authority or had a loose connection with it may have tried to rule in the Roman fashion or in the name of the emperors in Constantiople, but the lands they controlled were in various stages of decline, economically, culturally and socially and Roman authority was absent. Roman authority existed in territories whose administrations were appointed by the emperors and controlled by them.Rome in the West was gone: Justinian tried and only partially succeeded in the restoration. But why begin the story of the ruin with him? Why not with Theodosius the Great? or Honorius?Perhaps the book should have been titled, “The Further Ruin of the Shrunken Roman Empire” or “The last real Roman Emperor, Justinian, whose first language was Latin makes a bid to become Restorator Orbis and blows it, or maybe, he shouldn’t have tried.”

⭐There has been such a glut of historians chronicling the demise of the Roman Empire and the immediate aftermath (if the next 500/1000 years can be termed such). On my shelf are Tom Holland (Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom – Sep 2008), Chris Wickham (The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 -Jan 2009), Adrian Goldsworthy (The Fall Of The West: The Death Of The Roman Superpower: The Long, Slow Death of the Roman Superpower – Feb 09) and Peter Heather (Empires and Barbarians: Migration, Development and the Birth of Europe -June 2009). Collectively they catalogue the politics of a marbled empire to descending into brutal muddy village squabbles. For the general reader seeking good writing, not an academic or someone needing to pass exams these books are – at best – dull. The problem is they cover so much, politics and military entanglements, emerging economic, social and ecclesiastical structures. The evidence is complicated and controversial, as are the primary sources and archaeological data. For much of the time it seems we are living with academic bickering. Is there a clever, passionate author with an `angle of attack’ to open the door? An example Niall Ferguson “The Pity of War”, no means an easy book he gave a unique perspective on World War 1.And so to James O’Donnell, certainly a book with a clear angle of attack rooted in the sixth century when Rome is generally accepted to have fallen. Amid considerable detail and no shortage of digressions, this book is hard line revisionism. The collapse was in spite of the Barbarians not because of them. As he says in his preface “the stories I weave together will be unfamiliar to most readers”. He argues the Empire could have consolidated and flourished accommodating the barbarian kings who sportingly upheld Roman values. Citing the Ostrogoth King Theodoric O’Donnell argues the assimimulastion of aliens was a benefit not a diasaster, that Theodoric created stability amongst his disparate people and came as close to restoring the Western Roman Empire. His successor, Justinian, wasted this inheritance attempting to restore the empire to the power it had been. This meant removing the barbarians from the western empire and uniting it with a dominant Constantinople. Politically inept and arrogant Justinian’s strategy was doomed to failure. His military ineptmess wasted resources and internal infighting diverted his attention from the real threat confronting the empire, Persia. So Rome chose suicide, imploded and the incoming agressors were really the solution not the problem. O’Donnell discuses Pope Gregory and deals with the emergence Roman Catholicism and Islam.I – as other reviewers – found O’Donnell’s arguments partisan and style pompous. He is a clever man and makes every effort to let us know he is. He seeks to contextualise “them” with “us”, alluding to contemporary politicians and linking them to people we know relatively little about (he is not alone, others go the same way). And it is simplistic, almost a conjuring trick to imply Rome’s end presages our own and offers lessons which we should learn. Yes…but when you go beyond the superficial you end up in a cul de sac. This is a work of some scholarship, certainly offering an “angle of attack” and a strong argument, just what was asked for. Sadly it does not result in a good book. O’Donnell asserts ” I mean to tell a fresh story with old materials” but the arguments were somewhat stale and the old materials are not improved by revisionist spin.

⭐If this book has a hero of sorts it is the Ostrogothic king Theoderic, a so-called barbarian whose benign regime brought stability and prosperity to Italy after the demise of the western Roman empire. And if it has a villain it is the eastern emperor Justinian who never strayed far from his palace in Constaninople and whose misjudgements, according to the author, irrevocably damaged the empire. Indeed from the moment of his appearance Justinian receives a relentless drubbing at the hands of Mr O’Donnell, a hatchet job that reminded me not so much of Procopius on Justinian but of that other notorious attempt to bury an emperor: Tacitus on Tiberius. And Mr O’Donnell’s methods are very Tacitean. Even when Justinian does something we might deem neutral or innocuous (such as the building of Santa Sophia) the author puts a malodorous spin on it or he grubs around for the perjorative adjective. In one instance he refers to Justinian’s “stubby fingers”, just as you might refer to someone’s greasy mitts. Stubby fingers? Justinian? Says who? Not according to his portrait in the famous mosaic of San Vitale which happens to decorate the dustjacket of this book.Mr O’Donnell’s view of the “barbarians” is the one that has become fashionable in recent years and was strongly endorsed recently by Tony Robinson in the BBC’s Timewatch series. The historians of late antiquity gave them a bad press for obvious reasons, their designation as barbarians does them a disservice, they weren’t such bad guys (the beastly Huns excepted although Mr O’Donnell hints that the ancients may have exaggerated even in their case), they weren’t so uncultured and in many instances they strove to preserve the best of Roman culture. Indeed Theoderic’s Italy was pretty much a continuation of empire and that famous date of AD476 is highly dodgy. But Mr O’Donnell never invites us to spend time with any of the besieged and beleagured citizens of Gaul, Spain and North Africa and as Bryan Ward-Perkins points out in his recent The Fall of Rome (an excellent and concise counterblast) archaeological and other evidence frequently contradicts the “vicar’s tea party ” lobby.When things go wrong in history how much is due to poor judgement and how much to accident and the unexpected? Take for instance Justinian’s attempt to reconquer Italy for the empire. If the Ostrogoths had been a total walkover like the effete Vandals in North Africa and if the Lombards had stayed out of things then Justinian’s reconquest might have been a triumph. If poor or bad judgements are the reason, then why not rope in as co-accused Theoderic for failing to appoint a strong successor, or Valentinian III for murdering Aetius, or Honorius for disposing of Stilicho, or Theodosius for dividing the empire between his dozy sons, or Constantine for dismantling Diocletian’s tetrarchy, or Marcus Aurelius for ignoring the adoption principle, or Trajan for overextending the empire? You can fill in the gaps yourself.The fact is that by the time Justinian ascended the throne, the Roman empire was a grand vessel already well and truly holed and which continued to list, with occasional moments of bouyancy, for the next 900 years.You may get the impression from the above that I didn’t care much for Mr O’Donnell’s book but you’d be wrong. He is deliberately provocative and both the scholar and layman will find much to disagree with. Ultimately I did not find the thrust of his argument entirely persuasive. But this wide-ranging and ambitious book is on the whole a bracing and stimulating read and there are plenty of fresh insights to be gleaned. Occasionally I found Mr O’Donnell a little too wide-ranging and I experienced the occasional longeur especially towards the end where he discusses the pontificate of Gregory the Great and the cult of the archangel Michael – the mass of tedious facts and observations seems to have little relevance to the book’s title (one such superfluous fact produces a classic howler when the author informs us, apropos of the Castel Sant Angelo, that it was used in the late 19th century by Giuseppe Verdi as the setting for the last act of the opera Tosca which in fact was written by Puccini and premiered at the dawn of the 20th century.) But let me not carp too much. The book is an impressive achievement.Incidentally Mr O’Donnell touches on a point I found interesting, namely how advances in technology, especially the development of oceangoing navigation, tipped the balance of power decisively in favour of Europeans and away from Islam during the late mediaeval period and early renaissance. I have often wondered what part the failure of technological advance (due, for example, to the existance of slavery and the Roman educational system) played in the demise of the empire. Is there a book in this for any scholar out there?

⭐One could be forgiven for thinking that there is a checklist of obligations being handed out to anyone thinking of writing about Roman history these days which must be followed, which we may be able to reconstruct as going something like this:”- Picture the Romans as terribly beastly and as nasty as you possibly can. Conversely, portray the barbarians, contrary to their bad press, as actually being more interested in dancing, flower arranging, soft furnishings and soppy romantic poetry than in rape and pillage. In short, describe the barbarians as more Roman than the Romans – the Romans as they should have been;- Moreover, in doing the above, write as though you were the first person in the entire history of the universe to have even conceived of the possibility that, contrary to the Roman histories, the barbarians might not have been all bad and the Romans not all good, even though every historian over the last two decades has been banging on along exactly this theme;- Place a modern day liberal-leftist interpretation on those events of 1500 years ago in a world with a totally different mindset. In particular, with total lack of relevance whatsoever to the book, explicitly compare Roman policy towards the barbarians to that of modern day USA towards the Middle East, along with plenty of snide remarks about the latter – don’t hold back on your vitriol here;- Similarly, make an exact comparison in your mind between chalk and cheese, namely between barbarian immigration and invasions into Rome, and modern day immigration. Remark how terrible it was that the beastly Romans weren’t too keen on letting in all those hordes of wonderful wonderful cultured barbarian people who really enriched the empire. Blithely ignore the unavoidable fact that, despite your totally irrelevant liberal sensitivities concerning modern day immigration, the barbarian invasions and immigration were, and regardless of attempts to rewrite history will always remain, the primary cause of the permanent fragmentation of the Roman empire;- Be critical about Christianity and the church; conversely be almost sickeningly deferential towards Islam.”Having said this, if you can brush past all this liberal-left tosh, we have here a magnificent evocation of the 6th century Roman world and its life and culture which ranks amongst the best I have seen. It’s extremely well and entertainingly written – I could almost imagine the voice of Simon Schama delivering some of the lines with a biting wit and sarcasm.It’s about time that we totally excised the phrase “Dark Ages” from our vocabulary once and for all, for the ages were anything but. O’Donnell for example remarks (“with apologies to [his] Irish ancestors”) that the commonly-held notion that the Celts, in a small remote isolated enclave in the north west of Europe, somehow alone preserved literature and learning and thus ultimately saved Western civilisation is utter rubbish. After Theoderic and Justinian, the third major figure in O’Donnell’s account and concluding the work is Pope Gregory the Great; here we get a picture of how civilisation, culture and learning continued despite the ravages of the time.Whilst much of this “rehabilitation” of the barbarians is indeed welcome, we mustn’t get carried away with the idea presented in the subtitle of this book that the barabarians could have rescued the empire whilst the Romans themselves were hell bent on self-destruction. There can be little doubt that many of these barbarians fully bought into the idea of Empire and many of its cultural and social norms, but probably what ultimately destroyed the Empire’s unity is that many of the barbarian nobility wanted to run the shop themselves. With too many chiefs each wanting a slice of the pie for their own, permanent breakup was inevitable.A reviewer of a different edition of this book (

⭐The Ruin of the Roman Empire: A New History

⭐) wrote of the author being a bit smug and self-satisfied. Well I can certainly see where that feeling comes from and occasionally it grates a bit, but it’s certainly not a reason to give up on this book.A must have for those interested in late Roman and early medieval history.

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