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The End of the Roman Empire
s/t: Decline or Transformation?
172 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1962
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About the author
Donald Kagan
129 books240 followersDonald Kagan (May 1, 1932 – August 6, 2021) was a Lithuanian-born American historian and classicist at Yale University specializing in ancient Greece. He formerly taught in the Department of History at Cornell University. Kagan was considered among the foremost American scholars of Greek history and is notable for his four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
March 1, 2026
Mission 2026: Binge reviewing (and rereading on occasion) all previous Reads, I was too slothful to review, back when I read them.
The question in the title itself carries the echo of Edward Gibbon, whose monumental narrative turned Rome’s fall into a moral and cultural epic. Kagan enters that shadow calmly, almost pedagogically, sifting through explanations—barbarian invasions, economic decay, military overstretch, moral enervation, administrative bloat—without succumbing to melodrama. His tone is measured, lucid, and almost courtroom-like: here are the claims, here is the evidence, and here is why we must be cautious. What I respected most is his resistance to monocausality. Empires don’t trip over a single stone; they erode. Kagan frames Rome less as a sudden catastrophe and more as a long negotiation with complexity. The supposed “barbarians” are not cartoonish destroyers but contributors in a shifting geopolitical order. Internal weaknesses mattered, yes—but so did adaptation, resilience, and contingency. The collapse becomes less apocalypse and more transformation. That subtle reframing quietly destabilises our appetite for dramatic endings. Reading this, you cannot help thinking about how every age projects itself onto Rome. For some, decline is moral decay; for others, fiscal irresponsibility; for still others, immigration anxiety. Kagan mildly reminds us that historical interpretation is always contemporary autobiography in disguise. Rome becomes a mirror in which modern societies study their own fears. In the end, the book doesn’t hand you a single villain. Instead, it leaves you with a discomfiting awareness: civilisations are intricate organisms. They change, fragment, absorb, and mutate. “Fall” might just be a narrative expediency we impose on continuity we fail to recognise. And that understanding lingers longer than any dramatic ruin.
Most recommended for history buffs.
The question in the title itself carries the echo of Edward Gibbon, whose monumental narrative turned Rome’s fall into a moral and cultural epic. Kagan enters that shadow calmly, almost pedagogically, sifting through explanations—barbarian invasions, economic decay, military overstretch, moral enervation, administrative bloat—without succumbing to melodrama. His tone is measured, lucid, and almost courtroom-like: here are the claims, here is the evidence, and here is why we must be cautious. What I respected most is his resistance to monocausality. Empires don’t trip over a single stone; they erode. Kagan frames Rome less as a sudden catastrophe and more as a long negotiation with complexity. The supposed “barbarians” are not cartoonish destroyers but contributors in a shifting geopolitical order. Internal weaknesses mattered, yes—but so did adaptation, resilience, and contingency. The collapse becomes less apocalypse and more transformation. That subtle reframing quietly destabilises our appetite for dramatic endings. Reading this, you cannot help thinking about how every age projects itself onto Rome. For some, decline is moral decay; for others, fiscal irresponsibility; for still others, immigration anxiety. Kagan mildly reminds us that historical interpretation is always contemporary autobiography in disguise. Rome becomes a mirror in which modern societies study their own fears. In the end, the book doesn’t hand you a single villain. Instead, it leaves you with a discomfiting awareness: civilisations are intricate organisms. They change, fragment, absorb, and mutate. “Fall” might just be a narrative expediency we impose on continuity we fail to recognise. And that understanding lingers longer than any dramatic ruin.
Most recommended for history buffs.
December 12, 2021
From a historical perspective, it appears that empires age to the point where they end, often dramatically due to conquest. Sometimes, like the Soviet Empire of the twentieth century, they simply just end. Down through history, there was no empire that was more powerful and long lived than the Roman Empire. Unlike the Soviet Empire that lasted only fifty years, the Roman political entity lasted over 1,000 years. There were three distinct forms, the time of kings, the time of the Republic and then Imperial Rome.
There is still a great deal of debate regarding the primary cause(es) of the collapse of the Roman Empire. The articles in this collection do not advance the debate a great deal. There was a problem of taxation, there was a dilution of the Roman nature of the citizenry and the armies became increasingly hired foreign mercenaries rather than people from Italy. Several causes are put forward, yet the best evidence is the growing hostility between the people from the cities and those from rural areas. The rank-and-file of the army was largely drawn from the rural regions and the animosity was so great that the army occasionally sacked the cities they were supposed to defend.
I read this book and cannot say that I emerged knowing anything more about the causes of the fall of the Roman Empire than I knew before. It was at best a basic refresher on some of the reasons the greatest Empire of all time ended.
There is still a great deal of debate regarding the primary cause(es) of the collapse of the Roman Empire. The articles in this collection do not advance the debate a great deal. There was a problem of taxation, there was a dilution of the Roman nature of the citizenry and the armies became increasingly hired foreign mercenaries rather than people from Italy. Several causes are put forward, yet the best evidence is the growing hostility between the people from the cities and those from rural areas. The rank-and-file of the army was largely drawn from the rural regions and the animosity was so great that the army occasionally sacked the cities they were supposed to defend.
I read this book and cannot say that I emerged knowing anything more about the causes of the fall of the Roman Empire than I knew before. It was at best a basic refresher on some of the reasons the greatest Empire of all time ended.
November 25, 2022
I've been interested about the viability of slavery in an industrialized society; I've heard it claimed that slavery could only profitably exist, as a significant part of the economy, in large agricultural settings.
Thus it is argued that slavery was on the path to extinction, at least in America, as the country, and agriculture itself, industrialized. So the Civil War, and Emancipation, only accelerated the process.
One might look for examples of slavery in industrial concerns in the anti-bellum South. During the War itself, the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, and the ironworks in Birmingham (and the mines upstream), were largely slave operated. Were these short term aberrations, possibly related to wartime labor shortages?
Charles Dew's Bond of Iron chronicles William Weaver's slave operated Buffalo Forge and various furnace operations in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, beginning 1815; he explores tangentially similar operations across western Virginia. All used slaves for all "hands-on" jobs. (When whites were used, generally due to a shortage of slaves, they were determined to be shiftless and mostly drunk.) Ongoing, whites were clerks, overall supervisors, brokers and so on - exclusively. Never hands-on workers.
In iron, tilt hammer technology predated the Revolution; it was still in use throughout the South. In the years leading up to the Civil War, Southern forges came under increasing pressure from cheaper iron produced by the more modern rolling mill technology, used for years in the North and in great Britain. Weaver and the rest failed to modernize their technology.
To quote (at length) Dew: "Why had William Weaver, a hard-driving Yankee entrepreneur if there ever was one [he hailed from Pennsylvania], largely ignored the technological innovations that had transformed the northern iron industry during the decades prior to the Civil War?
"Certainly part of the explanation lay in the nature of Weaver's labor force. After he acquired and trained a group of skilled slave artisans in the 1820s and 1830s and had his ironworks functioning successfully, Weaver displayed little interest in trying to improve the technology Weaver's tendency
was to keep doing things in old, familiar ways. The emphasis was on stability, not innovation. Slavery, in short, seems to have exerted a profoundly conservative influence on the manufacturing process ...
"This failure to modernize earlier at Buffalo Forge had absolutely nothing to do with the talents of Weaver's slave artisans....highly skilled workers "
I suspect a reason explored by F. W. Walbank in his Decline of the Roman Empire in the West, as
· excerpted in Donald Kagan's The End of the Roman Empire: the degradation of "hands-on" work, going back to the Greeks. "Because it was normal to associate manual labor with slaves, Greek culture began to draw a line between the things of the hand and the things of the mind....[Aristotle's Politics].... 'Certainly the good man and the good citizen ought not to learn the crafts of inferiors except for their
own occasional use; if they habitually practice these, there will cease to be a distinction between master and slave"'.
Further, Cicero: "Public opinion divides the trades and professions into the liberal and the vulgar the
very wages the laborer receives are a badge of slavery."
"So the classical world perpetuated that technological retardation that had been one of the most paradoxical features of the civilizations of the Nile and the Euphrates..."
Weaver seems to have not trained his slaves; they were trained by apprenticing to another slave already possessing the requisite skills or by purchasing an already skilled slave. If Weaver's slaves are not to use their minds to innovate, and Weaver and other whites are unwilling to degrade themselves, getting their hands dirty, learning and then teaching a new technology, that new technology cannot be adopted - in the antebellum South, or in classical Rome.
Echoes remain. I'm reminded of Mathew Crawford's story of a fellow walking with his son through a mall, and seeing a shop under renovation. An electrician is pulling wire. Father nudges son, gestures towards the electrician, and remarks, "study hard in school, son, so you don't wind up like him".
Likewise, Caltech's Richard Feynman's meditation on his work on the Challenger disaster committee, notes the change in NASA's culture from the days of its great success in putting a man on the moon (when run by engineers, a hands-on bunch) to the days of the Challenger launch (when run by the administrators).
One notes America's declining productivity. Due perhaps in part to the bifurcation of work of the hands and work of the mind, and the disparagement of the former - are we facing a future similar to Rome, or the South?
Thus it is argued that slavery was on the path to extinction, at least in America, as the country, and agriculture itself, industrialized. So the Civil War, and Emancipation, only accelerated the process.
One might look for examples of slavery in industrial concerns in the anti-bellum South. During the War itself, the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, and the ironworks in Birmingham (and the mines upstream), were largely slave operated. Were these short term aberrations, possibly related to wartime labor shortages?
Charles Dew's Bond of Iron chronicles William Weaver's slave operated Buffalo Forge and various furnace operations in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, beginning 1815; he explores tangentially similar operations across western Virginia. All used slaves for all "hands-on" jobs. (When whites were used, generally due to a shortage of slaves, they were determined to be shiftless and mostly drunk.) Ongoing, whites were clerks, overall supervisors, brokers and so on - exclusively. Never hands-on workers.
In iron, tilt hammer technology predated the Revolution; it was still in use throughout the South. In the years leading up to the Civil War, Southern forges came under increasing pressure from cheaper iron produced by the more modern rolling mill technology, used for years in the North and in great Britain. Weaver and the rest failed to modernize their technology.
To quote (at length) Dew: "Why had William Weaver, a hard-driving Yankee entrepreneur if there ever was one [he hailed from Pennsylvania], largely ignored the technological innovations that had transformed the northern iron industry during the decades prior to the Civil War?
"Certainly part of the explanation lay in the nature of Weaver's labor force. After he acquired and trained a group of skilled slave artisans in the 1820s and 1830s and had his ironworks functioning successfully, Weaver displayed little interest in trying to improve the technology Weaver's tendency
was to keep doing things in old, familiar ways. The emphasis was on stability, not innovation. Slavery, in short, seems to have exerted a profoundly conservative influence on the manufacturing process ...
"This failure to modernize earlier at Buffalo Forge had absolutely nothing to do with the talents of Weaver's slave artisans....highly skilled workers "
I suspect a reason explored by F. W. Walbank in his Decline of the Roman Empire in the West, as
· excerpted in Donald Kagan's The End of the Roman Empire: the degradation of "hands-on" work, going back to the Greeks. "Because it was normal to associate manual labor with slaves, Greek culture began to draw a line between the things of the hand and the things of the mind....[Aristotle's Politics].... 'Certainly the good man and the good citizen ought not to learn the crafts of inferiors except for their
own occasional use; if they habitually practice these, there will cease to be a distinction between master and slave"'.
Further, Cicero: "Public opinion divides the trades and professions into the liberal and the vulgar the
very wages the laborer receives are a badge of slavery."
"So the classical world perpetuated that technological retardation that had been one of the most paradoxical features of the civilizations of the Nile and the Euphrates..."
Weaver seems to have not trained his slaves; they were trained by apprenticing to another slave already possessing the requisite skills or by purchasing an already skilled slave. If Weaver's slaves are not to use their minds to innovate, and Weaver and other whites are unwilling to degrade themselves, getting their hands dirty, learning and then teaching a new technology, that new technology cannot be adopted - in the antebellum South, or in classical Rome.
Echoes remain. I'm reminded of Mathew Crawford's story of a fellow walking with his son through a mall, and seeing a shop under renovation. An electrician is pulling wire. Father nudges son, gestures towards the electrician, and remarks, "study hard in school, son, so you don't wind up like him".
Likewise, Caltech's Richard Feynman's meditation on his work on the Challenger disaster committee, notes the change in NASA's culture from the days of its great success in putting a man on the moon (when run by engineers, a hands-on bunch) to the days of the Challenger launch (when run by the administrators).
One notes America's declining productivity. Due perhaps in part to the bifurcation of work of the hands and work of the mind, and the disparagement of the former - are we facing a future similar to Rome, or the South?
April 10, 2022
Featuring articles from a variety of experts on the topic of Rome's collapse. A well-rounded book to accompany anyone with an interest in Roman history and how this great empire ceased to be.
January 30, 2014
This book really makes the question of why Rome fell feel truly hopeless to be ever answered. The book collected essentially all of the leading historians of the topic and put all of their reasons for why Rome fell in one book. And I don't think a single one of them agreed with another. Nearly all of them began with a refutation of the common reasons for Rome's fall and then went on to assert their own probable cause. But every writer did this, so really they all disproved each other.
I would say it is pretty obvious that it is a conglomeration of reasons that resulted in Rome's fall, and most of the historians agreed on that, but beyond that, such as attributing any specifics, I think it just a hopeless cause. Which is unfortunate because it makes it that much harder to take those reasons and apply them to a modern day nation in a hope to avoid a similar downfall.
I would say it is pretty obvious that it is a conglomeration of reasons that resulted in Rome's fall, and most of the historians agreed on that, but beyond that, such as attributing any specifics, I think it just a hopeless cause. Which is unfortunate because it makes it that much harder to take those reasons and apply them to a modern day nation in a hope to avoid a similar downfall.
January 11, 2015
An excellent compilation of book excerpts dealing with the decline of Rome. This book provides an excellent sampling of respected historiography on the topic especially if the reader wishes to know whether reading the whole book is worthwhile or not.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews