Volume 36, Number 4 · March 16, 1989
Greeks, Romans, Jews & Others
By Jasper Griffin
Corruption and the Decline of Rome
by Ramsay MacMullen
Yale University Press, 319 pp., $25.00
Greeks, Romans and Barbarians: Spheres of Interaction
by Barry Cunliffe
Methuen/Routledge, 243 pp., $25.00
The Jews in the Greek Age
by Elias J. Bickerman
Harvard University Press, 338 pp., $30.00
Why did the Roman Empire fall? Alexander Demandt has published a book of 695 pages on the different explanations that have been offered over the centuries.[1] A work enlivened with a good deal of dry humor, it concludes with a straight-faced listing of 210 causes alleged by one scholar or another. In it the reader finds, cheek by jowl, 'asceticism' and 'hedonism,' 'centralization' and 'decentralization,' 'Christianity' and 'polytheism,' 'communism' and 'aristocracy,' 'professional army' and 'indiscipline of the army,' 'superstition' and 'rationalism,' 'urbanization' and 'decline of the cities.' There is no agreement on the question when the fall began, or even whether it took place at all: 'The Western Empire continues to this day,' wrote Sir Isaac Newton, and at various times Germans, Frenchmen, and Catholics have all asserted the unbroken continuity of Rome with the empire of Charlemagne, or with the First Reich, or with the papacy.
Review, 5502 words
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