In common among the books I’ll be returning to the library shortly is a shared theme of empire – rising, attacking, and falling.
I’m almost surprised that in all of the discussion of illegal immigration, I haven’t yet seen someone attempt to use, or perhaps misuse, Peter Heather’s THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE, which sums up the last few generations of archaeological and historical research to overthrow widespread beliefs about what finally brought the Empire of the West to an end. Not financial mismanagement and overstretch, not moral decline and decadence, not the disorder and violence of periodic succession crises always on the brink of civil war, not the softening of old Roman brutality and cruelty under the establishment of Christianity, not military attack and competition by powers like the Huns and Persians – though all of these played their roles – but, rather, uncontrolled immigration appears to Heather to have been the key:
[I]t is impossible to escape the fact that the western Empire broke up because too many outside groups established themselves on its territories and expanded their holdings by warfare.
Or…
[T]he Roman state became its own worst enemy. Its military power and financial sophistication both hastened the process whereby streams of incomers became coherent forces capable of carving out kingdoms from its own body politic.
Yet the concluding lines of the book, which follow a summary re-examination of Rome and the Germanic tribes that were central in the epic’s final chapter, may be even easier to misappropriate from the political left:
There is in all this a pleasing denouement. By virtue of its own unbounded aggression, Roman imperialism was ultimately responsible for its own destruction.
The Inca Empire was also destroyed by outsiders, but the denouement, as described in Kim McQuarrie’s THE LAST DAYS OF THE INCAS, struck me as altogether displeasing, in fact as rather relentlessly ugly – the destruction of one cruel and brutal ruling elite (the Incas) by an even more cruel and brutal would-be elite (the Conquistadors). One observation stood out for me amidst the frequently fascinating but ultimately alienating tale of depravity, torture, greed, megalomania, and combat as desperate as it was unequal:
Conquest… had little to do with adventure, but rather had everything to do with groups of men willing to do just about anything in order to avoid working for a living.
I’m not saying I buy it – but there’s an element of truth to the statement. I think McQuarrie’s book rather effectively reports a fuller context.
Tom Holland’s PERSIAN FIRE looks at the Persian Empire in its collision with the Greek city-states, as fancifully dramatized in the movie 300. Fans of that movie may be disappointed to see it put merely in context, if lyrically – or may instead be delighted to see convincing flesh and bone put on the out-sized and CGI-augmented figures. In addition to being illuminating and informative, Holland’s approach, almost that of an erudite pundit skewering political forces and figures of his own time, rather than of 2500 years ago, is relentlessly entertaining – as in the following passage, selected more or less at random, concerning the Oracle at Delphi and its initial prophecy of Greek doom vs. Persia’s Great King:
Tottering out weakly into the sunlight, the Athenian emissaries found themselves with little option but to do as the Pythia had instructed, and slump down in despair. So all was settled, then: the hour of their city’s doom was at hand. Or was it? A priest, seemingly as shocked by the Pythia’s vision as the Athenians themselves had been, hurried after the emissaries, and urged them to approach the oracle a second time. To a skeptic, this might have seemed suspiciously like bet-hedging. And so indeed, perhaps, it was; the priesthood, after all, had to consider its own future. While understandably anxious not to antagonize the Great King, it could not afford to stake all its chips on a Persian walkover. Every eventuality – even one as improbably as a Greek victory – had to be covered
[...]
The Athenians, then, following the priest’s advice, were not wholly nonplussed when the Pythia, seeing them a second time, did indeed fall into a renewed frenzy and start chanting fresh prophecies.
In this manner, Holland again and again makes sense – not always logical sense so much as human sense – of events from 2,500 years ago, in the lives of people unimaginably different from and invariably just like us. Which strikes me as the job of all good popular historians.