The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes and Imperial Pretenders Author: Visit Amazon's Peter Heather Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0199368511 | Format: EPUB
The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes and Imperial Pretenders Description
Review
"The transition from the first empire to the present is wonderfully retold... Heather's style is seductive and his British wit enlivens this engrossing history of the piecemeal 'restoration' of a Rome that lingers still." --Publishers Weekly
"In this brilliant account... Peter Heather explains how and why efforts to reconstruct the Roman empire ultimately failed, and how they unwittingly laid the foundation for a new sort of Roman empire... This is a beautifully written book that combines sprightly narrative with detailed analysis, but never loses the big picture." --Peter Jones, BBC History Magazine
"The Restoration of Rome presents an exciting and learned argument in a convincing, passionate way designed to be intelligible to a popular audience. Heather is a masterly interrogator of evidence, questioning the texts he quotes in such a way to make his book feel at times like a historical detective puzzle... This is a keenly conceived, deeply intelligent and very timely history." --Dan Jones, Sunday Times
"This is the story of the birth of Europe, with its profusion of competitive states. It is told with energy and zest, full of lurid detail and enthralling biographical portraits." --Ben Wilson, Telegraph
"A tightly argued and highly stimulating book that will be of obvious interest to readers curious about the aftermath of Rome's fall and the cultural and ideological legacy of Rome. The style is chatty and accessible, and the scholarship up to date and reliable." --Peter Sarris, Literary Review
About the Author
Peter Heather is Professor of Medieval History at King's College London. He is the bestselling author of The Fall of the Roman Empire, Empires and Barbarians, and numerous other works on late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.
- Hardcover: 488 pages
- Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (March 21, 2014)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0199368511
- ISBN-13: 978-0199368518
- Product Dimensions: 1.8 x 6.8 x 9.8 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Peter Heather is without doubt a great historian who has done much to revisit some of the theories that used to be common currency regarding the end of the Roman Empire. In this book, he seeks to demonstrate how, after three failed attempts by "imperial pretenders" to "restore" the Roman Empire, "barbarian popes" finally managed to succeed in the "Restoration of Rome", although in a quite different form.
Written with a large audience in mind, this book is an entertaining and, at times, a brilliant read backed up by the author's rather exceptional scholarship. The three first parts of the book are vignettes telling the stories of Theodoric, Justinian and Charlemagne, and, according to the author, how each of them attempted, and failed to restore the Empire. The fourth part is about the ascendency of the papacy and how it managed to dominate and become the head of the Church in the western part of what had been the Roman Empire.
This is where I started having some problems. One of the lesser ones is the use of profanity because this allegedly "people's prose" is supposed to make the book's contents more accessible or even more endearing to a large audience. One of the mildest is the author's rather sweeping judgement about Justinian being a "bastard", given the Nikea massacre that saved his throne (and his life) and his long wars which he pursued with little consideration about the sufferings of the populations. He even gets compared to Hitler, Staline and Pol pot. Needless to say, passing judgement on a historical figure in such an anachronistic way is quite amazing for a historian of this calibre who clearly knows better than to compare apples and oranges and call them fruit.
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