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The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire
How climate change and disease helped to bring down the Roman Empire
Here is the monumental retelling of one of the most consequential chapters of human history: the fall of the Roman Empire. The Fate of Rome is the first book to examine the catastrophic role that climate change and infectious diseases played in the collapse of Rome's power--a story of nature's triumph over human ambition. Interweaving a grand historical narrative with cutting-edge climate science and genetic discoveries, Kyle Harper traces how the fate of Rome was decided not just by emperors, soldiers, and barbarians but also by volcanic eruptions, solar cycles, climate instability, and devastating viruses and bacteria. The Fate of Rome is Harper's sweeping account of how one of history's greatest civilizations encountered and endured, yet ultimately succumbed to the cumulative burden of nature's violence.
Here is the monumental retelling of one of the most consequential chapters of human history: the fall of the Roman Empire. The Fate of Rome is the first book to examine the catastrophic role that climate change and infectious diseases played in the collapse of Rome's power--a story of nature's triumph over human ambition. Interweaving a grand historical narrative with cutting-edge climate science and genetic discoveries, Kyle Harper traces how the fate of Rome was decided not just by emperors, soldiers, and barbarians but also by volcanic eruptions, solar cycles, climate instability, and devastating viruses and bacteria. The Fate of Rome is Harper's sweeping account of how one of history's greatest civilizations encountered and endured, yet ultimately succumbed to the cumulative burden of nature's violence.
417 pages, Hardcover
First published October 2, 2017
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6676 people want to read
About the author
Kyle Harper
11 books90 followersProfessor of Classics and Letters and Senior Vice President and Provost at the University of Oklahoma. His research topics are the social and economic history of the Roman Empire and the early middle ages, and the environmental and population history of the first millennium, exploring the impact of climate change and disease on the history of civilization.
from http://www.ou.edu/flourish/about/team...
from http://www.ou.edu/flourish/about/team...
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November 1, 2017
For his third book, Kyle Harper has utilised the tools developed to address the modern focus on climate change to investigate the extent to which the varied effects of environment, climate, and disease were significant in the fall of the Roman Empire. In no way does he discount the role of human agency, but compellingly argues the ways in which these factors, at varying times, pushed the empire past its resilience, beyond its ability to truly recover, and therefore played a definitive role in its downfall.
As Harper notes, there is a tendency to see the environment as some kind of 'stable, inert background to the story' [p. 14], a fixed stage with human actors dominating the forefront. There's no doubt that I, for one, have been wearing these blinkers and its somewhat staggering to read the far reaching impact of, particularly, these massive disease events, some of which were as devastating as the Black Death. It's not understating it to say that the book has made me reevaluate the way I look at the past; while the role of geographical factors has always played its more obvious part, now it seems clear that the connection between humanity and the environment in its widest sense should be acknowledged and evaluated.
According to Harper, the height of Roman Empire building in 'the last centuries BC and first centuries AD were favoured by a war, wet, stable climate rightly known as the Roman Climate Optimum'. [p.39] Such congenial conditions provided a solid basis for Roman growth, though the author points to the African droughts of 120s as an example that the period was not without environmental difficulties. Yet the very nature of a expanding Empire with its increasing connectivity allowed for the spread of germs and infection; the substantial movement of peoples through migration, warfare/negotiation, and extensive trade networks; general population growth and urbanisation; as well as the physical manipulation of the environment through unchecked expansion into and building on unknown or previously untamed areas. In AD 165 the effective pathways this made for disease was made devastatingly clear by the Antonine Plague, a smallpox epidemic that carried off at least 10% of the Empire's population, with up to 20% in the worst affected areas. [p. 115]. It marked a turning point, and even if it did not lead to society's disintegration, it stressed the political system and the population beyond anything that had come before. [p. 116]
Harper goes on to discuss, in chronological fashion, the further pressures put on the Roman structure, detailing the ways in which each disease event or environmental shock had repercussions in every aspect of human life, from marriage and procreation to food production, from high politics to barbarian invasion. It is a dense history, heavy on detail and methodology, but nevertheless engagingly written. There are, of course, clear parallels in the interconnected, globalised society we live in today, and such warnings from history should be well heard. Overall, a brilliantly researched, well written, and valuable addition to the literature on Rome's fall.
ARC via Netgalley
As Harper notes, there is a tendency to see the environment as some kind of 'stable, inert background to the story' [p. 14], a fixed stage with human actors dominating the forefront. There's no doubt that I, for one, have been wearing these blinkers and its somewhat staggering to read the far reaching impact of, particularly, these massive disease events, some of which were as devastating as the Black Death. It's not understating it to say that the book has made me reevaluate the way I look at the past; while the role of geographical factors has always played its more obvious part, now it seems clear that the connection between humanity and the environment in its widest sense should be acknowledged and evaluated.
According to Harper, the height of Roman Empire building in 'the last centuries BC and first centuries AD were favoured by a war, wet, stable climate rightly known as the Roman Climate Optimum'. [p.39] Such congenial conditions provided a solid basis for Roman growth, though the author points to the African droughts of 120s as an example that the period was not without environmental difficulties. Yet the very nature of a expanding Empire with its increasing connectivity allowed for the spread of germs and infection; the substantial movement of peoples through migration, warfare/negotiation, and extensive trade networks; general population growth and urbanisation; as well as the physical manipulation of the environment through unchecked expansion into and building on unknown or previously untamed areas. In AD 165 the effective pathways this made for disease was made devastatingly clear by the Antonine Plague, a smallpox epidemic that carried off at least 10% of the Empire's population, with up to 20% in the worst affected areas. [p. 115]. It marked a turning point, and even if it did not lead to society's disintegration, it stressed the political system and the population beyond anything that had come before. [p. 116]
Harper goes on to discuss, in chronological fashion, the further pressures put on the Roman structure, detailing the ways in which each disease event or environmental shock had repercussions in every aspect of human life, from marriage and procreation to food production, from high politics to barbarian invasion. It is a dense history, heavy on detail and methodology, but nevertheless engagingly written. There are, of course, clear parallels in the interconnected, globalised society we live in today, and such warnings from history should be well heard. Overall, a brilliantly researched, well written, and valuable addition to the literature on Rome's fall.
ARC via Netgalley
April 6, 2020
Kyle Harper's "The Fate of Rome" is the intellectual heir to Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Where Diamond looked at how environmental change led to the collapse of several smaller civilizations around the world, Harper argues that climate change and disease helped push one of the largest and most successful empires in history over the edge.
Despite the title of this book, Harper doesn't quite argue that climate change and disease alone led to the collapse of Rome in the fifth and sixth centuries. Like Diamond, he acknowledges that humans have agency and the policies of the later emperors also contributed to Rome's decline. However, Harper does show that climate change and disease sapped Rome of its resilience, which was critical to its ability to dominate the Mediterranean for hundred of years.
The peak of Roman influence occurred during a warmer, wetter period in the Mediterranean (the Roman climatic optimum) that peaked during the latter half of the second century. This meant among other things that food production was more stable and inhibited the introduction of certain diseases. This also led to rapid population growth. Unlike its enemies, Rome could replenish its armies relatively quickly after defeat. During this period, Rome had a large margin for error and could afford to suffer military setbacks.
With the shift in climate, food production became less reliable as areas like Egypt, which had once been the breadbasket of the empire, suddenly became too dry to grow the same crop yields. Meanwhile, several pandemics wracked the empire, including smallpox (Antonine Plague of 165), ebola (Cyprian Plague of 250), and bubonic (Justinian Plague of 541). These sapped the empire of manpower and made it much harder for the central government to recruit new soldiers for the army. The famous Hun migration from Central Asia to Europe, which pushed the Goths towards Rome, was also likely driven by climate change.
The Roman state was poorly equipped to handle these environmental challenges. Roman cities were densely populated and had poor sanitation, allowing communicable diseases to spread easily. Moreover, the famous Roman transportation network allowed diseases to go from one corner of Europe to the other in short order. On top of that, Roman medical practice had no understanding of germs, so medical techniques, such as bloodletting, often made the problem worse.
I have read many other books about ancient Rome and so I had heard about the various plagues and signs of climate change, but never realized just how much stress they put on the Roman state until Harper put all the pieces together. He amasses a wealth of climatological and biological evidence to show just how much the Mediterranean had changed from Augustus to Justinian. I appreciated that he took the time to explain how we know what we know about the ancient world, as well as the remaining gaps in our knowledge.
Given our current concerns about climate change and pandemics, "The Fate of Rome" feels like a book just as much about the present as about the past. Harper doesn't spend too much time on the parallels, perhaps because they are so obvious. There are of course differences between our globalized world and the Roman Empire. For one thing, we have a much better scientific understanding of diseases. However, Harper's book is an important reminder that human civilization ultimately depends upon the vagaries of nature.
Even more so than Jared Diamond's "Collapse," this is a dense book. Harper doesn't spend much time providing background on ancient Rome or discussing the alternative theories for Rome's fall. I highly recommend readers readers acquaint themselves with the subject before tackling this book (I'd recommend Peter Heather's Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe or Adrian Goldsworthy's How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower). Highly recommended for readers interested in ancient Rome or environmental history.
[Note: I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.]
Despite the title of this book, Harper doesn't quite argue that climate change and disease alone led to the collapse of Rome in the fifth and sixth centuries. Like Diamond, he acknowledges that humans have agency and the policies of the later emperors also contributed to Rome's decline. However, Harper does show that climate change and disease sapped Rome of its resilience, which was critical to its ability to dominate the Mediterranean for hundred of years.
The peak of Roman influence occurred during a warmer, wetter period in the Mediterranean (the Roman climatic optimum) that peaked during the latter half of the second century. This meant among other things that food production was more stable and inhibited the introduction of certain diseases. This also led to rapid population growth. Unlike its enemies, Rome could replenish its armies relatively quickly after defeat. During this period, Rome had a large margin for error and could afford to suffer military setbacks.
With the shift in climate, food production became less reliable as areas like Egypt, which had once been the breadbasket of the empire, suddenly became too dry to grow the same crop yields. Meanwhile, several pandemics wracked the empire, including smallpox (Antonine Plague of 165), ebola (Cyprian Plague of 250), and bubonic (Justinian Plague of 541). These sapped the empire of manpower and made it much harder for the central government to recruit new soldiers for the army. The famous Hun migration from Central Asia to Europe, which pushed the Goths towards Rome, was also likely driven by climate change.
The Roman state was poorly equipped to handle these environmental challenges. Roman cities were densely populated and had poor sanitation, allowing communicable diseases to spread easily. Moreover, the famous Roman transportation network allowed diseases to go from one corner of Europe to the other in short order. On top of that, Roman medical practice had no understanding of germs, so medical techniques, such as bloodletting, often made the problem worse.
I have read many other books about ancient Rome and so I had heard about the various plagues and signs of climate change, but never realized just how much stress they put on the Roman state until Harper put all the pieces together. He amasses a wealth of climatological and biological evidence to show just how much the Mediterranean had changed from Augustus to Justinian. I appreciated that he took the time to explain how we know what we know about the ancient world, as well as the remaining gaps in our knowledge.
Given our current concerns about climate change and pandemics, "The Fate of Rome" feels like a book just as much about the present as about the past. Harper doesn't spend too much time on the parallels, perhaps because they are so obvious. There are of course differences between our globalized world and the Roman Empire. For one thing, we have a much better scientific understanding of diseases. However, Harper's book is an important reminder that human civilization ultimately depends upon the vagaries of nature.
Even more so than Jared Diamond's "Collapse," this is a dense book. Harper doesn't spend much time providing background on ancient Rome or discussing the alternative theories for Rome's fall. I highly recommend readers readers acquaint themselves with the subject before tackling this book (I'd recommend Peter Heather's Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe or Adrian Goldsworthy's How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower). Highly recommended for readers interested in ancient Rome or environmental history.
[Note: I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.]
September 19, 2021
Rome was once the biggest empire in the world. Why did it end? I had always been under the impression that the root cause was insurrections, revolts, and invasions by surrounding tribes. Well, yes, but why were these enemies so successful, against the biggest, baddest armies of the Roman empire?
The answer is that the Roman defeats did not occur overnight. They occurred over the course of centuries. Kyle Harper, the book's author, makes a very good case that the Roman empire was battered by pandemics and climate change. Hmmm ... sound familiar?
Rome is well known for building then-state-of-the-art roads over long distances. After all, we have the well-known saying, "All roads lead to Rome". Rome's bread-basket was Egypt, along the Nile River. Long-distance transportation and communication across the vast empire was unprecedented in history. But there were consequences. Local outbreaks of epidemics in the outskirts of the empire soon spread as pandemics across huge swaths. These pandemics sometimes decimated the population, including the Roman legions.
On top of the pandemics were droughts. At the beginning of the Roman empire, the Mediterranean region was more humid and cooler than it is today. Climate change induced aridification, and the result was occasional droughts that lasted years. These changes also affected the Rome's ability to field enormous armies across its entire empire.
The author notes that the real wonder, is how Rome lasted as long as it did. Multiple pandemics and droughts took their tolls, but the empire was amazingly robust. Towards the end, some really incompetent (and evil) emperors did their part, too, in ending the reign of Rome.
The book is also very interesting, due to the science that Kyle Harper adds. The details of the climate changes are deeply interwoven with the science of climate. This applies also to the pandemics and diseases. The book dives deeply into the science of medicine and the germs and medical practices of Rome. So, while this is primarily a history book, it is also quite immersed in science.
The author is a professor and professional historian. While the book is fascinating, the style of writing is EXTREMELY dry. It is a history book for historians and science historians, probably not for the general public.
The answer is that the Roman defeats did not occur overnight. They occurred over the course of centuries. Kyle Harper, the book's author, makes a very good case that the Roman empire was battered by pandemics and climate change. Hmmm ... sound familiar?
Rome is well known for building then-state-of-the-art roads over long distances. After all, we have the well-known saying, "All roads lead to Rome". Rome's bread-basket was Egypt, along the Nile River. Long-distance transportation and communication across the vast empire was unprecedented in history. But there were consequences. Local outbreaks of epidemics in the outskirts of the empire soon spread as pandemics across huge swaths. These pandemics sometimes decimated the population, including the Roman legions.
On top of the pandemics were droughts. At the beginning of the Roman empire, the Mediterranean region was more humid and cooler than it is today. Climate change induced aridification, and the result was occasional droughts that lasted years. These changes also affected the Rome's ability to field enormous armies across its entire empire.
The author notes that the real wonder, is how Rome lasted as long as it did. Multiple pandemics and droughts took their tolls, but the empire was amazingly robust. Towards the end, some really incompetent (and evil) emperors did their part, too, in ending the reign of Rome.
The book is also very interesting, due to the science that Kyle Harper adds. The details of the climate changes are deeply interwoven with the science of climate. This applies also to the pandemics and diseases. The book dives deeply into the science of medicine and the germs and medical practices of Rome. So, while this is primarily a history book, it is also quite immersed in science.
The author is a professor and professional historian. While the book is fascinating, the style of writing is EXTREMELY dry. It is a history book for historians and science historians, probably not for the general public.
July 30, 2021
The fate of Rome is a very engaging and informative look about Rome in a climate and disease side of things. It never stopped being intresting and was very enjoyable and an easy to follow non fiction. I'm excited to read more non fiction by Kyle Harper in tee future for sure.
November 18, 2021
Numerous historians have written numerous books analysing why and how the Roman Empire collapsed. Yes there were invasions and revoltes, but there were also climate change and pandemics. More importantly, the empire didn’t fall in years or decades, but in centuries. The Roman world did not end in a big bang, but in many bangs. In Fate of Rome, historian Kyle Harper paints a wide picture of the empire from its turning point to the end. His focus is the effects of pandemics and climate changes on society.
Three pandemics:
1. The Antonine Plague or the Plague of Galen: 165 to 180 AD; possible pathogen: smallpox. This plague is widely considered the turning point of Roman history. The empire bounced back but weakened.
2. The Plague of Cyprian: 249 to 262 AD; possible pathogen: a virus in Filoviruses family, which includes modern species such as the Ebola virus. The empire was further weakened and failed to bounce back.
3. The Justinianic Plague: bubonic plague in the Late Roman or Byzantine Empire, which first appears in historical records in 541 CE. It reappeared in waves in different regions over the next two hundred years, ending ca. 750 CE. The plague, along with the climate change brought by The Late Antique Little Ice Age, transformed the social and spiritual landscape of the Late Roman Empire and marked the beginning of medieval time.
Two major climate change events:
1. The Roman Warm Period, or Roman Climatic Optimum, was a period of unusually-warm weather in Europe and the North Atlantic that ran from approximately 250 BC to AD 400. The end of this period brought agriculture failures across the empire. Climate change also made the Huns migrate from central Asia to the west. According to the author, the Huns, the barbaric invaders, were climate refugees.
2. The Late Antique Little Ice Age was a long-lasting Northern Hemispheric cooling period in the 6th and 7th centuries AD, during the period known as Late Antiquity. The period coincides with three large volcanic eruptions in 535/536, 539/540 and 547.
A well-researched book written in easy-to-follow prose. A lot of detailed descriptions, figures and analysis.
In the Epilogue, Harper gives his view on The Malthusian theory. While nodding to its merit, he points out that the view is entirely human-centric. The evolution of microbes is intertwined with ours, but it is on its own path and we humans do not have control, even using today’s technologies. Nature is not passive.
The book was published in 2017. Perhaps it is not surprising that the climate change (this time man-made) and pandemic are now back onto the center stage of our life, which is chilling to think of.
Three pandemics:
1. The Antonine Plague or the Plague of Galen: 165 to 180 AD; possible pathogen: smallpox. This plague is widely considered the turning point of Roman history. The empire bounced back but weakened.
2. The Plague of Cyprian: 249 to 262 AD; possible pathogen: a virus in Filoviruses family, which includes modern species such as the Ebola virus. The empire was further weakened and failed to bounce back.
3. The Justinianic Plague: bubonic plague in the Late Roman or Byzantine Empire, which first appears in historical records in 541 CE. It reappeared in waves in different regions over the next two hundred years, ending ca. 750 CE. The plague, along with the climate change brought by The Late Antique Little Ice Age, transformed the social and spiritual landscape of the Late Roman Empire and marked the beginning of medieval time.
Two major climate change events:
1. The Roman Warm Period, or Roman Climatic Optimum, was a period of unusually-warm weather in Europe and the North Atlantic that ran from approximately 250 BC to AD 400. The end of this period brought agriculture failures across the empire. Climate change also made the Huns migrate from central Asia to the west. According to the author, the Huns, the barbaric invaders, were climate refugees.
2. The Late Antique Little Ice Age was a long-lasting Northern Hemispheric cooling period in the 6th and 7th centuries AD, during the period known as Late Antiquity. The period coincides with three large volcanic eruptions in 535/536, 539/540 and 547.
A well-researched book written in easy-to-follow prose. A lot of detailed descriptions, figures and analysis.
In the Epilogue, Harper gives his view on The Malthusian theory. While nodding to its merit, he points out that the view is entirely human-centric. The evolution of microbes is intertwined with ours, but it is on its own path and we humans do not have control, even using today’s technologies. Nature is not passive.
The book was published in 2017. Perhaps it is not surprising that the climate change (this time man-made) and pandemic are now back onto the center stage of our life, which is chilling to think of.
May 15, 2021
The argument put forth in these pages is that to understand the prolonged episode we know as the fall of the Roman Empire, we must look at a great act of self-deception, right at the heart of the empire’s triumphant ceremonies: the undue confidence .. that the Romans had tamed the forces of wild nature. At scales that the Romans themselves could not have understood and scarcely imagined – from the microscopic to the global – the fall of their empire was the triumph of nature over human ambitions. The fate of Rome was played out by emperors and barbarians, senators and generals, soldiers and slaves. But it was equally decided by bacteria and viruses, volcanoes and solar cycles.
A complex, well-researched and well if densely written book and one which is so much more timely and prescient for our own globally interconnected and thriving society than the author can even have imagined when he first published it in 2017.
While acknowledging the many theories on the Fall of Rome which concentrate on direct human choices and interplays (the increasing difficulties of including frontier tribes in the Empire, Hun-forced migratory pressures, Gibbon’s views on the role of Christianity, the compounding effects of Civil Wars, fiscal and geographical overstretch etc. – note that for me the best discussion of these is in Peter Heather’s “The Fall of the Roman Empire” (my review - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) and I notice that this book is referenced here) the book examines the role of two other more hidden factors which the author considers key to the fall (and also the rise) of Rome : climate and (perhaps the key focus of the book) infectious disease.
In both cases as a historian he draws on lots of recently discovered or publicised objective evidence (from tree rings to bone lengths) which have been increasingly accessed used by climatologists and epidemiologist researching the history of each topic.
The book I think can only be truly appreciated by someone with a fairly detailed knowledge as well as with an almost obsessive interest of Roman history for the period covered (certainly more than mine – and I consider myself both knowledgeable and interested) because the book proceeds to step through that history both explaining and summarising the human elements in detail (typically introducing sections with eyewitness testimony from marked historical figures who are introduced in well written biographical detail) and then showing how they interacted with climate and disease impacts.
On climate one thing I found interesting was the author’s research into the climate that applied in the Roman Climate Optimum – the latter stages of which marked Gibbon’s “Happiest Age” – and how records seems to confirm a to the modern eye almost implausibly good warm and wet climate for the key Imperial areas. He makes a similar observation about climate benefits during both the latter 4th Century resurgence of the Western Empire and the peak of the Eastern Empire. Overall the author like Gibbon ultimately concludes that the real marvel is not the fall of the Roman Empire but that it lasted so long – and in some ways fortunate climate at critical junctures, taken advantage of by inspired leaders using a deeply ingrained and established imperial infrastructure, was a key part of this.
Generally he considers climate to be a purely exogenous factor due to astronomical and geological forcings – albeit with some speculation that deforestation did give some mild anthropological forcing.
By contrast for disease he draws the opposite view that, as well as its link with climate, that the story of infectious disease is far more intimately shaped by human interference …… In Many ways, an unintended and paradoxical consequence of the Roman Empire’s ambitious social development was the lethal microbial environment that it fostered.”
In particular he shows how the Roman’s links to tropical areas beyond the Empire’s frontiers (which recent research have shown to be a lot more extensive than expected) linked it to the breeding ground for new pathogens and how extremely dense urban environments (and a complete lack of medical understanding and infrastructure) then allowed pandemics to thrive. The aforementioned warm and wet climate for the key Imperial areas, and Rome itself being built on a marsh, also of course served as a breeding ground for the recurring Roman problem of malaria.
On the fall of the Western Empire he explicitly follows Heather in considering Hun-forced migration as the final driver – but goes further in showing that climate (in particular a severe Steppe based drought due to North Atlantic Oscillation phases) may have forced the incursion of the Huns into “barbarian” areas (so forcing the Roman Empire to accept permanent – and ultimately destabilising - mass migration and settlement from the latter). He also posits that the astonishing retreat of the Huns was probably due to their encounter with the unknow to them killer of malaria.
A key chapter looks at the plague which devestated the population of both halves of the Empire – permanently weakening the East when it was at its Justinian peak and leaving the Western part of the Empire largely deluded not just of civilisation but even of much sign of population. He draws on recent research including genome sequencing which proves that this plague was in fact bubonic plague – a disease whose origins and trajectory (including the interactions between black rats, fleas and humans – and the way in which human pandemic infection is effectively a by-product as the rat population dies out) he traces in detail. He posits early on that the tremendous grain shipping networks that the Eastern Empire developed (and which underpinned the grain dole in Constantinople just as it did in Imperial Rome) combined possibly with climate shifts were what allowed the plague via shipborn rats to infiltrate the Empire. He shows that a key differentiator of bubonic plague was its ability to transmit into the countryside and not just thrive in cities – and posits that it killed 50% of the overall population. He also shows how climate change (severe volcanic activity, reduced solar energy and changes in the North Atlantic oscillation) caused complete upheaval to the Empire at a time when it was denuded due to the plague of any ability to respond. A final chapter examines how the aftermath of recurring plague lead to an eschatological turn in the religions of the book and how all these factors fuelled the rise of Islam.
One area of interest for me is a reference to how Christianity first really thrived due to the basic medical care (as well as love and community) offered by the Christian community during the plague of Cyprian in the third century – a theme which I heard articulated recently by Nicky Gumble on an Alpha Leadership Conference referencing work by the American Sociologist Rodney Stark (which is also a reference in this book). One can only hope that COVID gives a similar opportunity for Christian growth – and early signs of the huge uptake in online Alpha courses would give grounds for optimism – albeit the key will be people joining local church communities post lockdown.
Overall an outstanding if very involved book.
December 26, 2017
Decent book. If Goodreads gave half-stars, I'd give it 3.5. But a lot of it seemed fairly basic, so I wasn't going to give it four stars.
This book has a different take on Rome's fall. Instead of looking at Huns or Goths or Christians or internal politics to explain Rome's fall, author Kyle Harper looks at the environment. He starts by noting that Rome's peak came in an era called the Roman Climate Optimum, which - as the name implies - was an era where the weather really helped Rome prosper. It was an era where the climate was warm, wet, and stable. So you had good weather for growing crops and maintaining a large population and a prosperous empire. From 150-450, Rome's climate became less stable, and then came the 6th century volcanic eruptions that fucked everything up. Plus disease plays a role in hurting Rome.
In the glory years, volcanoes were dormant and growth ensued. Rainfall was heavier than normal. Deforestation occurred, and was consequential. By the 120s, a drought hit northern Africa, signalling the good old days were coming to an end.
Plague hit Rome in 166 AD. The empire had 75 million people at the time and lots of internal trade. This went on and off through 180. The social development had created biological diversity. Pathogens were likely increased by the urbanization. Deaths, even before the plague, tended to spike in August and September, indicating stomach/intestinal diseases. Malaria, TB, and lepracy were all common. The big plague led to an increase in religious devotion centered on Apollo. He was a big deal before, but never like this. The best guess is that the plague was smallpox. People have estimated it killed from 2% to 33% (!!) of the people: from 1.5 to 25 million. Silver mining collapsed, prices skyrocketed and rent prices went down. Best guess here: 10-20% died.
The Roman Climate Optimum gave way to the Late Roman Transition by the late 2nd century. By the later part of the century, drought hit the Mediterranean, especially in the south and east. The Nile had some weak flows. A plague came up from Ethiopia by the 250s. A 2nd wave came the next decade. It was maybe influenza and Harper even floats the possibility of ebola. (Uh, the first known case of ebola in humans is in the 1960s, so color me skeptical). Around this time the empire really started to fragment, but it rallied. There was also persecution of Christians around this time.
Aridity along the Eurasian steppe led to the migration of groups like the Huns. Eventually the climate stabilized as the population went up in France and Germany. But central Asia stayed dry and the Huns moved into Europe outright. Rome fell.
In the late Roman/early Byzantine world, rats came and brought a new plague during the time of Justinian. There had been a revival of Eurasian trade. 536 was the year without a summer. Plague hit and social order collapses. Maybe half the population died (!!!). More outbreaks came. From 542-619, it came once every 15 years. It came two more times by the mid-8th century. Pope Gregory the Great responded to the plague with a ritual parade of mournful prayer. The 530s kicked off a 150-year cold snap: the Late Antique Little Ice Age. The Byzantine Empire was sapped of its vitality. Italy had population collapse. The west was hurt harder than the eastern Mediterranean. Justinian held on due to ruthlessness. (The way he handled the Nika riots helped ensure no one rioted here when his empire still demanded the old tax rates). Future emperors had to lessen tax intake, though. Christianity responded by putting more focus than ever before on Mary. Apocolyptic writing was more common among Christians and Jews. But it all helped set the stage for Islam.
Looking over my notes, it's been than I recall when reading it. But it also had dry spells that I didn't get much out of. And it was a bit circular in it's timelining, going forward then doubling back and circles this way then then. Overall though, it is an interesting book.
This book has a different take on Rome's fall. Instead of looking at Huns or Goths or Christians or internal politics to explain Rome's fall, author Kyle Harper looks at the environment. He starts by noting that Rome's peak came in an era called the Roman Climate Optimum, which - as the name implies - was an era where the weather really helped Rome prosper. It was an era where the climate was warm, wet, and stable. So you had good weather for growing crops and maintaining a large population and a prosperous empire. From 150-450, Rome's climate became less stable, and then came the 6th century volcanic eruptions that fucked everything up. Plus disease plays a role in hurting Rome.
In the glory years, volcanoes were dormant and growth ensued. Rainfall was heavier than normal. Deforestation occurred, and was consequential. By the 120s, a drought hit northern Africa, signalling the good old days were coming to an end.
Plague hit Rome in 166 AD. The empire had 75 million people at the time and lots of internal trade. This went on and off through 180. The social development had created biological diversity. Pathogens were likely increased by the urbanization. Deaths, even before the plague, tended to spike in August and September, indicating stomach/intestinal diseases. Malaria, TB, and lepracy were all common. The big plague led to an increase in religious devotion centered on Apollo. He was a big deal before, but never like this. The best guess is that the plague was smallpox. People have estimated it killed from 2% to 33% (!!) of the people: from 1.5 to 25 million. Silver mining collapsed, prices skyrocketed and rent prices went down. Best guess here: 10-20% died.
The Roman Climate Optimum gave way to the Late Roman Transition by the late 2nd century. By the later part of the century, drought hit the Mediterranean, especially in the south and east. The Nile had some weak flows. A plague came up from Ethiopia by the 250s. A 2nd wave came the next decade. It was maybe influenza and Harper even floats the possibility of ebola. (Uh, the first known case of ebola in humans is in the 1960s, so color me skeptical). Around this time the empire really started to fragment, but it rallied. There was also persecution of Christians around this time.
Aridity along the Eurasian steppe led to the migration of groups like the Huns. Eventually the climate stabilized as the population went up in France and Germany. But central Asia stayed dry and the Huns moved into Europe outright. Rome fell.
In the late Roman/early Byzantine world, rats came and brought a new plague during the time of Justinian. There had been a revival of Eurasian trade. 536 was the year without a summer. Plague hit and social order collapses. Maybe half the population died (!!!). More outbreaks came. From 542-619, it came once every 15 years. It came two more times by the mid-8th century. Pope Gregory the Great responded to the plague with a ritual parade of mournful prayer. The 530s kicked off a 150-year cold snap: the Late Antique Little Ice Age. The Byzantine Empire was sapped of its vitality. Italy had population collapse. The west was hurt harder than the eastern Mediterranean. Justinian held on due to ruthlessness. (The way he handled the Nika riots helped ensure no one rioted here when his empire still demanded the old tax rates). Future emperors had to lessen tax intake, though. Christianity responded by putting more focus than ever before on Mary. Apocolyptic writing was more common among Christians and Jews. But it all helped set the stage for Islam.
Looking over my notes, it's been than I recall when reading it. But it also had dry spells that I didn't get much out of. And it was a bit circular in it's timelining, going forward then doubling back and circles this way then then. Overall though, it is an interesting book.
November 30, 2019
Harper's book doesn't replace other books on the collapse of the Roman Empire (or Empires), but supplements them usefully. While other historians emphasise certain social or political conditions that underlay the collapses of the Roman polities, or the impact of certain decisions or events, Harper puts all these in a environmental context that shows how variations in climate, waves of pandemics and the economic impacts of both formed the rolling waves on which the micro-level events rode. By marrying recent modern climate science data and medical knowledge of disease vectors, he is able to map archaeology and a new perspective on the sources to give political events and social changes a wider context.
This will probably not sit well with those who have ideological needs to attribute Rome's rise to more abstract forces (e.g. admirable values like fortitude and constancy) or its fall to sinister outside influences (Christianity or an influx of "foreigners"). It definitely won't sit well with those who have a misty eyed and romantic view of the Romans shaped by Hollywood images of pristine, white marble cities with baths and running water - Harper takes some delight in making it clear exactly how dirty, smelly and disease-ridden major Roman cities actually were. But it makes for a fresh new way of reading about the political ups and downs.
] Readers looking for a narrative history with entertaining anecdotes will be disappointed, as a lot of the book is technical and goes into great detail on the underpinning science. But those of us who like to look at familiar events from a new angle will find this book an eye-opener.
This will probably not sit well with those who have ideological needs to attribute Rome's rise to more abstract forces (e.g. admirable values like fortitude and constancy) or its fall to sinister outside influences (Christianity or an influx of "foreigners"). It definitely won't sit well with those who have a misty eyed and romantic view of the Romans shaped by Hollywood images of pristine, white marble cities with baths and running water - Harper takes some delight in making it clear exactly how dirty, smelly and disease-ridden major Roman cities actually were. But it makes for a fresh new way of reading about the political ups and downs.
] Readers looking for a narrative history with entertaining anecdotes will be disappointed, as a lot of the book is technical and goes into great detail on the underpinning science. But those of us who like to look at familiar events from a new angle will find this book an eye-opener.
May 10, 2020
I love books about classic history and more if it is on ancient empires such as the colossal one we know as The Roman Empire, that’s why I chose to read this book that dealt with how the climate and changes to it impacted the empire and might have even precipitated it’s fall. But this book is not easy read, it deals with climate charts, there is terminology that will not sound familiar to most historians and had a lot of charts about demographics and environmental impact. What I’m trying to say here is that if you are looking for an easy read about the Roman Empire and why it fell this is not the book for you, that being said if you are looking for a more nuanced point of view backed up with science as to another probable reason why the Roman Empire fell then you might enjoy this book but be ready to take it slow. It was kind of scary to read this book while there is an actual pandemic going around the world as I’m writing this .
October 14, 2020
In the old days this book would have been called "learned." Kyle Harper has done a virtuoso job collecting evidence from a wide array of disciplines and has formulated a new history of the fall of Rome that is the first to fully incorporate the climate and epidemiological data into a synthesis that is complete and, best of all, very readable. This book will change the way you think about late antiquity, guaranteed - and contains the faintest hints of warnings for our own time. In its day, Rome was a colossus that bestrode much of the world - but climate variation and pandemics brought it down.
December 12, 2022
This book tells the long, dreadful and hectic story of the fall of the Roman Empire. Though instead of primarily looking at the battles and invasions that led to the imminent collapse of the empire, as most books on the fall do, Harper focuses on the role of climate change and disease. He did this through the use of many modern studies and discoveries in both the measuring of climate change and its effects and through the recent studies on the understanding of diseases. This was extremely interesting and refreshing as it sheds light on things we did not know merely twenty years ago.
After an amazing introduction, Harper looks at the state of the empire in Gibbon’s so-called ‘happiest age’ in the 2nd century AD. In this time period, climate actually favoured the empire and helped it grow, in what we now call the Roman Climate Optimum. I was continually fascinated by the statistics of the empire at its height, from the urbanisation to the size of the population and its connected networks. I was also shocked how many records the Roman Empire had set that would only be broken many centuries afterwards.
But this golden age was not to last and was met by plagues, which easily spread in the urbanised and connected Roman world. The Romans suffered through political crises and climate change but managed to hold on until invasions from the North and East destroyed the Western Empire.
Justinian the Great was very close to recovering most of it and starting a new golden age, but literally everything went bad and I can’t blame his contemporaries for believing that the world was ending and that the Final Judgment had arrived. The arrival of the Plague of Justinian, famines and the eruptions of volcanoes that led to a ‘year without sun’ and the onset of a little Ice Age make for a very grim read. The constant wars overstretched the empire and the Islamic conquests of the early 7th century ended the empire’s chances of fully recovering. A very good book with probably one of the most beautiful covers I have seen so far. Four stars!
After an amazing introduction, Harper looks at the state of the empire in Gibbon’s so-called ‘happiest age’ in the 2nd century AD. In this time period, climate actually favoured the empire and helped it grow, in what we now call the Roman Climate Optimum. I was continually fascinated by the statistics of the empire at its height, from the urbanisation to the size of the population and its connected networks. I was also shocked how many records the Roman Empire had set that would only be broken many centuries afterwards.
But this golden age was not to last and was met by plagues, which easily spread in the urbanised and connected Roman world. The Romans suffered through political crises and climate change but managed to hold on until invasions from the North and East destroyed the Western Empire.
Justinian the Great was very close to recovering most of it and starting a new golden age, but literally everything went bad and I can’t blame his contemporaries for believing that the world was ending and that the Final Judgment had arrived. The arrival of the Plague of Justinian, famines and the eruptions of volcanoes that led to a ‘year without sun’ and the onset of a little Ice Age make for a very grim read. The constant wars overstretched the empire and the Islamic conquests of the early 7th century ended the empire’s chances of fully recovering. A very good book with probably one of the most beautiful covers I have seen so far. Four stars!
March 20, 2019
Absurdly stunning book.....I think it will take its place as maybe the great book of the end of the Roman Empire (yes I know there are massive contenders for that title)
It looks at the Fall of Rome factoring in climate change and disease. In a nutshell, the height of Rome occurred during a climactic warm spell, the start of the long decline corresponds with the warm period becoming not so warm then worse. Also, he looks at 3 major epidemics (and the epidemiology of them) that were body blows to the Roman Empire (and since the last plague was Bubonic and occurred in 541, it also deals with what became the Byzantine Empire)
It's an incredibly researched, well written all encompassing history.....climate, disease, Roman work, medicine, death patterns, floods, farming.....everything
I can't rave enough....this is a masterpiece
It looks at the Fall of Rome factoring in climate change and disease. In a nutshell, the height of Rome occurred during a climactic warm spell, the start of the long decline corresponds with the warm period becoming not so warm then worse. Also, he looks at 3 major epidemics (and the epidemiology of them) that were body blows to the Roman Empire (and since the last plague was Bubonic and occurred in 541, it also deals with what became the Byzantine Empire)
It's an incredibly researched, well written all encompassing history.....climate, disease, Roman work, medicine, death patterns, floods, farming.....everything
I can't rave enough....this is a masterpiece
August 10, 2020
This is a good book to read to get a general overview of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. It definitely is biased towards the author's viewpoint, but it is well-cited and well-written. The prose is excellent, and the there is a good sense of storytelling. My only real caveats are that it sometimes feels as if Harper is overemphasizing the importance of climate and disease in the history of Rome. They were certainly large influences, but I am someimes skeptical that they were most or nearly most important factors in many of the events. Harper does have nuance here, though, and so I can still say that the book covers things well (just not enough maybe's and perhaps's for my taste when doing more speculative history). Reading a couple of other reviews also brought to my attention that Harper's coverage of the Cyprian plague is not the consensus, with many historians not believing the Cyprian plague to be anything other than local to Alexandria. (That this is not more emphasized in the text or footnotes is my reason for dropping a single star, as I think it deserves at least a footnote.)
Overall, it is a nice synthesis of the ways that the environment and human decisions come together to create the trends for nations/empires/cities/etc to rise and fall. It is engaging, and so long as you make sure not to simply accept everything stated in the book as the whole truth (something I'm sure even Harper would object to), then the book will teach you something interesting about Rome and how civilizations interact with the environment.
Overall, it is a nice synthesis of the ways that the environment and human decisions come together to create the trends for nations/empires/cities/etc to rise and fall. It is engaging, and so long as you make sure not to simply accept everything stated in the book as the whole truth (something I'm sure even Harper would object to), then the book will teach you something interesting about Rome and how civilizations interact with the environment.
September 24, 2021
Brillante saggio ultradocumentato che postula il fattore ecologico, inteso sia come clima che malattie, alla base del crollo dell'Impero romano. Argomentato con maestria, anche se con qualche lungaggine, il libro ci porta a toccare con mano quale parte fondamentale abbiano avuto gli elementi naturali nel favorire, anzi causare, quelle invasioni barbariche (e non solo) che sono da sempre accreditate come le responsabili della fine di una storia millenaria.
November 30, 2017
This is a fascinating book on a topic that I assumed had long since been picked over. There was quite a bit of evidence to support the author's arguments. It does enjoy using a 75 cent words when a 10 cent one might do the job.
July 2, 2019
A fascinating foray into fields I didn’t even know existed. A book I couldn’t stop telling friends about.
January 11, 2025
Actual Rating 3.5
This was required reading for a course I was taking at the time on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Compared to the other books I had to read for the class this is the only one I read in its entirety. This was also the most unique. There’s a lot of discourse over the Roman Empire’s fall due to religion, invasions, and politics. But Kyle Harper focuses on the climate and environmental factors to answer the question of how the Roman Empire fell.
Harper did convince me of his argument by the end. I also found that this topic was unexplored which is a bit odd considering how much discourse there is about the fall of the Roman Empire. So he gets more points there for keeping my attention.
My biggest criticism of this book was how repetitive it felt. I found myself skim-reading a lot of the sections. In my opinion it could’ve been trimmed just a little bit.
Not sure who to recommend this for as this is required reading. I guess for those of you obsessed with the Roman Empire and its decline?
This was required reading for a course I was taking at the time on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Compared to the other books I had to read for the class this is the only one I read in its entirety. This was also the most unique. There’s a lot of discourse over the Roman Empire’s fall due to religion, invasions, and politics. But Kyle Harper focuses on the climate and environmental factors to answer the question of how the Roman Empire fell.
Harper did convince me of his argument by the end. I also found that this topic was unexplored which is a bit odd considering how much discourse there is about the fall of the Roman Empire. So he gets more points there for keeping my attention.
My biggest criticism of this book was how repetitive it felt. I found myself skim-reading a lot of the sections. In my opinion it could’ve been trimmed just a little bit.
Not sure who to recommend this for as this is required reading. I guess for those of you obsessed with the Roman Empire and its decline?
August 22, 2025
So big kudos for the author for navigating the trecherous waters of pathoarcheology and providing a ton of examples and sources, often primary ones. The book also approached the topic from numerous angles and showed what conclusions can be made from a number of various writings, from conscription documents, through prices of grain, diaries, letters, medical records, up to the amount of silver in coins. I'm also glad that the story didn't stop with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and carried on to ERE, though of course discussing the issue of plagues in the Roman Empire can never be complete without mentioning at least the Plague of Justinian. So respect for all that. The problem was, that sometimes the book just wasn't this interesting. I guess there are only so many ways in which you can write: "A plague came and people started dying."
December 24, 2017
I really wanted to like this book. I heard the author speak, presumably part of a book tour, and his speech/presentation was very interesting and enlightening, so I bought the book. I was disappointed. First, I think you have to have a decent knowledge of Roman history going into this book to follow it, and I don't. He makes lots of references to people, groups of people, and places I have never heard of. He does have some maps in the book, which is helpful. However, there are certain cities of ancient groups of people I didn't know existed, that play a rather important role, so I was lost every time he would refer to them. (Who are these people and where do they come from? I would have enjoyed learning of them if he had given at least a little background on them instead of just a name.) Second, Perhaps this wouldn't have been so much of an issue if I already had knowledge of these ancient rulers, groups of people, and places, but he jumps around a lot both geographically and chronologically. Some of the chronological jumping is to explain why something is important or to give you knowledge the people back then didn't have, but it only confused me more. Perhaps if the book had been organized better or there had been more labeled subsections, it would have helped.
The topic of the book though, I found very interesting. I really liked reading an historical account that weaved politics with disease and environmental factors. On the whole, I did like this book and feel like I learned something. However, I found it really hard to read, not because of the topic, but because of the writing and organization.
The topic of the book though, I found very interesting. I really liked reading an historical account that weaved politics with disease and environmental factors. On the whole, I did like this book and feel like I learned something. However, I found it really hard to read, not because of the topic, but because of the writing and organization.
October 21, 2017
Summary :
1. While Marcus Aurelius held the reins, a pandemic “interrupted the economic and demographic expansion” of the Roman empire.
2. In the middle of the 3rd century, a cocktail of drought, plague, and political turmoil led to the unforeseen and precipitous dissolution of the empire. It was, however, determinedly rebuilt, with a new emperor, a new system of governance, and in due time a new Mythos.
3. The coherence of this new empire was splintered in the late 4th and early 5th centuries. The entire Eurasian steppe seemed to rest against the edifice of the empire's power in brand new and unsustainable ways, and the western part of it tumbled.
4. In the east, there was a resurgent Empire, but unfortunately, this was violently brought to a halt by one of the worst environmental disasters in recorded history — the double strike of bubonic plague and a little bit of ice age for good measure.
The later centuries Roman history were an age of endemic and pandemic disease. The empire was shaken thrice by mortality events with such wide and striking geographical reach. In 165 AD the Antonine plague erupted most probably due to smallpox. In 249 AD, an undefined pathogen scoured the territories of Roman reign. And in 541 AD, the first rampant pandemic of Yersinia pestis, the agent that authors the bubonic plague, arrived and dawdled for over all of 200 years. The enormity of these biological catastrophes is almost mystifying and should serve as a stern warning for the times to come.
1. While Marcus Aurelius held the reins, a pandemic “interrupted the economic and demographic expansion” of the Roman empire.
2. In the middle of the 3rd century, a cocktail of drought, plague, and political turmoil led to the unforeseen and precipitous dissolution of the empire. It was, however, determinedly rebuilt, with a new emperor, a new system of governance, and in due time a new Mythos.
3. The coherence of this new empire was splintered in the late 4th and early 5th centuries. The entire Eurasian steppe seemed to rest against the edifice of the empire's power in brand new and unsustainable ways, and the western part of it tumbled.
4. In the east, there was a resurgent Empire, but unfortunately, this was violently brought to a halt by one of the worst environmental disasters in recorded history — the double strike of bubonic plague and a little bit of ice age for good measure.
The later centuries Roman history were an age of endemic and pandemic disease. The empire was shaken thrice by mortality events with such wide and striking geographical reach. In 165 AD the Antonine plague erupted most probably due to smallpox. In 249 AD, an undefined pathogen scoured the territories of Roman reign. And in 541 AD, the first rampant pandemic of Yersinia pestis, the agent that authors the bubonic plague, arrived and dawdled for over all of 200 years. The enormity of these biological catastrophes is almost mystifying and should serve as a stern warning for the times to come.
July 28, 2022
A fascinating and fairly scholarly examination on how changing climate and disease effected the course of Ancient Roman history. Harper provides an extensive examination of Roman civilization in the face of changing climate, extending contact between different peoples and the spread of disease before, during and after the Antonine Plague (ca. 165 A.D.), the Plague of Cyprian (ca. 249-62), and Justinian Plague (ca. 541-43 A.D., and subsequent outbreaks to 749 A.D). If found the different disease ecologies to be particularly interesting, especially combined with changing climate and human behaviour. The "plagues" described in this book don't all refer to the same disease: - small pox, some sort of viral hemorrhagic fever makes an appearance, and then, of course, there is the bubonic plague. Harper makes good use of existing paleoclimate data, ancient texts, archaeological data, and modern data on disease microbes, to support his conclusions. The book includes a timeline and various graphs and other useful graphics. This is definitely one of the more interesting books about Ancient Rome I have come across, providing new information and a different perspective on an old subject.
NOTE : The text in the paperback version of this book is fairly small, so if small print is an issue for you, try the hard cover edition.
NOTE : The text in the paperback version of this book is fairly small, so if small print is an issue for you, try the hard cover edition.
February 3, 2018
Scholarly nonfiction is always so hard to rate. Is this examination of the impacts of disease and climate on the fall of the Roman empire interesting and important? Yes, very much so. Do I have enough detailed background on the minutia of Roman history to independently evaluate the strength of this examination? That's a big, fat no. It is a very good sign however that the footnotes and appendices are over a quarter of the pages in my copy, and that the author is a professor of classics, so I'll take him at his word. My studies of quaternary geology also jive with the trends described. Now, was this book a readable, well-written page turner? Yes, to the extent that this type of study can ever be, but of course that also means sections that are rather dry and that require concentration from the reader. This doesn't bother me, I knew what I was biting into. And it *was* full of delicious thoughts; my brain feels bigger for having consumed this book. I wish it had the life changing, revelatory quality and poetical prose, perfect-example-of-the-genre-ness I personally need in order to give this sort of text 5 stars. Alas, call me picky. I'll still be thinking about this for a long time and will be glad to have it on the shelf.
May 10, 2018
A different perspective on the fate of Rome. What made the empire to topple? Adrian Goldswhorty gave us in 2009 his thesis that It was the internecine fights what ended the system in "How Rome Fell" and now I have my hands in this jewel of a book telling me that germs and climate change are the new culprits.
Fascinating read and a pleasure to witness a task force from different fields of science to take on this wonderful tale of how good luck on climate cannot last forever.
On the other hand this is an horror book describing how different plagues halved the population in the mediterranean and kept It from recover. Now I know why Bill Gates is always nagging us about the next plague to come. I am really, really scared to death.
Fascinating read and a pleasure to witness a task force from different fields of science to take on this wonderful tale of how good luck on climate cannot last forever.
On the other hand this is an horror book describing how different plagues halved the population in the mediterranean and kept It from recover. Now I know why Bill Gates is always nagging us about the next plague to come. I am really, really scared to death.
March 18, 2019
Outstanding new book on the disintegration of the Roman Empire from the reign of the deified Marcus Aurelius to the Moslem conquests.
Harper explores the convergence of climate and disease that repeatedly struck the Roman Empire. While the Antonine plague and the plague of Justinian are well enough known, Harper gives new importance to the plague of Cyprian, that makes a lot of mid third century history make more sense now.
Great discussion on how ancient cities were veritable stew pots of diseases.
So while I used to think that the Romans did themselves in, (and yes they did help), this book makes a very good case that the Empire was done in by events both beyond its control, and facilitated by the structure of civilization itself.
New phrase learned: Roman climate optimum.
Harper explores the convergence of climate and disease that repeatedly struck the Roman Empire. While the Antonine plague and the plague of Justinian are well enough known, Harper gives new importance to the plague of Cyprian, that makes a lot of mid third century history make more sense now.
Great discussion on how ancient cities were veritable stew pots of diseases.
So while I used to think that the Romans did themselves in, (and yes they did help), this book makes a very good case that the Empire was done in by events both beyond its control, and facilitated by the structure of civilization itself.
New phrase learned: Roman climate optimum.
December 1, 2024
I've never read a book like this. There's a heavy science focus, which does make sense as one way to look at history. He's talked about geochemistry, economics, genomic research, weather patterns, dendrochronology, epidemiology, bioarchaeology, and more. I've also started saving cool words he uses lol. Unusual for a non-fiction book for me. Insalubrious, consilience, maleficent, and fecundity are a few. I've even had to look a few words up. This guy's TBR list must be fascinating. He even touches on religion. I wouldn't suggest this as a 1st or 2nd book about Rome, but it's a very unique read. Some books I read just to see if I can follow and finish them. This is one of those.
September 26, 2018
The bad: it reads like a scientific book about scientific events that happen to take place during the Roman era versus an actual book about the Roman era. Not necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes I thought there were too many mentions of climate, pests, earthquakes and other natural phenomena and not enough actual history.
The good: the flip side of the above. It's a different and interesting take on the story of the Roman empire, from a scientific point of view.
The good: the flip side of the above. It's a different and interesting take on the story of the Roman empire, from a scientific point of view.
May 27, 2025
Excellent investigation into the natural causes and social dynamics in play that lead to the decline of the Roman civilization. The book covers a large swath of time and is thoroughly researched. It might be too dry for the casual reader, but if one is interested in the effects of epidemics on a fairly stable civilization, this book is as authoritative as you can get.
December 4, 2024
Firstly, considering the frame:
Thus the author complicates a tacit alignment with Malthusian theory, but with nods to the vagaries of environmental trends and the structured fickleness of demographics, rather than historical materialist critique of the in-built contradictions of class, productive & distributive systems---even though there are sprinklings of approaching those points. Although completely incidental to the topic of this book, in drawing broader lessons in it epilogue, questions of the context of 'population explosion' are neglected to the point that the Chinese Century of Humiliation of all things is reduced to the country "outstripping its ecological capacities".
Moving on.
With all due respect to the author, it is most often silenced. If you'll excuse the cliche: much as climactic evidence is buried under layers in the "natural archive", the history of the "silent majority of labouring peasants" is buried in layers of ideological narrative, particularly so with the "shadows" of murkiness in historical accounts of the distant past. Revisiting this era, I'm always reminded of the class-driven historiography of Michael Parenti's The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome.
The gist of this book's thesis, repeated for emphasis over and over again, is the perfect storm of environmental augurs for demographic and 'fiscal-military' reversals of fortune. The Huns appear as "armed climate refugees on horseback". There's an emphasis on the lumbering but inescapable spread of plague---less from human-to-human transmission than from the sheer scale of latent epizootic virulence mixed with ancient Roman hygienic conditions. Such conditions only offer slight relative advantage to those with at least more immediate access to food and water, but the impact of the disease itself touched every class from the core to the fringes. The greatest impacts came with the fallout in the form of demographic crisis---portending collapse and imperial contraction.
Although most trade remained local across imperial history, "The empire by its nature systematically levelled barriers to trade." From the breadbasket of Egypt to the far eastern border, a general "Roman Climate Optimum" facilitated the efflorescence of trade and military strength. Until it didn't.
This "Late Antique Little Ice Age", naturally, hurt the harvests. This, and a "Justinian Plague" in the 540s, would then wreck the demographic makeup to the point of military desperation and fiscal fluctuations. "Conglomerate forces of barbarians" and, of course, nascent rival imperial conquest, would ultimately be able to take advantage of dissipated forces in the western Roman imperial core.
If the earlier Antonine Plague (AD 165-180) "hastened the provincialization of the empire", its hegemony was able to weather that storm. I won't try to recount here what Roman history enthusiasts will know about the fall of Rome, the fall of Constantinople, etc. The important takeaway is that disrupted patterns of patronage, Christianity's rise (crucially, reflecting millenarian sentiments in the superstructure), and climate realigning militant forces at the frontier fringes (and straining the human geography through, i.e., flooding), ultimately helped strain Rome to the breaking point. Amidst the restructuring of the empire, "Nomadism was the ideological mirror of civilization." The more the political centre was hollowed out by epidemiological and environmental crises, the more the threat in the mirror crossed the threshold. This is, at least, the extremely abbreviated version.
If the book is at points repetitive, the confluence of forces culminating in collapse bears repeating. It was not simply a case of overextension, or of inevitable destruction-by-climate, or of internal volatility wrought by political/economic shifts. These factors came together. "The vexing issue of military recruitment in the fourth century was not directly a demographic problem," for example. And later, in the sixth century A.D., when Emperor Justinian, in the wake of plague decimating military and economic forces, resisted debt forgiveness and cheated soldiers of payment (in a context where payments in gold and in kind precluded prior strategies of a resort to silver currency manipulation)...the infamous legions of Rome would be stretched. As much as the author emphasizes demographics, those shifts are the gun and the political and natural environment is the trigger.
Replace "demography" with "class society" and this would sound self-evident to any historical materialist.
Particularly in the last chapter, these demographic considerations in tandem with environmental manipulations so heavily reminds one of the tone of Mike Davis (Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster)---if he reified rather than critiqued the drive for capital growth:
The exploration of factors from traces of volcanic eruptions to variance in solar activity were fascinating (credit to the author for going out of his way as an aside to distinguish this from modern trends of anthropogenic climate change---anyone who has dealt with denialists will hear various claims about impacts of solar activity, designed to mislead). Harper's relation of this to the rise of millenarian ideas and rituals emphasizes the base-superstructure link without putting it in those terms.
A final note: considerations of climate, military manoeuvres, and demographic shifts all, as the tone of the book's epilogue seem to suggest, are 'echoes of history' that taken too superficially make it tempting to adopt the view of history as cyclic. While it's clear at this point that overoptimism is unmerited and there are epicycles of advancement and retreat, revolution and counter-revolution, we should be cautious of drawing parallels too uncritically. Differences in class structure are a key function to help us avoid this trap, lest we draw the wrong lessons from such statements as, "Average incomes in eighteenth-century England were closer to Roman levels than to those we enjoy in the developed world today."
In reality, mortality has been a much wilder, more independent and unpredictable force than the strict laws of energy limits would predict...Seen in this frame [of chaotic climate- and bacteria-driven fortune or misfortune], the Malthusian laws are at last too narrow to endure.
Thus the author complicates a tacit alignment with Malthusian theory, but with nods to the vagaries of environmental trends and the structured fickleness of demographics, rather than historical materialist critique of the in-built contradictions of class, productive & distributive systems---even though there are sprinklings of approaching those points. Although completely incidental to the topic of this book, in drawing broader lessons in it epilogue, questions of the context of 'population explosion' are neglected to the point that the Chinese Century of Humiliation of all things is reduced to the country "outstripping its ecological capacities".
Moving on.
All too often, the historical change that counts is also silent.
With all due respect to the author, it is most often silenced. If you'll excuse the cliche: much as climactic evidence is buried under layers in the "natural archive", the history of the "silent majority of labouring peasants" is buried in layers of ideological narrative, particularly so with the "shadows" of murkiness in historical accounts of the distant past. Revisiting this era, I'm always reminded of the class-driven historiography of Michael Parenti's The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome.
The gist of this book's thesis, repeated for emphasis over and over again, is the perfect storm of environmental augurs for demographic and 'fiscal-military' reversals of fortune. The Huns appear as "armed climate refugees on horseback". There's an emphasis on the lumbering but inescapable spread of plague---less from human-to-human transmission than from the sheer scale of latent epizootic virulence mixed with ancient Roman hygienic conditions. Such conditions only offer slight relative advantage to those with at least more immediate access to food and water, but the impact of the disease itself touched every class from the core to the fringes. The greatest impacts came with the fallout in the form of demographic crisis---portending collapse and imperial contraction.
People never disappeared from the old territories of the Roman Empire, but their ways of life were simplified and localized.
Together, climate change and disease exhausted the remnants of the Roman imperial order. The demographic consequences were primary.
Although most trade remained local across imperial history, "The empire by its nature systematically levelled barriers to trade." From the breadbasket of Egypt to the far eastern border, a general "Roman Climate Optimum" facilitated the efflorescence of trade and military strength. Until it didn't.
The reign of Justinian (A.D. 527 to 565) was beset by an epic, once-in-a-few-millennia cold snap, global in scale.
This "Late Antique Little Ice Age", naturally, hurt the harvests. This, and a "Justinian Plague" in the 540s, would then wreck the demographic makeup to the point of military desperation and fiscal fluctuations. "Conglomerate forces of barbarians" and, of course, nascent rival imperial conquest, would ultimately be able to take advantage of dissipated forces in the western Roman imperial core.
If the earlier Antonine Plague (AD 165-180) "hastened the provincialization of the empire", its hegemony was able to weather that storm. I won't try to recount here what Roman history enthusiasts will know about the fall of Rome, the fall of Constantinople, etc. The important takeaway is that disrupted patterns of patronage, Christianity's rise (crucially, reflecting millenarian sentiments in the superstructure), and climate realigning militant forces at the frontier fringes (and straining the human geography through, i.e., flooding), ultimately helped strain Rome to the breaking point. Amidst the restructuring of the empire, "Nomadism was the ideological mirror of civilization." The more the political centre was hollowed out by epidemiological and environmental crises, the more the threat in the mirror crossed the threshold. This is, at least, the extremely abbreviated version.
If the book is at points repetitive, the confluence of forces culminating in collapse bears repeating. It was not simply a case of overextension, or of inevitable destruction-by-climate, or of internal volatility wrought by political/economic shifts. These factors came together. "The vexing issue of military recruitment in the fourth century was not directly a demographic problem," for example. And later, in the sixth century A.D., when Emperor Justinian, in the wake of plague decimating military and economic forces, resisted debt forgiveness and cheated soldiers of payment (in a context where payments in gold and in kind precluded prior strategies of a resort to silver currency manipulation)...the infamous legions of Rome would be stretched. As much as the author emphasizes demographics, those shifts are the gun and the political and natural environment is the trigger.
Without the deep movements of demography, models of the state and social order become weightless abstractions...The natural environment and human demography were acted upon by the state, the economy, and the social order, but they also acted and reacted upon them in turn, with a motive power of their own that had consequences at the highest levels of political organization.
Replace "demography" with "class society" and this would sound self-evident to any historical materialist.
Particularly in the last chapter, these demographic considerations in tandem with environmental manipulations so heavily reminds one of the tone of Mike Davis (Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster)---if he reified rather than critiqued the drive for capital growth:
The influx of capital and the integration of markets provided the means to colonize riskier environments...The mass-scale deployment of irrigation technology enabled the expansion of agriculture, straight into the teeth of ecologically forbidding circumstances.
The exploration of factors from traces of volcanic eruptions to variance in solar activity were fascinating (credit to the author for going out of his way as an aside to distinguish this from modern trends of anthropogenic climate change---anyone who has dealt with denialists will hear various claims about impacts of solar activity, designed to mislead). Harper's relation of this to the rise of millenarian ideas and rituals emphasizes the base-superstructure link without putting it in those terms.
A final note: considerations of climate, military manoeuvres, and demographic shifts all, as the tone of the book's epilogue seem to suggest, are 'echoes of history' that taken too superficially make it tempting to adopt the view of history as cyclic. While it's clear at this point that overoptimism is unmerited and there are epicycles of advancement and retreat, revolution and counter-revolution, we should be cautious of drawing parallels too uncritically. Differences in class structure are a key function to help us avoid this trap, lest we draw the wrong lessons from such statements as, "Average incomes in eighteenth-century England were closer to Roman levels than to those we enjoy in the developed world today."
May 12, 2022
Most people think that all of the broad outlines of the ancient world are already known to historians, but in that last fifteen or twenty years an important new understanding of the problems that beset the Roman Empire is adding considerably to the debate over why Rome fell. I first became aware of this debate about ten years ago when scholars started to note that an event referred to as the Justiniac Plague was not a relatively isolated event in Constantinople but a crippling empire wide event on a par with the Medieval Black Death. Since then, much new information has come out and in this book, Kyle Harper looks at the related issues of climate change and disease in the last few centuries of the Roman Empire.
Why was the third century so difficult?—cooling temperatures and a consequent rise in diseases like small pox which devastated both the population and the economy. Things got a little better during the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine before the temperature dropped again and disease returned to ravage the land. Justinian’s attempt to reconquer the west might have been doomed to failure anyway, but it didn’t help matters to have unusual volcanic activity cool the earth and set the stage for a surge in bubonic plagues that lasted at least two centuries. It’s hard to defend your new lands when the size of your legions is now one-third what it had been with no way to recover the numbers. It’s hard to keep funding your government when the tax base has just plummeted (leading Justinian to raise taxes to impractical levels).
This is a fascinating book with perhaps a little too much detail for the casual reader. It doesn’t lessen other issues that are discussed as contributing to the fall of Rome (like poor leadership) but it certainly goes a long way to show that the earth itself played a heavy role in bringing down the west’s most successful empire.
If you liked this review, you can find more at www.gilbertstack.com/reviews.
Why was the third century so difficult?—cooling temperatures and a consequent rise in diseases like small pox which devastated both the population and the economy. Things got a little better during the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine before the temperature dropped again and disease returned to ravage the land. Justinian’s attempt to reconquer the west might have been doomed to failure anyway, but it didn’t help matters to have unusual volcanic activity cool the earth and set the stage for a surge in bubonic plagues that lasted at least two centuries. It’s hard to defend your new lands when the size of your legions is now one-third what it had been with no way to recover the numbers. It’s hard to keep funding your government when the tax base has just plummeted (leading Justinian to raise taxes to impractical levels).
This is a fascinating book with perhaps a little too much detail for the casual reader. It doesn’t lessen other issues that are discussed as contributing to the fall of Rome (like poor leadership) but it certainly goes a long way to show that the earth itself played a heavy role in bringing down the west’s most successful empire.
If you liked this review, you can find more at www.gilbertstack.com/reviews.
April 17, 2018
Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome is so far the best and most thought-provoking investigation into the role of climate in the end of the classical world.
You can already tell something from the previous line of telling: not the generic "Fall of the Roman Empire", but "end of the classical world" -- that's right. Whereas the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476 AD might strike a contemporary college student as the year of Rome's demise, nobody at the time of its happening actually thought of that. In fact, the year 476 AD itself was a later recognition dated back to almost 50 years later. The gist here is: the classical/Roman world characterized by its distinctive way of living and organizing political and economic activities did not immediately fall apart upon the eviction of the last (Western) Roman emperor, instead that came almost 70 years later, in the midst of the 6th century, marked by a series of devastating natural disasters, famines, wars, and epidemics that fundamentally changed the face of the Mediterranean world.
How did that happen? One with knowledge of that period would most likely point to Justinian I, who plunged the eastern half of the empire into a chronic war against the barbarians in the name of reconquest, which ended up severely weakening the empire; and while this was happening, a series of unfortunate catastrophes swept across Justinian's empire and waged irreparable damages that not only killed the last hope of revival but also foreshadowed the oncoming downfall of the 7th century.
That was the typical political narrative that most of us were taught in school. Although there's nothing inherently wrong about such narrative, it does present us with a somehow incomplete view of what actually happened in that short span of 5o to 70 years; moreover, by stressing out political and military events while depicting natural disasters and epidemics as sideshows, it misses important parts of the picture.
Through Harper's telling account of the historical evolution of Mediterranean climatic pattern, we get to know that despite what most people believed, natural factors did play a significant role in shaping the political landscape of civilizations. For instance, the period commonly known as "Pax Romana", which marked the high point of the Roman Empire, coincided with what climatologists called the Roman Climatic Optimum, a period characterized by unusually warmer and more stable climate throughout the Mediterranean basin and most parts of Europe. The beginning of Rome's political turmoils and military setbacks coincided with several destructive waves of epidemics as well as unpredictable changes in climate. Perhaps it shouldn't come as such a big surprise that the most chaotic years of the Crisis of the Third Century was also accompanied by the devastating Plague of Cyprian. It was only in the midst of the 6th century that the severity of these fluctuating natural factors finally reached its climax, culminating in the cataclysmic events of late 530s and 540s. By 550 AD, those who managed to survive all the terrible disasters suddenly found themselves living in a completely different world: the population was much less, cities and towns were mostly abandoned or destroyed, trans-regional trading networks came to an end, the classical Roman system that revolved around urbanism and market economy was gone.
Notice that this isn't to present an alternative, or worse, a revisionist narrative to the traditional political narrative we are familiar with. Instead, the message Harper was trying to convey was simple: those major political events on the surface were more or less propelled by natural factors from a long-term point of view -- the Pax Romana couldn't happen without a warm and stable climate that contributed to increased crop yields, more available arable lands, and less risks from unpredictable weathers and natural disasters. Agriculture surrounding the Nile River, for example, relied heavily on the river's natural cycle of flooding; considering Rome's dependency on Egypt for its often excessive grains, it isn't difficult to understand why the Empire was in chaos whenever the steady supply of Egyptian grains was disrupted, either by natural phenomenon or human machinations. Obviously emperors, generals and bishops all played major parts in shaping the Romand world, but it shouldn't be overlooked that their actions were almost always influenced by external factors beyond their control.
Some may point the aforementioned to environmental determinism -- Harper certainly didn't endorse the determinist position, and it's important to understand why: although climatic patterns and other natural phenomena did correlate with our social and political timelines, such correlation did not imply any certainty of causal relations. Environmental determinism holds the view that all historical events were predetermined by its surrounding environment, hence implying definite causes and effects, yet causal relations cannot be established based on pure correlations, let alone imperfect ones (there were plenty of counterexamples; Rome itself was a good one -- whereas it eventually succumbed to changing climate and epidemics, what's surprising was that it survived anther two and a half centuries following the Crisis the Third Century, which, by any measures could easily be the end of the Roman Empire.
Thus comes to the conclusion -- did natural disasters and epidemics caused the collapse of the classical Roman world? No, but they certainly contributed greatly to the process. The only difference between Rome in the year 260 AD and the year 540 AD was the level of resilience -- Rome under capable Illyrian emperors was amazingly resilient against challenges, while Rome under incompetent child emperors gradually lost that string of resilience that bonded the empire together. In short, it wasn't a surprise that Justinian's empire crumbled in the face of unprecedented disasters, the real surprise was that the empire didn't fall apart as early as the second half of the third century. Saying that nature caused civilizations to fall was misleading, for every civilization has its own limit of resilience; what ultimately determines the fate of a civilization wasn't the severity of its environmental challenges, but the level of resilience that supported its complex systems.
____________
A brilliant, one-of-a-kind book on a familiar period of history with an unfamiliar story to tell; highly recommended.
You can already tell something from the previous line of telling: not the generic "Fall of the Roman Empire", but "end of the classical world" -- that's right. Whereas the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476 AD might strike a contemporary college student as the year of Rome's demise, nobody at the time of its happening actually thought of that. In fact, the year 476 AD itself was a later recognition dated back to almost 50 years later. The gist here is: the classical/Roman world characterized by its distinctive way of living and organizing political and economic activities did not immediately fall apart upon the eviction of the last (Western) Roman emperor, instead that came almost 70 years later, in the midst of the 6th century, marked by a series of devastating natural disasters, famines, wars, and epidemics that fundamentally changed the face of the Mediterranean world.
How did that happen? One with knowledge of that period would most likely point to Justinian I, who plunged the eastern half of the empire into a chronic war against the barbarians in the name of reconquest, which ended up severely weakening the empire; and while this was happening, a series of unfortunate catastrophes swept across Justinian's empire and waged irreparable damages that not only killed the last hope of revival but also foreshadowed the oncoming downfall of the 7th century.
That was the typical political narrative that most of us were taught in school. Although there's nothing inherently wrong about such narrative, it does present us with a somehow incomplete view of what actually happened in that short span of 5o to 70 years; moreover, by stressing out political and military events while depicting natural disasters and epidemics as sideshows, it misses important parts of the picture.
Through Harper's telling account of the historical evolution of Mediterranean climatic pattern, we get to know that despite what most people believed, natural factors did play a significant role in shaping the political landscape of civilizations. For instance, the period commonly known as "Pax Romana", which marked the high point of the Roman Empire, coincided with what climatologists called the Roman Climatic Optimum, a period characterized by unusually warmer and more stable climate throughout the Mediterranean basin and most parts of Europe. The beginning of Rome's political turmoils and military setbacks coincided with several destructive waves of epidemics as well as unpredictable changes in climate. Perhaps it shouldn't come as such a big surprise that the most chaotic years of the Crisis of the Third Century was also accompanied by the devastating Plague of Cyprian. It was only in the midst of the 6th century that the severity of these fluctuating natural factors finally reached its climax, culminating in the cataclysmic events of late 530s and 540s. By 550 AD, those who managed to survive all the terrible disasters suddenly found themselves living in a completely different world: the population was much less, cities and towns were mostly abandoned or destroyed, trans-regional trading networks came to an end, the classical Roman system that revolved around urbanism and market economy was gone.
Notice that this isn't to present an alternative, or worse, a revisionist narrative to the traditional political narrative we are familiar with. Instead, the message Harper was trying to convey was simple: those major political events on the surface were more or less propelled by natural factors from a long-term point of view -- the Pax Romana couldn't happen without a warm and stable climate that contributed to increased crop yields, more available arable lands, and less risks from unpredictable weathers and natural disasters. Agriculture surrounding the Nile River, for example, relied heavily on the river's natural cycle of flooding; considering Rome's dependency on Egypt for its often excessive grains, it isn't difficult to understand why the Empire was in chaos whenever the steady supply of Egyptian grains was disrupted, either by natural phenomenon or human machinations. Obviously emperors, generals and bishops all played major parts in shaping the Romand world, but it shouldn't be overlooked that their actions were almost always influenced by external factors beyond their control.
Some may point the aforementioned to environmental determinism -- Harper certainly didn't endorse the determinist position, and it's important to understand why: although climatic patterns and other natural phenomena did correlate with our social and political timelines, such correlation did not imply any certainty of causal relations. Environmental determinism holds the view that all historical events were predetermined by its surrounding environment, hence implying definite causes and effects, yet causal relations cannot be established based on pure correlations, let alone imperfect ones (there were plenty of counterexamples; Rome itself was a good one -- whereas it eventually succumbed to changing climate and epidemics, what's surprising was that it survived anther two and a half centuries following the Crisis the Third Century, which, by any measures could easily be the end of the Roman Empire.
Thus comes to the conclusion -- did natural disasters and epidemics caused the collapse of the classical Roman world? No, but they certainly contributed greatly to the process. The only difference between Rome in the year 260 AD and the year 540 AD was the level of resilience -- Rome under capable Illyrian emperors was amazingly resilient against challenges, while Rome under incompetent child emperors gradually lost that string of resilience that bonded the empire together. In short, it wasn't a surprise that Justinian's empire crumbled in the face of unprecedented disasters, the real surprise was that the empire didn't fall apart as early as the second half of the third century. Saying that nature caused civilizations to fall was misleading, for every civilization has its own limit of resilience; what ultimately determines the fate of a civilization wasn't the severity of its environmental challenges, but the level of resilience that supported its complex systems.
____________
A brilliant, one-of-a-kind book on a familiar period of history with an unfamiliar story to tell; highly recommended.
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