Download The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians AudioBook Free
The death of the Roman Empire is one of the perennial mysteries of world history. Now, in this groundbreaking publication, Peter Heather proposes a sensational new solution: Generations of imperialism changed the neighbors Rome called barbarians into an enemy capable of dismantling an Empire that acquired dominated their lives for so long. A leading power on the overdue Roman Empire and on the barbarians, Heather relates the remarkable tale of how Europe's barbarians, altered by hundreds of years of contact with Rome on every possible level, eventually drawn the empire apart. He shows first how the Huns overturned the prevailing proper balance of vitality on Rome's Western frontiers, to drive the Goths as well as others to get refuge inside the Empire. This prompted two generations of struggle, where new barbarian coalitions, shaped in response to Roman hostility, helped bring the Roman western to its legs. The Goths first damaged a Roman army at the challenge of Hadrianople in 378, and continued to sack Rome in 410. The Vandals multiply devastation in Gaul and Spain, before conquering North Africa, the breadbasket of the American Empire, in 439. We then meet Attila the Hun, whose reign of terror swept from Constantinople to Paris, but whose death in 453 ironically precipitated a final desperate stage of Roman collapse, culminating in the Vandals' beat of the considerable Byzantine Armada: the west's previous chance for survival. Peter Heather convincingly argues that the Roman Empire had not been on the brink of cultural or moral collapse. What helped bring it to a finish were the barbarians.
