I recently finished reading Peter Heather's newest book "The Fall of the Roman Empire". As an author, he usually writes about those on the north-eastern side of the Roman limes: the Goths and Huns, and the OUP describes him, racily, as the leading authority on the barbarians. Which, surely, has rarely have been a handier subject than today.
The cover notes say that Heather offers a new and radical interpretation of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire: that it was not the failings but the success of the Roman Empire that led to its downfall. Here, the name of the book is important, and I am sure that the contrast with Gibbons' "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" is completely intentional. Heather, basically, strips away any process of decline. Essentially, he says that the Roman Empire was strong - and in many ways getting stronger - right up until the first impact upon the Danubian provinces of the Hunnic migrations in the 360's.
He's certainly a big barbarophile: he never really says it out loud, but one does get the feeling that he is arguing less in defence of the late western Empire against charges of decadence, and more in favour of the barbarians. A sort of "the better team won" thing, and obviously, it's better if your team beats Manchester United than Accrington Stanley.
It is traditional for treatments of this period to dive into the "how small were the invading tribes that destroyed Rome?" reverse auction. Heather's figures are definitely towards the lower end of the bidding - low five figures, in the main - but his analysis of tribal confederations (caused, he says, by a mixture of Hunnic and Roman activities amongst the Germanic peoples), and the localised impact of these concentrated forces when facing static, 3rd rate Roman border defence forces - is convincing.
The real oddity of the book for me is the ending. After 450-odd pages of narrative, analysis and evidence-gathering the conclusion - that the Romans provided just the right mixture of example, grooming and provocation to harden and consolidate the Germanic tribes into a weapon capable of their destruction - is only really presented in just one paragraph (the very last). I'm not sure how to put this so as not to sound insulting, but this structure can't help but strike one as oddly undergraduate. It's as if reading all those essays and dissertations has left Heather feeling that he has to tack on a "Janet-and-John" conclusions paragraph. There is also a strange sensation that he'd reached his essay word-limit, or that the examiner had instructed him to stop writing.
The book is fun, and at times sparklingly funny. But I wish he'd spoken less about Alaric's "Gothic supergroup". I have trouble enough not seeing the cliched long hair, unkempt beards and womanising habits of the 5th century tribes as suspiciously Led Zeppelin, without Peter Heather light-heartedly describing them in a way that smacks of the wonderful Stonehenge scene in Spinal Tap, but performed by proto-Goths Bauhaus.