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The Fall of Rome
The fall of the Roman Empire was the denouement of a long and dramatic confrontation between powerful ideological forces and legendary men. R. A. Lafferty captures the true meaning of both, and examines the people, places, ideas and feelings that led to this epic struggle.
Rome's demise was not a simple case of fierce barbarians sacking and subduing a decadent, crumbling city. The author has skillfully balanced the turmoil and illusions of a mighty, dying Empire against the vitality of the aggressive Huns, Vandals, and above all, the Goths. The result is one of the most perceptive and stimulating historical accounts ever written.
This is history told and read for sheer pleasure: exciting, splendid and complex. The Fall of Rome is a story of the men and women who made things happen, who were as awesome, poignant, and in some cases, as savage as the era itself.
(from the inside flap of The Fall of Rome)
Rome's demise was not a simple case of fierce barbarians sacking and subduing a decadent, crumbling city. The author has skillfully balanced the turmoil and illusions of a mighty, dying Empire against the vitality of the aggressive Huns, Vandals, and above all, the Goths. The result is one of the most perceptive and stimulating historical accounts ever written.
This is history told and read for sheer pleasure: exciting, splendid and complex. The Fall of Rome is a story of the men and women who made things happen, who were as awesome, poignant, and in some cases, as savage as the era itself.
(from the inside flap of The Fall of Rome)
302 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1971
About the author
R.A. Lafferty
550 books292 followersRaphael Aloysius Lafferty, published under the name R.A. Lafferty, was an American science fiction and fantasy writer known for his original use of language, metaphor, and narrative structure, as well as for his etymological wit. He also wrote a set of four autobiographical novels, a history book, and a number of novels that could be loosely called historical fiction.
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April 27, 2015
R.A. Lafferty's The Fall of Rome
Googling R.A. Lafferty the other day I found a few tantalizing excerpts from an interview he gave that I've been unable to get a look at in full as yet. In response probably to a question about the critics who say he's a better short story writer than novelist he said: "The short stories are more readable, but the novels really do say more." This statement (the last part--I find his novels just as readable as his short stories) is not only true but almost self-evident: if you're a master of multum in parvo as Lafferty is, you're not going to say at novel length only what you could say in a short story. But even Neil Gaiman, who certainly should know better, has said that Lafferty's a better short story writer than novelist I mean: Gaiman's a fine writer, particularly in the Sandman series, but I've read one of his novels, Neverwhere. It doesn't much commend his understanding of the form. Two or three fine short stories are embedded in its generally formless slop, but it's astonishing how often and easily he goes on autopilot and lets easy genre cliche take over the act of writing from him. Critics have special dispensation, they can complain about the sloppy construction of a two hour movie or a three hundred page book when they're personally incapable of a sentence whose tail end is on speaking terms with its front end, but writers ought to hold themselves to a higher standard. When Gaiman has written a book half as good as Past Master or Okla Hannali, which is to say ten times as good as Neverwhere, he might have something interesting to say about Lafferty the novelist.
Of course to say that Lafferty's novels are better than Neverwhere is to damn with criminally faint praise. I'm tolerably sure that if i had five hundred people in a lecture-hall, a reliable mike and a basket beside me filled with the collected works of both to flip through for quotes apropos, I could deliver a two hour lecture extempore on why Lafferty's as important a novelist as Dostoyevsky.And as Monty Python might put it, if you're calling Dostoyevsky an inferior novelist I shall have to ask you to step outside.
Then there's The Fall of Rome, anomalous even within his quirky oeuvre. He's written a number of historical novels, but this is more a novelized history--which is to say while he uses all the devices of a storyteller, they're secondary to the scholarship and careful sifting of evidence that an historical account demands if it's to be trusted as any close approximation to fact, and dammitall if Lafferty isn't just as fine a historian as he is a novelist and short story writer! piss you right off, such an intimidating cluster of genius level skills in a literary competitor. I console myself by reflecting that with a few notable exceptions he's no more than a serviceable poet, and so far as I know never even attempted to write plays.
The only way really to review The Fall of Rome is to give you a few generous quotes:
"This short history [Lafferty is here referring to the history, recorded in one particularly eventful chapter, within the larger history] should have something to satisfy every taste and perversion: action, treachery, fratricide and regicide, corruption, and bloodshed. It contains thirteen murders, the victims being mostly of one family. It lists the ways in which a man or an Empire may be surrounded and destroyed; and contains a veritable catalogue of subversions and finely wrought treacheries--which the reader may be able to make use of in his own life. And after this short interruption, we will return to our main action. . .
Constantine had been the last clear and absolute Emperor of all the Roman regions. Constantine was not the first Christian Emperor--that had been Philip the Arab a hundred years before--but he was the first Emperor who declared the Empire to be Christian: though he did not himself become a Christian till on his deathbed.
There were certain advantages in Constantine's advocating a Christianity for others he was not yet ready to practice himself. Nobody would question the sincerity of Constantine, but it was a sincerity that ran off in several opposite directions. He left, at his death, a rich heritage, and too many heirs.
The three sons, with their confusing and too-similar names, were to receive these territories:
Constantinus--Italy and Gaul.
Constantius--the East; that which was to become Byzantium.
Constans--Illyricum and Africa.
The territories which the two nephews, Dalmatius and Annibalianus, were to receive are not known for certain, but they are believed to have been Spain and Pannonia. This would have fragmented the Empire intolerably, but a rude sort of process was soon to simplify the holdings. These were not all the nephews--and possibly not all the sons--of Constantine, but they were the inheriting ones.
Keep your eye now on the three sons, Constantinus, Constantius, and Constans, as the shell game is played out. The three are very alike, but one of them will end up with the pea, and the others with nothing at all--not even their lives."
--pp. 61-62
"Sometime in this period Alaric did penance for forty days in reparation for his murderous raids in Greece. He was subject to remorse, for which reason he cannot be ranked among the great military leaders of the world. And in this period also, the Goths became un-Gothed to a great extent. They caught the Greek fever and discovered sudden new talents in themselves. they borrowed stringed instruments from the Greeks--they had had only horns and bull-roarers before--and went music crazy. It has been mentioned that rhyme in verse and son appeared at the turn of that century for the first time ever in the world. Nobody knew where it came from, but all the peoples took it up at the same time. The Goths made ballads in rhyme, in their own language and in Low Latin; and these became almost the signature of that rural Gothic springtime in Epirus that lasted four years.
When the impulse seized the Goths next, after martial interludes of more than five hundred years, they would be the troubadours of Languedoc in South France."
--p. 184
"Stilicho had already begun to be a little mentally deranged in those years. Though several of his most incredible feats of daring and effectiveness were still in the future, his failures had begun to appear. Some observers have claimed to see the effect of brain injury in the doughty old soldier.
The worst that can be said of him, however, is that he failed to solve certain problems that nobody else even saw. In retrospect, those problems are there clear enough. But the problems were not clear at that time; and the answers are not clear now. Stilicho was the only one who perceived that there were mortal dangers beneath the surface changes.
There were the affairs of soldiers; the affairs of governors; the affairs of Provinces. There were changes of jurisdiction and certain alterations of administration; there were settlements and resettlements; and there were the deaths and resurrections of certain countrysides. Old men were being replaced by new, and the long-time trend towards centralization was being reversed. They were times of change, but only Stilicho realized that the Empire was dying in the changes; and only he cared.
It may not have mattered. It may be that he was wrong to care. It is only guesswork as to what sort of world it would be today if Stilicho had succeeded in his strong endeavours in those critical times. But for a weird combination of circumstances he would have succeeded. In such a case the empire would not have crashed; not, at least, in that decade and probably not in that century. Naturally, it would not have survived in the same form forever; but enough of it might have survived for a long enough time to have made a great difference.
It might not have been necessary to spend five hundred years just getting onto its feet again. It might not have been necessary to lose certain noble qualities forever. Certian institutions had to be wrought, heated and variously reshaped. Much of the furniture of the Empire was bad and outmoded. But it it possible that the house could have been cleaned without burning it down.
Nothing is inevitable till it has already happened. There, at the beginning of the fifth century, Stilicho still had a good chance of saving the Empire. For a while it seemed that he would save it, and there was undeniable improvement under his hand. The World did not have to end then."
--pp. 200-201
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 12, 2013
Alright, this is, admittedly not the most accurate history of Rome ever written. Even forty-some-odd years ago, it wasn't the most accurate, and we've advanced our understandings a great deal since then. But you want to know the great secret of this book?
It doesn't matter in the slightest.
R.A. Lafferty is, no matter what you think of the stories he tells, one hell of a storyteller. This is a hypnotic, rollicking tale of a city and a man and a people and a world, and by the time you've reached the end of it, you've felt what they felt and seen a grand human drama play out to the very, logical, tragic end. What it does is it Inflames rather than Informs. I learned a lot about Rome after this book, much of it contradicting it, but I did so because I fell in love with this book. It taught me a few facts and a great deal of truth. It was where I truly realized that a culture is more than just a few quaint customs and modes of dress, it is a world, a world as different from our own sometimes as another planet and as real and whole and true and unquestioningly natural to its inhabitants as the world we live in is to us.
I originally found this tome in the dollar bin at a Library Sale the year I came to college. It stuck with me over the years, with its poetry and humanity, its detail and sense for scale, both small and large, and while What I think has changed a great deal over the intervening years, a great deal of How I think it has been influenced by this book.
It doesn't matter in the slightest.
R.A. Lafferty is, no matter what you think of the stories he tells, one hell of a storyteller. This is a hypnotic, rollicking tale of a city and a man and a people and a world, and by the time you've reached the end of it, you've felt what they felt and seen a grand human drama play out to the very, logical, tragic end. What it does is it Inflames rather than Informs. I learned a lot about Rome after this book, much of it contradicting it, but I did so because I fell in love with this book. It taught me a few facts and a great deal of truth. It was where I truly realized that a culture is more than just a few quaint customs and modes of dress, it is a world, a world as different from our own sometimes as another planet and as real and whole and true and unquestioningly natural to its inhabitants as the world we live in is to us.
I originally found this tome in the dollar bin at a Library Sale the year I came to college. It stuck with me over the years, with its poetry and humanity, its detail and sense for scale, both small and large, and while What I think has changed a great deal over the intervening years, a great deal of How I think it has been influenced by this book.
September 16, 2009
“The sub-title of this study 'The Day the World Ended' is not meant to be extravagant. It was not the orbis terrarum, the globe, that ended; but the mundus, the ordered world. Mundus, as an adjective, means clean, neat, or elegant. As a noun it may mean the ornamentation, the vesture; but it also means the world. It is like the Greek cosmos which not only means the world and the universe, but likewise means the order, the arrangement, the beauty: for cosmetic, the beautifier, and cosmos, the beauty, are of the same root.
Both before and after the mundus, the ordered world, there is chaos. But in its bounds it was one thing. It is redundant to speak of the Roman world; the mundus was the Roman world, and there was no other. It was one of the great things that have happened but once. It has been a living person, and now there were but the sundered limbs.” (293-294)
Perhaps I am biased, being both a) a R.A. Lafferty fan and b) knowing as much about the ancient world as the average person (i.e., nothing), but I found this book to be informative, provocative, and conscious-expanding.
There is so much I didn’t know or knew incorrectly about this time period. For one thing, I had always imagined the Goths to be barbaric savages; here, they are represented as civilized as everyone else, and the backbone of the Roman empire. Lafferty’s allegiance is clearly with them, and not the fragmented, bloated Empire, which has outsourced the world and eventually murders its only guardian.
“The Goths were one of the few old peoples who had historic memory. The Romans hadn’t, in its real sense, until they learned it from the Goths and other outlanders. It is possible that every early people who carried a memory carried it for revenge.” (14)
“The drink of the Goths was wine, beer and mead. Christian men had not yet been seduced by the oriental impostors tea and coffee; the nothing drinks. They knew that only the drink that moves itself, that undergoes a form of metamorphosis or fermentation, can be the resurrection and the life.” (76)
I love Lafferty, but I do not trust him: so every once in a while I would fact-check his account on wikipedia. For the most part, what he reports is accurate, though it necessarily has its own Laffertian spin. For example, Alaric is given quite the sympathetic makeover, and Stilicho and he are friends until the end- never do they betray one another, except once in Alaric’s youth out of youthful ignorance.
The only references I could not find anywhere on the internet are to Astrox Fabulinus, “the Roman Rabelais,” who “once broke off the account of his hero Raphaelus in the act of opening a giant goose egg to fry it in an iron skillet of six yards’ span. Fabulinus interrupted the action with these words: ‘Here it becomes necessary to pause for a moment and to recount to you the history of the world up to this point.’” (60)
I could also find no references to any Laughing Christs in history, though if you google image “Laughing Christ” quite a few funny images pop up.
There is little I can see to compare the fall of Rome to the fall of America, as has been postulated recently. The fall of Rome was not so much destroyed by its outsourcing as it was by the faults of particular people and an inability to respect the demands of its “superior” underlings, such as the Gothic army. And by being very brutal and unnecessarily patriotic at ill-advised times.
But this is speaking in very generic terms and Lafferty does not really postulate on why Rome fell, only how. Here he can sometimes be dry, but only when he goes into the specifics of various battles, and I cannot see how they could be written of in a “wetter” way. And I love passages like this:
“Alaric now at this moment of supreme crisis, coming down to the rough shore and seeing the howling waves, raised his hand to heaven and called out that the Gulf of Corinth should freeze!
It froze!
And the Goths, shattering the last scrim of Roman interceptors, abandoned their horses and crossed the ice on foot!
That is the story of it. The exact details were later brought into doubt, but not in the lifetime or presence of any of the Goths who were there.” (157)
A passages like this works because it takes us into the timeframe; it is the work of the dull modern historian to project a nowism into the past; but in the past, this fantastic happening was real, and had a cause and effect that cannot be garnished from historical “truth.”
I found this book moving and enlightening, I cared deeply for Stilicho and the Darth Vadersque Alaric, I came to believe that when Rome died, the world really had ended. I am mesmerized and in awe at Lafferty’s prose style and self-taught intelligence. He is truly a genius and tells a good tale.
“What follows the end of a world? Why, chaos again, which is another name for legend. All that happened in the next five hundred years to the great area where the world had stood is legend. Whatever reality can be found in it must be found by probing, as an analyst attempts to find reality behind dreams.” (294)
“But we are all Goths, for all that, whoever we are; which is to say, Outlanders. And like the Goth Sarus we still owe loyalty to an Empire, but we no longer know of what the Empire consists. We are still bound by the statement of Stilicho that the highest duty in the World is the proper ordering of the World. There will be, and are, other worlds; and perhaps it is not a terrible thing that a world should end. But we are still in admiration at the great corpse of it.” (297)
Here are some random passages I found particularly enlightening:
“There is abominable and worthless ancient Greek art in Asia Minor, in Constantinople, in Thebes, in Eritrea, in the Cyclades and other islands. There is little or none of this worthless ancient art surviving in the path of the Gothic Greek adventures; not in Athens, or Megara or Corinth or Argos. Sparta does not figure in the account at all; it never had art. It is said that Alaric destroyed half the art of Greece. It may have been the worst half. He was a critic of unusual effectiveness.” (140)
“The first King who played the game of King, of chess, was the Persian Pad-Shah Shapur II, who was taught it by his wazir who had invented it. The wazir was the better chess player, but the King was always the winner of the game.
The King attained victory by the ingenious device of overturning the chessboard at a crucial point of the game and declaring himself the winner. This showed an imagination of the sort that the wazir did not have; and it was for this reason that Shapur was the King, and the wazir would never be anything but wazir.” (153)
“The Romans had the first underworld, and it was literally under the ground. The criminals of the city lived below the surface in the caves and passages. Nobody considered it unusual that they should live down there as a caste, that they should come up and rob, and then return. Raids were made on them when they were too obstreperous, but there was never a concerted attempt to clear them out. It was assumed that they had been there forever that they were in the natural order of things. There were even thieves’ markets set up on certain days where people could go for bargains.” (177)
“The Romans were a serious people; it can be seen on their coins and medallions and reliefs, and the broken-nosed faces of their statues. They took themselves seriously, and there was no chink at all in their attitude.
The devil-gods of the Phoenicians were capable of a grin, for all their evil. In Greek verse or statuary we can never be sure that there is not an element of burlesque, or even that it is not all burlesque. Hittite serpents turn and bite themselves, and Egyptian mummies are buried with their childhood toys. There are Eastern minarets built in the form of a pun, and the most philosophical of all folks had a frog-faced deity. Chinese temple roofs turn up like cowlicks, and wooden Indians have been seen to wink. Only the old potato-faced Romans took themselves completely seriously.
It is true that the Romans of the Late Empire, of whom we are treating, had become a generation of mockers. They had humor, high and low, and little else. But by that time there were few Romans left in the population of Rome.” (172-173)
Both before and after the mundus, the ordered world, there is chaos. But in its bounds it was one thing. It is redundant to speak of the Roman world; the mundus was the Roman world, and there was no other. It was one of the great things that have happened but once. It has been a living person, and now there were but the sundered limbs.” (293-294)
Perhaps I am biased, being both a) a R.A. Lafferty fan and b) knowing as much about the ancient world as the average person (i.e., nothing), but I found this book to be informative, provocative, and conscious-expanding.
There is so much I didn’t know or knew incorrectly about this time period. For one thing, I had always imagined the Goths to be barbaric savages; here, they are represented as civilized as everyone else, and the backbone of the Roman empire. Lafferty’s allegiance is clearly with them, and not the fragmented, bloated Empire, which has outsourced the world and eventually murders its only guardian.
“The Goths were one of the few old peoples who had historic memory. The Romans hadn’t, in its real sense, until they learned it from the Goths and other outlanders. It is possible that every early people who carried a memory carried it for revenge.” (14)
“The drink of the Goths was wine, beer and mead. Christian men had not yet been seduced by the oriental impostors tea and coffee; the nothing drinks. They knew that only the drink that moves itself, that undergoes a form of metamorphosis or fermentation, can be the resurrection and the life.” (76)
I love Lafferty, but I do not trust him: so every once in a while I would fact-check his account on wikipedia. For the most part, what he reports is accurate, though it necessarily has its own Laffertian spin. For example, Alaric is given quite the sympathetic makeover, and Stilicho and he are friends until the end- never do they betray one another, except once in Alaric’s youth out of youthful ignorance.
The only references I could not find anywhere on the internet are to Astrox Fabulinus, “the Roman Rabelais,” who “once broke off the account of his hero Raphaelus in the act of opening a giant goose egg to fry it in an iron skillet of six yards’ span. Fabulinus interrupted the action with these words: ‘Here it becomes necessary to pause for a moment and to recount to you the history of the world up to this point.’” (60)
I could also find no references to any Laughing Christs in history, though if you google image “Laughing Christ” quite a few funny images pop up.
There is little I can see to compare the fall of Rome to the fall of America, as has been postulated recently. The fall of Rome was not so much destroyed by its outsourcing as it was by the faults of particular people and an inability to respect the demands of its “superior” underlings, such as the Gothic army. And by being very brutal and unnecessarily patriotic at ill-advised times.
But this is speaking in very generic terms and Lafferty does not really postulate on why Rome fell, only how. Here he can sometimes be dry, but only when he goes into the specifics of various battles, and I cannot see how they could be written of in a “wetter” way. And I love passages like this:
“Alaric now at this moment of supreme crisis, coming down to the rough shore and seeing the howling waves, raised his hand to heaven and called out that the Gulf of Corinth should freeze!
It froze!
And the Goths, shattering the last scrim of Roman interceptors, abandoned their horses and crossed the ice on foot!
That is the story of it. The exact details were later brought into doubt, but not in the lifetime or presence of any of the Goths who were there.” (157)
A passages like this works because it takes us into the timeframe; it is the work of the dull modern historian to project a nowism into the past; but in the past, this fantastic happening was real, and had a cause and effect that cannot be garnished from historical “truth.”
I found this book moving and enlightening, I cared deeply for Stilicho and the Darth Vadersque Alaric, I came to believe that when Rome died, the world really had ended. I am mesmerized and in awe at Lafferty’s prose style and self-taught intelligence. He is truly a genius and tells a good tale.
“What follows the end of a world? Why, chaos again, which is another name for legend. All that happened in the next five hundred years to the great area where the world had stood is legend. Whatever reality can be found in it must be found by probing, as an analyst attempts to find reality behind dreams.” (294)
“But we are all Goths, for all that, whoever we are; which is to say, Outlanders. And like the Goth Sarus we still owe loyalty to an Empire, but we no longer know of what the Empire consists. We are still bound by the statement of Stilicho that the highest duty in the World is the proper ordering of the World. There will be, and are, other worlds; and perhaps it is not a terrible thing that a world should end. But we are still in admiration at the great corpse of it.” (297)
Here are some random passages I found particularly enlightening:
“There is abominable and worthless ancient Greek art in Asia Minor, in Constantinople, in Thebes, in Eritrea, in the Cyclades and other islands. There is little or none of this worthless ancient art surviving in the path of the Gothic Greek adventures; not in Athens, or Megara or Corinth or Argos. Sparta does not figure in the account at all; it never had art. It is said that Alaric destroyed half the art of Greece. It may have been the worst half. He was a critic of unusual effectiveness.” (140)
“The first King who played the game of King, of chess, was the Persian Pad-Shah Shapur II, who was taught it by his wazir who had invented it. The wazir was the better chess player, but the King was always the winner of the game.
The King attained victory by the ingenious device of overturning the chessboard at a crucial point of the game and declaring himself the winner. This showed an imagination of the sort that the wazir did not have; and it was for this reason that Shapur was the King, and the wazir would never be anything but wazir.” (153)
“The Romans had the first underworld, and it was literally under the ground. The criminals of the city lived below the surface in the caves and passages. Nobody considered it unusual that they should live down there as a caste, that they should come up and rob, and then return. Raids were made on them when they were too obstreperous, but there was never a concerted attempt to clear them out. It was assumed that they had been there forever that they were in the natural order of things. There were even thieves’ markets set up on certain days where people could go for bargains.” (177)
“The Romans were a serious people; it can be seen on their coins and medallions and reliefs, and the broken-nosed faces of their statues. They took themselves seriously, and there was no chink at all in their attitude.
The devil-gods of the Phoenicians were capable of a grin, for all their evil. In Greek verse or statuary we can never be sure that there is not an element of burlesque, or even that it is not all burlesque. Hittite serpents turn and bite themselves, and Egyptian mummies are buried with their childhood toys. There are Eastern minarets built in the form of a pun, and the most philosophical of all folks had a frog-faced deity. Chinese temple roofs turn up like cowlicks, and wooden Indians have been seen to wink. Only the old potato-faced Romans took themselves completely seriously.
It is true that the Romans of the Late Empire, of whom we are treating, had become a generation of mockers. They had humor, high and low, and little else. But by that time there were few Romans left in the population of Rome.” (172-173)
May 23, 2024
What a strange book! And also quite a wonderful one.
This is such a fascinating work and Lafferty’s voice throughout is one of its major attractions. I do not know what to call it though. Too fanciful to be history, I think it is more (or other) than simply fiction. Lafferty is not shy to admit when facts are not known, but he is equally confident in making claims that I am fairly certain are far from established (or at least defensible) fact. Many of his claims seem outrageous, or at least questionable, but he writes with such elan that I can’t help but accept him at his word. Thus my shelving it as both historical fiction and nonfiction…might as well just split the difference and look at it from both angles I guess. It is a legendary history, telling the apocalyptic story of the rise of Alaric and the Fall of Rome.
This was no mere fall of a political regime for Lafferty, but truly the end of the world for, as he himself notes:
He further explains his conception of the place of Rome in the world at the time:
Lafferty’s stories regarding people and events about which, so far as I know, the recorded evidence is sparse at best are so confident that they sound like the assertions of an eyewitness…and as a result I can’t take him completely seriously as an historian. Yet it is done with such skill, style, and conviction that I can’t help but respect and enjoy it regardless. He speaks of the thoughts, beliefs, and actions of his ‘characters’ as though they truly are the products of his pen and imagination rather than of history, but he certainly weaves a fine tale whether its truth is actual or not. This is not to say that I think Lafferty is composing history out of whole cloth. No doubt the events he reports happened and he may often (or perhaps even usually) be correct in his assumptions about the people whose lives he details, but I find it hard to believe that he knew this to be the case given the sources he would have had to work with.
At one point I was minded of that great historical forgery, the poems of Ossian, when reading Lafferty’s work, and I’m not sure that he would be displeased by the association.
One stray example: Lafferty’s assured, and straight faced, reporting of Alaric’s consultation with an undead Gothic king on the eve of his first great venture is nothing short of masterful. His confidence, much like that of his legendary hero’s, is without peer. Later on Lafferty does state that the event *might* not have happened, but I get the sense that his slight wink to the reader is rather to the believer than the non-believer.
He vividly paints the picture of a Roman Empire that is more melting pot than monolith. It certainly had a history and culture that made it ‘Roman’, but the constituents would not likely have been recognizably Roman to those who were its citizens when it was born from the ashes of the Republic. The ‘barbarians’ on its periphery that had been assimilated into the whole were not quite the outsiders that I at least had always assumed them to be…at least not as Lafferty would have it. It was possible in this world, at a certain point in his life, for an Alaric to not be quite certain whether he was a Roman or a Goth, or such, at least, is Lafferty’s assertion. For Lafferty the distinction between a Roman and a barbarian is hardly as clear as most of us might think. For him there is no contradiction in Alaric being both a Roman general and a Gothic king…or at least not *too* much of a contradiction. He rather convincingly argues that the ‘invasion’ of Alaric and his Goths could as easily been seen as an internal attack, more akin to a civil war, than as an invasion by external forces…at least until the final point of no return. Alaric, he argues, might well have saved the crumbling empire and prevented the “end of the world” instead of bringing it about if only a few factors had played out differently.
All in all I found this to be a great piece of imagined, though not I think untrue, history. The way Lafferty incorporates the fantastic with the realistic is nearly seamless and I am by no means certain that he didn’t give as much credence to some of the stranger tales of history as he did to the more mundane accounts. All is presented as worthy of consideration and it is left to the reader to decide what they wish to accept.
I can’t put my finger on what exactly it is, but I really enjoy Lafferty’s style. I think the closest I can come to expressing it is to say that he has a charming authorial voice. I can see why he is so beloved, if largely to a select group of other writers. I’m definitely a fan. It certainly makes me much more interested in tracking down his other works than I was previously when he was merely a vague recommendation. His wit is mordant, but never overstays its welcome by making itself too conspicuous. Definitely recommended.
This is such a fascinating work and Lafferty’s voice throughout is one of its major attractions. I do not know what to call it though. Too fanciful to be history, I think it is more (or other) than simply fiction. Lafferty is not shy to admit when facts are not known, but he is equally confident in making claims that I am fairly certain are far from established (or at least defensible) fact. Many of his claims seem outrageous, or at least questionable, but he writes with such elan that I can’t help but accept him at his word. Thus my shelving it as both historical fiction and nonfiction…might as well just split the difference and look at it from both angles I guess. It is a legendary history, telling the apocalyptic story of the rise of Alaric and the Fall of Rome.
This was no mere fall of a political regime for Lafferty, but truly the end of the world for, as he himself notes:
The subtitle of this study “The Day the World Ended” is not meant to be extravagant. It was not the orbis terrarum, the globe, that ended; but the mundus, the ordered world…Both before and after the mundus, the ordered world, there is chaos. But in its bounds it was one thing. It is redundant to speak of the Roman world; the mundus was the Roman world, and there was no other.
He further explains his conception of the place of Rome in the world at the time:
The Roman Empire did not, at that time, become identical with the world because of any new aggrandizement of the Empire, but because of the bewildering collapse of all the surrounding nations. It must be realized that the “barbarian” invasions of the Empire were not due to the strengthening of the exterior nations, but to their sudden break-up—turning their peoples into wandering hordes. The Empire was now the world, and outside the world there was only confusion.
Lafferty’s stories regarding people and events about which, so far as I know, the recorded evidence is sparse at best are so confident that they sound like the assertions of an eyewitness…and as a result I can’t take him completely seriously as an historian. Yet it is done with such skill, style, and conviction that I can’t help but respect and enjoy it regardless. He speaks of the thoughts, beliefs, and actions of his ‘characters’ as though they truly are the products of his pen and imagination rather than of history, but he certainly weaves a fine tale whether its truth is actual or not. This is not to say that I think Lafferty is composing history out of whole cloth. No doubt the events he reports happened and he may often (or perhaps even usually) be correct in his assumptions about the people whose lives he details, but I find it hard to believe that he knew this to be the case given the sources he would have had to work with.
At one point I was minded of that great historical forgery, the poems of Ossian, when reading Lafferty’s work, and I’m not sure that he would be displeased by the association.
One stray example: Lafferty’s assured, and straight faced, reporting of Alaric’s consultation with an undead Gothic king on the eve of his first great venture is nothing short of masterful. His confidence, much like that of his legendary hero’s, is without peer. Later on Lafferty does state that the event *might* not have happened, but I get the sense that his slight wink to the reader is rather to the believer than the non-believer.
He vividly paints the picture of a Roman Empire that is more melting pot than monolith. It certainly had a history and culture that made it ‘Roman’, but the constituents would not likely have been recognizably Roman to those who were its citizens when it was born from the ashes of the Republic. The ‘barbarians’ on its periphery that had been assimilated into the whole were not quite the outsiders that I at least had always assumed them to be…at least not as Lafferty would have it. It was possible in this world, at a certain point in his life, for an Alaric to not be quite certain whether he was a Roman or a Goth, or such, at least, is Lafferty’s assertion. For Lafferty the distinction between a Roman and a barbarian is hardly as clear as most of us might think. For him there is no contradiction in Alaric being both a Roman general and a Gothic king…or at least not *too* much of a contradiction. He rather convincingly argues that the ‘invasion’ of Alaric and his Goths could as easily been seen as an internal attack, more akin to a civil war, than as an invasion by external forces…at least until the final point of no return. Alaric, he argues, might well have saved the crumbling empire and prevented the “end of the world” instead of bringing it about if only a few factors had played out differently.
All in all I found this to be a great piece of imagined, though not I think untrue, history. The way Lafferty incorporates the fantastic with the realistic is nearly seamless and I am by no means certain that he didn’t give as much credence to some of the stranger tales of history as he did to the more mundane accounts. All is presented as worthy of consideration and it is left to the reader to decide what they wish to accept.
I can’t put my finger on what exactly it is, but I really enjoy Lafferty’s style. I think the closest I can come to expressing it is to say that he has a charming authorial voice. I can see why he is so beloved, if largely to a select group of other writers. I’m definitely a fan. It certainly makes me much more interested in tracking down his other works than I was previously when he was merely a vague recommendation. His wit is mordant, but never overstays its welcome by making itself too conspicuous. Definitely recommended.
July 21, 2011
R.A. Lafferty is sui generis, a science fiction writer like no other. You love him or you hate him or you, like me, are perplexed by him enough to read his bizarre novels and short stories obsessively while hating every minute of it.
R.A. Lafferty has got some peculiar take on religion. I've never read anything biographical about him, but it appears that this man was a very idiosyncratic, very serious Catholic--a factor that may, in part, explain some of his weird fictions.
This book, however, is a straightforward account of Alaric and Rome's fall(s). Here Lafferty reads like almost any decent popular historian. The specialist will likely find it amateurish, but others will find it engaging and informative. I did.
R.A. Lafferty has got some peculiar take on religion. I've never read anything biographical about him, but it appears that this man was a very idiosyncratic, very serious Catholic--a factor that may, in part, explain some of his weird fictions.
This book, however, is a straightforward account of Alaric and Rome's fall(s). Here Lafferty reads like almost any decent popular historian. The specialist will likely find it amateurish, but others will find it engaging and informative. I did.
June 4, 2020
This is a historical novel of the final years of the Roman Empire -- the fall of the ordered world. To some degree speculative, but trying to be as accurate as possible, and making a few pretty reasonable extrapolations from accepted historical evidence.
Essentially the core argument is that the Goths had become highly Romanized in a lot of ways, and the intrigue at the end wasn't the very simply taught "Rome became weak and was overrun by attackers from outside". The former part is well supported by history; the specific characters and intrigues in the book might or might not be accurate but are plausible, supported by some evidence, and highly entertaining. It's obvious that there were some truly great people involved in an event as momentous as this, and the book makes a reasonable attempt at portraying them.
Unfortunately there's no way to buy this book on Amazon in digital format in the US (some rights issue); I ended up using Rakuten Kobo with a VPN to Germany to buy a copy (in English, though).
Essentially the core argument is that the Goths had become highly Romanized in a lot of ways, and the intrigue at the end wasn't the very simply taught "Rome became weak and was overrun by attackers from outside". The former part is well supported by history; the specific characters and intrigues in the book might or might not be accurate but are plausible, supported by some evidence, and highly entertaining. It's obvious that there were some truly great people involved in an event as momentous as this, and the book makes a reasonable attempt at portraying them.
Unfortunately there's no way to buy this book on Amazon in digital format in the US (some rights issue); I ended up using Rakuten Kobo with a VPN to Germany to buy a copy (in English, though).
August 1, 2014
I suspect a large portion of this book is a novel rather than history - or perhaps, as some have suggested, he treats history the same way the ancient Greek historians did, putting words in the mouth of Pericles but giving those words the same color as what Pericles actually said. Either way, it's an excellent book in that it gives you a good idea of what the late 4th and early 5th centuries in the crumbling Roman Empire were like, and that the so-called "barbarians" did a great deal more to prop it up than tear it down until they finally got tired of Rome's broken promises and betrayals. Alaric, whatever you think of him, was a complex character who had his feet in both the Germanic and Roman worlds, until he was finally forced to decide between them - a decision that has consequences we can still feel rippling down to this day.
December 27, 2019
RA Lafferty is a brilliant short story writer. Part of what makes him so good is the extraordinary breadth and depth of his reading and personal education. He had a sweet-ass personal library. He apparently spoke a ton of languages. His fiction is super interesting in part because it is a filtering of this huge knowledge base through Lafferty's thoughtful/idiosyncratic/non-modern belief system. Also because it's packaged in Lafferty's distinctive prose style. It's a treat for fiction readers looking for interesting ideas packaged in an interesting way.
Fall of Rome is Lafferty's attempt at nonfiction. When you've spent your time casually reading every surviving primary source from centuries of antiquity, why the heck not right? Lafferty's subject is the larger-than-life biography of Alaric, the Gothic king who sacked Rome.
But unfortunately Lafferty's literary talents and huge knowledge-base do not result in a good history. The analytical wildness that makes his fiction fun and interesting translates to sloppiness when applied to historical inquiry. The strictures of having a narrative of actual fact to respect and narrate robs his fiction and prose of their usual life. Basically you get the worst of both worlds. Well maybe not the worst, but certainly something that's not great fiction or great history.
Like much of Lafferty's work, it's also super hard to find a copy. Don't bother with this one.
Fall of Rome is Lafferty's attempt at nonfiction. When you've spent your time casually reading every surviving primary source from centuries of antiquity, why the heck not right? Lafferty's subject is the larger-than-life biography of Alaric, the Gothic king who sacked Rome.
But unfortunately Lafferty's literary talents and huge knowledge-base do not result in a good history. The analytical wildness that makes his fiction fun and interesting translates to sloppiness when applied to historical inquiry. The strictures of having a narrative of actual fact to respect and narrate robs his fiction and prose of their usual life. Basically you get the worst of both worlds. Well maybe not the worst, but certainly something that's not great fiction or great history.
Like much of Lafferty's work, it's also super hard to find a copy. Don't bother with this one.
May 10, 2024
This is an old book I found in the small history section of our local library. Like another review stated, I’m not sure how historically accurate the book is but I loved it so much. R.A. Lafferty’s storytelling is captivating. The book basically tells the story of Rome from about the late 300s AD to early 400 ADs, towards the end of the Roman Empire. I had never read much on the Goths so this was a great introduction to that culture of people. I wanted to hug the book when I finished.
October 3, 2023
This book had a transformative effect on me as a young man. It would not be overstating it to say that "The Fall of Rome" helped me to see the kind of writer that I hope one day to become. I revisited the book not long ago and was humbled by how far I still have left to go. Lafferty is simply that good. In terms of the material covered, I believe it stands without equal.
July 24, 2019
Interesting. Nice readable voice, but labors minor points out too far and leaves unanswered questions.
September 2, 2019
Lafferty is always so full on and hilarious.
October 30, 2023
This is one of the only books that I have ever read in one sitting. This book is an incredibly engaging account of the Fall of Rome from multiple perspectives. I highly recommend this book.
October 28, 2023
An obscure and spellbinding little masterpiece on the Fall of Rome from the point of view of the barbarians; who weren't savages.
Sadly out of print, but available as an e-book.
This is a "revisionist history" written long before the term was invented, from the point of view of tribes we have been historically educated to think of as "the villains." This is the fate of all peoples who didn't bother writing about their world-view, culture, myths, values, and goals and so let others who do misrepresent them to later generations as knuckle-dragging monsters.
As a matter of fact, these tribes who supplanted the rotten Roman Empire more or less ensured that the ensuing "dark ages" weren't really dark.
They were a safe, if unwashed pair of hands to salvage of what would evolve into the spiritual, philosophical basis of Western Civilisation.
R. A. Lafferty was an electrical engineer with a philosophical turn of mind who lived (except for his WW II military service) all his life in Oklahoma. He was also a competent, autodidact historian.
He is better known for the distinctive voice of his "magical realism" science fiction.
The pyrotechnics of Lafferty's distinctive, often wildly poetic, literary voice has the mordant humour of Mark Twain and made him "The William Faulkner of science fiction".
He writes history in such a way that after reading it, you lay awake at night frowning at the ceiling and wishing you could have been a fly on the wall in those times, listening to historical figures quarrel with each other at cross purposes. Read this book.
Even if you don't like it, --I promise you'll like it.
Sadly out of print, but available as an e-book.
This is a "revisionist history" written long before the term was invented, from the point of view of tribes we have been historically educated to think of as "the villains." This is the fate of all peoples who didn't bother writing about their world-view, culture, myths, values, and goals and so let others who do misrepresent them to later generations as knuckle-dragging monsters.
As a matter of fact, these tribes who supplanted the rotten Roman Empire more or less ensured that the ensuing "dark ages" weren't really dark.
They were a safe, if unwashed pair of hands to salvage of what would evolve into the spiritual, philosophical basis of Western Civilisation.
R. A. Lafferty was an electrical engineer with a philosophical turn of mind who lived (except for his WW II military service) all his life in Oklahoma. He was also a competent, autodidact historian.
He is better known for the distinctive voice of his "magical realism" science fiction.
The pyrotechnics of Lafferty's distinctive, often wildly poetic, literary voice has the mordant humour of Mark Twain and made him "The William Faulkner of science fiction".
He writes history in such a way that after reading it, you lay awake at night frowning at the ceiling and wishing you could have been a fly on the wall in those times, listening to historical figures quarrel with each other at cross purposes. Read this book.
Even if you don't like it, --I promise you'll like it.
June 2, 2017
Upon finishing, I let out a breath I'd been holding for ten pages, and gasped "Wow!". Let me tell you, R.A. Lafferty knows how to turn history into a story as compelling as any work of fiction.
2017 Re-Read Update: God damn, this is still a great book. Don't let a relatively dry title about a well-traveled subject throw you. This is a great *story*, an admittedly psedu-fictional history, and one worth reading even if all the names and places were changed to pure fantasy.
2017 Re-Read Update: God damn, this is still a great book. Don't let a relatively dry title about a well-traveled subject throw you. This is a great *story*, an admittedly psedu-fictional history, and one worth reading even if all the names and places were changed to pure fantasy.
Read
January 20, 2010 I didn't enjoy reading this book because i found it was poorly organized and contained a lot of information packed into only a few chapters. Therefore each sentence was expressing a new idea making this non-fictitious piece very arduous to read. If were not for school, I would not have read it.
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