![]() He traces the events that led to the Empire's division in 395 into western and eastern halves and describes how the Western Empire fell - the last emperor was toppled in a coup in 476 - while the eastern part lasted another 1000 years, evolving into the Byzantine Empire. His starting point is the death of the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius in AD 180 when the Roman Empire was at its height. However, a comforting suggestion from Goldsworthy's meticulously researched, complex and thought-provoking book is that, whatever its causes, the end of the Roman Empire was a long time coming. ![]() ![]() In How Rome Fell, Adrian Goldsworthy suggests this is because Rome's fate seems to carry a warning that "strength and success will always prove transitory in the end, and that civilisation will not automatically triumph".* In these present troubled times, thoughts of decline and fall strike an obvious chord, and, as Goldsworthy notes, the power now most often compared with Rome is the United States. Subsequent generations have been equally eager to seek analogies with their own times. Gibbon looked for messages in the Roman experience for late 18th century Britain, faced with the revolt of its American colonies. He blamed the Empire's "immoderate greatness", by which he meant that "the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight". ![]() Diana Preston examines what causes empires to collapse In his monumental History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon wrote that the reasons for Rome's debacle were "simple and obvious". ![]()
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