Peter Heather > Quotes

“The way to a landowner's heart was to tax gently.”
― Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians

“By virtue of its unbounded aggression, Roman imperialism was ultimately responsible for its own destruction.”
― Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians

“To reach Greenland, turn left at the middle of Norway, keep so far north of Shetland that you can only see it if the visibility is very good, and far enough south of the Faroes that the sea appears half way up the mountain slopes. As for Iceland, stay so far to the south that you only see its flocks of birds and whales. So, ROUGHLY PARAPHRASED, run the navigational directions in an Icelandic manual of the Middle Ages,”
― Peter Heather, Empires and Barbarians: Migration, Development and the Birth of Europe

“Never base motivation or fear, entirely.”
― Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians

“Biberunt ut Gothi – ‘drinking like Goths’ – would be a proverbial expression in Italy by the sixth century.”
― Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians

“An emphasis on reading individual texts with a view to understanding the ideological visions of the world that underlie them has also had a dramatic impact. This type of interpretation requires historians to treat ancient authors, not as sources of fact, but rather like second-hand-car salesmen whom they would do well to approach with a healthy caution.”
― Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire

“Cultures reflect the interactions of mixed populations.”
― Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians

“Foreign policy often involved nothing more than the decision whom to make war upon.”
― Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians

“When Constantine converted to Christianity, there basically was no Christian architecture. Local Christian communities met in converted houses, and especially in the face of periodic imperial persecution, the religion had developed no specific architectural forms of its own. In the fourth century, therefore, as imperial patronage and ongoing processes of conversion caused large numbers of specialist churches to be built for the first time, the religion took over an old form of public building from the Graeco-Roman world: the basilica. This was a rectangular, shallow-vaulted building, usually equipped with aisles around an elevated central nave and an apse at one end. It had long been used for town council buildings and audience chambers across the Mediterranean world, with the apse being occupied by the presiding figure of power (or indeed the emperor in the case of a palace audience chamber). For Christianity, the apse worked nicely for the sacred space of the altar, and the basilica was a building form essentially designed for meetings, which worked, too, as a space for church services”
― Peter Heather, Rome Resurgent: War and Empire in the Age of Justinian

“The author describes the attitude of some on the frontier at Rome's twilight as exhibiting "a kind of London-in-the-blitz determination to carry on being more Roman than usual.”
― Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians

“One answer to the transitory nature of imperial rule, in short, is that there is a Newtonian third law of empires. The exercise of imperial power generates an opposite and equal reaction among those affected by it, until they so reorganize themselves as to blunt the imperial edge.”
― Peter Heather, Empires and Barbarians: Migration, Development and the Birth of Europe

“He was a stylist, not a thinker. He spent time trying to say things in as complicated a way as possible.”
― Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians

“Having sliced Odovacar in half in early spring 493, Theoderic ruled his Italian kingdom for the next thirty-three years, until his own death on 30 August 526.”
― Peter Heather, The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes & Imperial Pretenders

“The most important thing for morale was to maintain a united front among the officers.”
― Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians

“A handsome dowry went to the Vandal king Thrasamund along with his new bride, Theoderic’s sister Amalafrida,”
― Peter Heather, The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes & Imperial Pretenders

“A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire; the repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland; the Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.”
― Peter Heather, The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes & Imperial Pretenders

“It was not the military prowess of the Germani that kept them outside the Empire, but their poverty.11”
― Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire

“Such was the quasi-religious fervour surrounding the concept of the nation that politicians were ready to use identifications of the ancient spread of ‘peoples’ as evidence for claims about the present.”
― Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians

“The Arian dispute is not (as it is often presented) a story of deviation from a well- and long-defined mainstream Christian belief-set, but of an intense struggle to establish one for the first time.”
― P J Heather, Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, AD 300-1300

“Reality confounds image.”
― Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians

“[W]ithin a generation, the Roman order was shaken to its core and Roman armies, as one contemporary put it, 'vanished like shadows'. In 376, a large band of Gothic refugees arrived at the Empire's Danube frontier, asking for asylum. In a complete break with established Roman policy, they were allowed in, unsubdued. They revolted, and within two years had defeated and killed the emperor Valens - the one who had received them - along with two-thirds of his army[.]”
― Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians

“Often discussed as the Christianization of the Roman Empire, this process can be more accurately cast as the Romanization of Christianity: one in which the religion turned itself into a branch of the Roman state in the fourth and fifth centuries.”
― Peter Heather, Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, AD 300-1300

“...when all the bullshit about rational, divinely inspired social order is put to one side, Roman law was all about defining and protecting property rights...”
― Peter Heather, The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes and Imperial Pretenders

“Claiming to be a unique divinely guided state, destined by the Almighty to bring Christian civilization to the entire globe, lost most of its force after two-thirds of the empire had been conquered by the standard-bearers of a different religion. Fortunately, Judaeo-Christian texts offered another, now more apposite model. From divinely ordained world conquerors, emperors were able to use the Old Testament to morph themselves into the leaders of a Chosen People, riding the Constantinopolitan Ark of salvation through besetting tempests towards final Salvation and Triumph, with apocalypse a recurrently popular genre.”
― Peter Heather, The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes & Imperial Pretenders

“The cornerstone of the Roman legionnaires' astonishing fighting spirit can be attributed to their training.”
― Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians

“These exchanges are reported without comment by the East Roman historian Theophylact Simocatta (charmingly, his surname means ‘the one-eyed cat’).”
― Peter Heather, The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes & Imperial Pretenders

“As late as 300, at the time of Constantine’s conversion, Christianity possessed no central authority structure at all. It was composed of a series of mostly urban congregations, who elected their own leaders and despite some commonalities in required beliefs, personal behaviour and institutional organization for the most part ran their own affairs independently.”
― Peter Heather, Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, AD 300-1300

“Author describes one monarch's impressive table but conveys a contemporary's observation, "the weightiest thing at dinner was the conversation".”
― Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians

“old visions of an illiterate lay elite in the early Middle Ages have been overturned.”
― Peter Heather, The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes and Imperial Pretenders

“Charisma often flows from total self-confidence.”
― Peter Heather