He takes every opportunity coming to discuss the minutia of ethnic groups beyond the Danube frontier and their various cultural and political evolutions, while ignoring the internal workings of the actual Roman Empire to too much of an extent. In fact, Heather goes off-topic to such a frequent extent as to leave the rest of the narrative in a very jarred state. For a book on the fall of Rome, Heather spends an inordinate amount of time discussing barbarian history, culture and politics, to the detriment of the nominal subject matter. This is where things start to go wrong really. This is Heather’s contribution, and per his own speciality in the field, his focus is almost exclusively on the “barbarian” element. Ever since Edward Gibbon wrote his landmark epic, every ancient classics historian worth his or her salt has put forward their own thesis on why Rome fell when it did, which factor was more important than all of the others. This is the kind of topic that so many people have tried to tackle in different ways. Peter Heather has written a mostly comprehensive overview of the final century or so of the Western Roman Empire, but I have numerous issues with his approach.
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