ROME AND ATTILA

The downfall of the Roman Empire coincides with the westward march of Attila the Hun in Holmes’ work of history, one in a series.

In this third volume of the author’s history of the end of the Roman Empire, Holmes focuses on the Eastern and Western Roman Empires in the 4th and 5th centuries. The book opens with an account of the conflict between the Roman Empire and the encroaching Huns: The author depicts a rich, vivid battle scene, imagining a history told from the perspectives of the soldiers and the people on the ground, offering a vista of Romans, Franks, and Visigoths facing off, together, against the eastern nomads. (“Long dragon pennants streaming in the wind. The sun glittering off their chain-mail. Sharp spears bristling. An unstoppable phalanx of horsemen rides down the hillside.”) Holmes’ remit broadens to track the movement of peoples across Europe as the Huns advanced. The author argues that, while the Huns didn’t directly topple the Roman Empire, they were an important factor in pushing the Goths west, and south, which led, inevitably, to the fall of Rome. He also uses paleoclimatology to make an additional argument: Desire for conquest didn’t fuel the Huns’ westward path exclusively—climate change drove them out of the Central Asian steppes. Looking at tree rings, Holmes identifies evidence of massive droughts that, he asserts, led the Huns west into Europe, crossing the Rhine in 451 and entering Gaul at the western frontier. Conveyed with clarity and accessibility, this history is a great primer for anyone interested in the migratory patterns of early Europeans, but Holmes rarely gives the reader a sense of the consequences for the people who lived in Rome, or Gaul, or North Africa. The author clearly has a talent for storytelling, but what he presents in this account is mostly a sequence of military successes and failures, with little apparent desire to immerse the reader in the proceedings.

A readable and approachable history, but without much scholarly backing to support its theses.