Romans and Barbarians: The Decline of the Western Empire

by Edward Arthur Thompson

The Fall of the Roman Empire—from the barbarian's perspective

Available for the first time in paperback, this classic work by renowned historian E.A. Thompson examines the fall of the Roman Empire in the West from the barbarian perspective and experience. Standard interpretations of the decline of the Roman Empire in the West view the barbarian invaders as destroyers. Thompson, however, argues that the relationship between the invaders and the invaded was far more complex than the common interpretation would suggest. This edition includes a new foreword by F.M. Clover and J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

344 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1982

About the author

Edward Arthur Thompson (22 May 1914 – 1 January 1994) was a British classicist, medievalist and professor at the University of Nottingham from 1948 to 1979. He wrote from a Marxist perspective, and argued that the Visigoths were settled in Aquitaine to counter the internal threat of the peasant bagaudae. Thompson's work remains the most substantial study of the Goths in Spain.

Thompson was born on 22 May 1914 in the town of Waterford, southern Ireland to an Presbyterian family of both Irish and Scottish descent. Although taught to read only at the age of eight, Thompson proceeded to attend and finish at The High School, Dublin, with which he maintained sufficient links to be requested by its then-headmaster, Dr. John Bennett, to send a copy of A History of Attila and the Huns when Thompson published the book in 1948.

Although his father worked for the administration of the National Health Insurance, Edward Thompson would be the first of his family to enter university: he graduated with First Class Honours in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin in 1936, later attributing his selection of the classics as a discipline to the arbitrary choice of his headmaster at The High School.

Thompson's first appointment in academe, as Lecturer in Classics, was a two-year stint at Trinity College, Dublin – although initially appointed for one year, Thompson's contract was renewed, and he stayed on (though at a reduced salary) until 1941. Already prepared to enter the Second World War with an enlistment in the British Army, Thompson finally secured an appointment at the University of Swansea, having learned of an opening for somebody who could teach Greek from a friend, Swansea classicist Ben Farrington.

From Swansea, Thompson transferred to King's College, London, teaching as a classics lecturer from 1945 to 1948. It was during this time that Thompson's first book, Ammianus Marcellinus, was published in Britain. He subsequently moved once more – this time to direct the classics department at the University of Nottingham, where Thompson worked from 1948 to 1979. Until his retirement in 1979, Thompson served as the first Chairman of the Editorial Board of the scholarly journal Nottingham Medieval Studies, founded by Lewis Thorpe in 1957.

He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1964 – the first University of Nottingham academic to be so honoured.

Although Thompson left the staunchly pro-Soviet Communist Party of Great Britain in 1956, the year of the Soviet Union's intervention in Hungary, Thompson's academic work continued to demonstrate a Marxist-oriented outlook on history. No longer active in political life, he continued his enthusiastic interest for politics. Thompson's interest in the class structure of societies, and in their material basis, continued to direct the structure of his studies. He died, aged 79, in Nottingham.

Reviews

[Альберто Лорэдо · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing and detailed work about the relations between the different "barbarian" peoples that came in contact with the Roman empire and how relations between them evolved in time. Deeply researched though some bits may be a little out of date now.