Book Review - The Fall of the Roman Empire by Michael Grant

 The Fall of the Roman Empire by Michael Grant

New York: Collier Books, 1990 (rev. ed. first ed. published 1976)   ISBN 0020285604

This is a serviceable book that describes in broad terms the author's view on how the Western Roman Empire came to collapse in the Fifth Century AD. Unfortunately I have to state at the beginning of this review there are much better books covering the subject. Grant's style is workmanlike at best, his lack of footnotes is annoying given how many quotations are used in the text, and he can tend to some post facto explication of the fall of the West, especially when it comes to the influence of Christianity on the fall of the Empire.

After an introductory chapter, which focusses on the events of the last hundred or so years of the Western Empire, Grant then catalogues the factors that went into causing the fall. The headings for the sections of his book The Failure of the Army, The Gulfs between the Classes, The Credibility Gap, The Partnerships that Failed, The Groups that Opted Out, The Undermining of Effort, cover his main themes. The first two in particular are crucial to the final downfall of the once great institution that was the Roman Empire.

It's clear that as time went on, the Roman Empire became more and more militarized as the "Germans" pressed more heavily on their frontiers. As Grant explains in an appendix, the Western Empire with its much longer "barbarian" border, had to provide a much stronger military force than the Eastern Empire. This led to a requirement for a very large army, and the high taxation required to keep it running. In earlier times, service in the army was a path to Roman citizenship, but after Caracella decreed that all free people in the Empire were automatically citizens in AD 212, that encouragement to service was removed. Each province of the Empire needed to provide a certain number of recruits for the army, but many bought their way out of service: their money was used to pay for German soldiers. The dilution of the Roman portion of the army led to a less professional force, a less reliable force, and a smaller force. Grant point out that evidence suggests that in the last century of the Empire, it seems the biggest offensive forces to deal with breaches in the Empire struggled to reach ten thousand men, a far cry from the huge Roman armies of earlier times.

Grant also explains how the Empire crumbled from within - the crippling taxes levied particularly on agricultural production were inequitably enforced, with wealthy citizens able to evade or reduce their taxes more than middle classes. This type of activity led to what Grant calls the "Credibility Gap", where the disconnect between the vital middle classes and the government meant that when the Empire needed their citizens, those citizens were often not too interested in helping.

Grant also points out that while Rome was happy to have Germans come into the West to fight or farm for the Empire, it did little to embrace those Germans or make them feel welcome. The aggressive suppression of any religions other than Roman Catholicism in the West also did little to encourage people to feel like they were part of something bigger than their own group or sect. The East and the West also gradually drifted apart, failing to support each other, and developing differing interpretations of religion.

Grant makes much of the rise of Monasticism and asceticism, suggesting that the call to turn away from the earthly life to a life of contemplation and peace was a factor in the fall of the Empire. I think his theory is problematic on a couple of fronts. Firstly, much of the evidence he provides is from a period later than the fall of the Western Empire, and he extrapolates that evidence backwards, which is risky. He also fails to convince me that the numbers of people who would actively turn away from the earthly life would be significant enough to affect army recruitment, for example. Where he does make a valid point in my opinion with regards to clerical expansion is that many people who could have become good imperial administrators instead turned to the church. This change seems due to laws that meant that civil servants were often responsible for raising taxes, or covering the costs of the taxes they failed to raise. The Church was a less stressful career.

The lack of footnotes is a real concern to me in this book - whenever I wondered at a quotation or a point, there was nothing for me to go back to and check. This book seems to want to rise above a popular history, but it doesn't quite get there. When I got to the end of the book I felt that I knew a lot about Grant's thinking about the fall of the Empire, but somewhat less as to why he came to the conclusions that he did. I would recommend other books before this if  you are interested in the fall of the Roman Empire.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Romantic Imagination by Maurice Bowra

 The Romantic Imagination by C.M. Bowra

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961 (first published 1950)     ISBN 0192810065

In a series of thoughtful and thought-provoking essays (originally lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1948-9), Maurice Bowra skilfully dissects the great Romantic poets, showing us how in their view "the creative imagination is closely connected with a peculiar insight into an unseen order behind visible things."

Bowra focusses on the major poets of the era - Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats - and also the "fellow travellers" who shared some of the thinking of the major poets, but either could not surrender fully to the imagination (Byron, Christina Rosetti), or surrendered to it too fully (Swinburne, Poe), or could only work with the thinking in a limited way (Dante Gabriel Rosetti).

Bowra shows how these poets succeeded, and where they failed, and links those successes and failures back to the driving ethos behind Romanticism. While the Romantics opened new vistas for poetry to explore, by turning their backs on the Augustan and Elizabethan tradition, Bowra explains that the Romantics had no tradition to fall back on when inspiration failed; "for tradition enables a poet to conserve his powers, to recruit his strength from other quarters when he is not able to do everything from his own resources. It even helps him to exert himself in fields for which he is not ideally suited, but in which none the less he may be able to win noteworthy successes. The Romantics relied on what was most unlike others in themselves, on their own peculiarly individual gifts. The result was that, by too much concentration on them, they exhausted these gifts fand had nothing to put in their place."

In his essay on Wordsworth's Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, Bowra explains this process as it worked through this poem and Wordsworth's life, and how Wordsworth came to terms with the waning of his inspiration, in a way that Coleridge could not. In both men poetry waned, but only Coleridge stopped writing. I think Bowra sees these two as the peak of true Romanticism, most able to successfully commit their "philosophy" to poetry that could readily be understood.

Blake, and to some extent Swinburne and Poe, struggled on that front as they used their own personal idea of the "supernal" in their poetry, and thus made it harder for the reader to understand what they were trying to say. They also moved away from using ordinary everyday scenes and words which was key for Wordsworth and Coleridge in particular, and their poetry suffers because of it. 

Poe and Swinburne in particular, in their strivings for tonality and musicality, could stray too far from meaning.. It's probable that Swinburne would have agreed with Walter Pater's maxim that "All art aspires constantly to the position of music", even though it was written well into the Victorian era. However, this idea is fundamentally flawed: poetry is an art (and a craft) that deals with words, and words convey meaning. No matter how "musically" words are grouped together, if they fail to convey meaning, a poem has failed. This was often a trap for Swinburne (and for God-knows how many poets that have come after him).

Bowra's essay on Christina Rosetti was for me the most powerful. It brings together his theories, showing how while Rosetti was a wonderful poet, she was not a Romantic because she cleaved to traditional religion rather than a self-created spirituality. She longed for God and fought her worldly desires for love. These strains are all worked out in her verse, and because she does have a focus for her "unseen order of things" her poetry doesn't fall into the trap of say, Poe's work, which too often falls into the "un-nameable" or "un-knowable" other.

I suppose the question for me is do I agree with Bowra's views as expressed in this book? I think, for the majority of them, the answer is yes, especially when he discusses Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley. His essay on Blake is interesting, and requires more thought from me. The essay that opened my eyes the most was the one concerning Christina Rosetti - I will go back to her work with a new outlook and respect.

If you like the works of the Romantics, but feel that you need a bit of a scaffold on which to build a greater understanding of their achievement, I can highly recommend this book - well worth reading.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell