At the Gates of Rome: The Battle for a Dying Empire

by Don Hollway

A dramatic retelling of the final years of the Western Roman Empire and the downfall of Rome itself from the perspective of the Roman general Stilicho and Alaric, king of the Visigoths.It took little more than a single generation for the centuries-old Roman Empire to fall. In those critical decades, while Christians and pagans, legions and barbarians, generals and politicians squabbled over dwindling scraps of power, two men – former comrades on the battlefield – rose to prominence on opposite sides of the great game of empire.Roman general Flavius Stilicho, the man behind the Roman throne, dedicated himself to restoring imperial glory, only to find himself struggling for his life against political foes. Alaric, King of the Goths, desired to be a friend of Rome, was betrayed by it, and given no choice but to become its enemy. Battling each other to a standstill, these two warriors ultimately overcame their differences in order to save the empire from enemies on all sides. And when one of them fell, the other took such vengeance as had never been seen in history. Don Hollway, author of The Last Viking, combines ancient chroniclers' accounts of Stilicho and Alaric into an unforgettable history of betrayal, politics, intrigue and war for the heart and soul of the Roman Empire.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Ancient

377 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 12, 2022

Reviews

[ERIC PECHINOT · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here is the impressive and well paced narrative of the long chain of events that led to the dreadful upshot of August 410 AD.
Don Hollway is a fount of knowledge. He really knows how to tell a story. He spans the length of time from the battle of Adrianople on, putting things into context, factoring in all that mattered in the vast expanse of the Roman world, and scaling down to the agendas of the leading characters. Add to the hallmarks of the brililant scholar a subtle sense of humour with a tinge of irony, and a gift for thrilling the reader from cover to cover, and you can understand how tempting it is to label the book a must-read.
I am well aware that one should always guard against invidious comparisons, but the book stands out in sharp contrast to what has already been written on the matter, not to mention the cinema industry, glutted appallingly with awful stuff, as for instance "La Vendetta dei Barbari" by Giusseppe Vari...

So this is the time when a protracted deep crisis is striking, and "as always in a crisis, politicians must be seen to do something, anything in response. In the absence of any effective alternative, that response is usually to lay blame on a scapegoat", as Don Hollway puts it.
This was the time when "Christians were actually more tolerant of pagans, whose souls could be redeemed, than of Christians with differing beliefs, who were simply heretics."
This is the time when "the reign of most emperors in the later imperial period can be seen as a series of fires needing to be put out".
This is the time when all lines are tangled and blurred: "the empire is a conglomeration of factions, often at odds, detesting each other more than they did the Goths, who therefore could be played against each other."
And when it comes to the root cause of the sack of Rome by Alaric's thugs, and more broadly why it went out of hand in the Western Roman Empire as a whole, Don Hollway touches on it conclusively in his compelling epilogue: "[...] the Empire [was] left [...] with a hostile nation within its own borders. Immigration wasn't the issue then, and though much noise is made about it, immigration is not the issue today, another era of great migrations. The crux of the matter is assimilation. Assimilation of outsiders, even homegrown outsiders, benefits a host culture, just as it did Rome in the golden age of the Pax Romana. Without assimilation though, as with the Goths after Adrianople, newcomers are simply invaders."

That's what I call history at its best. Open any history book and very likely you'll have to make do with a sorry map of a Roman Empire criss-crossed with a jumble of arrows by way of explanation, leaving you none the wiser. Pick this book instead and everything is crystal clear, everything falls into place!

And this is now the time when in the course of such a review I come up with some nitpicking!
P. 159: Scipio Africanus died in 183 BC. Censorinus laid siege to Carthage in 146 BC and another Scipio, Scipio Aemilianus, was in the limelight then;
P. 165: passing a law under the Republic of old was a process much more complicated than the one summed up in one sentence;
P. 183: paludamentum could not be put on by a woman, be it a woman of imperial stock, as it was the special garb of a victorious general (then later of the Emperor), so a man's piece of clothing, definitely. The paludamentum was associated with the idea of military glory and leadership in a men's world!
P. 215: the triumphal parade went like this, floats, spoils of war, prisoners, the triumphator in full regalia on his chariot, his friends and family, soldiers (in a bawdy sing- along at the top of their lungs!). Senators were onlookers, so that no one amongst the happy few could have overshadowed, even unwittingly, the star of the show;
P. 254: yes, Agrippina the Younger married her uncle Claudius, but with senatorial blessing, I'll have you know! But the suggestion that she hit on her brother Caius for some hanky-panky and later her son Nero, this is just pure slander, not historical fact.
And it is true that one should never judge a book by its cover because I am still puzzled by the face of Constantine (in fact we know now it was most likely the face of his rival Maxentius): what's that got to do with it, I wonder?

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very detailed look into the fall of the Roman Empire and the events leading up to it.
Don Holloway casts an expert eye over as many primary sources as he can get his hands on, to give us an unbiased view of how the Roman emperors brought about the downfall of the empire.
The author transports you back in time to give you a clear understanding of the prejudices both sides had for each other, and the horrors that this resulted in.
This is a must for anyone studying the Roman Empire.

[Tony 08 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cet ouvrage m'a initialement semblé difficile d'abord...je ne voyais pas où l'auteur voulait en venir.
Mais au fil des pages le parallèle Alaric/Stilicon dans la chronologie de l'Empire Romain s'avère des plus intéressants et des plus pertinents.
Deux barbares...un Goth et un demi-Vandale...un opportuniste et un serviteur absolu de Rome...

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was bored out of my mind while reading this book. The only reason I finished it was because I was hoping once the narrative got to the actual sacking of Rome that things would turn around, but that never happened. This feels like one of those instances of it being better to be bad than it is to be boring, because at least with a bad book I’d have had something to keep me interested. As it is, it’s hard to even call out things I did or didn’t like about it. It was just boring.

[Jeroen Van de Crommenacker · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fantastic book. Very well written and very well researched. It is also the only book that I could find that goes into the detail of this extremely interesting period. It gives a meticulous chronologically and intellectually sound explanation of why things happened the way they did - no mean feat giving the scarcity of sources. And it does so keeping you completely hooked! Small grumble - I didn’t care so much for the introduction and the epilogue.

[Paul A · Rating 3 out of 5]

"At the Gates of Rome" centers the stories of Stilicho and Alaric in the waning days of the Western Roman Empire. From Adrianople to the sack of Rome in 410, these two personalities rose to the height of power, from where they could dictate the fate of both halves of the empire. I felt like this book was a good length, but the political machinations throughout the latter half of the book felt less focused due to the sheer amount of politicking going on. Overall, this was a well written dual biography on a lesser known period of ancient history.

[John Marcogliese · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fall of Rome causes and historical sources

This book covers the history of
the fall of the Western roman empire. Also analyzes the sources used against each other to get a truer view to understand why it fell. Each source has it's biases and allegiances

[Robert Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that does the best it can to explain a complicated situation and does a good job of it. It places the fall of Rome less as the fault of the "barbarians" and more the fault of the romans themselves. It is also the first book I've seen to put much of the responsibility where it belongs, and where most authors are apparently afraid to look at or at least to state the facts, which is on the Christian church.

[Caroline Palmer · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating and absorbing tale of Stilicho and Alaric, and the beginning of the end of the Western Roman Empire.

[Kevin Furr · Rating 4 out of 5]

** An account of a period of Roman strife with barbarians, culminating in the sack of Rome by Goths in 410 AD **

This narrative leads to the sack of Rome by Goths in 410 AD. But this wasn't the final sack or fall of Rome -- the Vandals sacked it in 455 and the final "Fall of Rome" occurred in 476, when the last Western Emperor was ousted. But 410 was the beginning of the end and sparked a rapid depopulation of Rome from a city of over a million to less than 100,000 in the 5th century, on its way to becoming a small early medieval village with cows munching on grass growing in the old Forum.

The story focuses first on Stilicho, a half Barbarian (Vandal), but loyal Roman officer who had risen to be the chief of the armed forces for the Western Roman Empire -- by this time the division between a Western and Eastern Empire had been well established. He was a force for peace and order, but in this time of incompetent emperors and court intrigue his competence and loyalty were paid back with betrayal and death. The next focus is on Alaric, the Christian king of the Goths who wanted nothing more than peaceful integration into the Roman Empire, but who was alienated and eventually driven to sack Rome multiple times from 408 to 410.

While authors can get lost in the weeds explaining their take on the fall of the Roman Empire, Don Hollway makes clear the big picture was the influx of Barbarians into Roman land and army and how the Romans mishandled all that. With all the disloyalty, betrayal, court intrigue, usurpations, and savage habits, the Romans were more uncivilized than the Barbarians, and it was a failure to assimilate the Barbarian people into Roman society that spelled ultimate doom for the Western empire.