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Title: The Decline and Fall of Roman Britain by Neil Faulkner ISBN: 0-7524-1944-7 Publisher: Tempus Publishing, Limited Pub. Date: 01 January, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $29.99

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Average Customer Rating: 3.5 (2 reviews)

Rating: 3
Summary: Useful, but almost unimaginably bigoted
Comment: Neil Faulkner's book ought to be called a meritorious enterprise, and certainly a necessary one: bringing together all areas of advanced research into the history of Roman Britain, especially archaeological, into what is in many ways an elegant and creditable synthesis. But Faulkner murders his own work stone dead between the second and the third page, with the following extraordinary outburst:

"Many classical scholars in the past have portrayed Rome as a model to be emulated - "The grandeur that was Rome" - and have urged that it be studied for this reason. This book offers an alternative perspective, arguing that Rome was a system of robbery with violence, that it was inherently exploitative and oppressive, and that it was crisis-prone, unstable and doomed to collapse. I think there are lessons for the present in this. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - Conquest, Slaughter, Famine and Death - stalk the modern world, dominated as it is by corporate capital and imperialist war, just as they did that of late antiquity. In this context, continuing discussion about the past - especially about the role of violence and exploitation in human affairs - becomes part of an urgent debate about the sort of future we want to create."

Why, after this, should anyone pay Dr.Faulkner any more attention? This wheeling peacock display of vainglorious ignorance disguised as morality, this inability to think through elementary facts of life, and last but not least, this ridiculous teaching your grandmother to suck eggs, are bound to vitiate everything else he thinks or says. My dear man, do you think that you are saying anything that would have surprised Gibbon or Mommsen, Carcopino or Pallottino, M.I.Finney or - "sí ch'io sia sesto fra cotanto senno" - my own self? The point is not whether the Roman Empire was or not a system of organized exploitation; the point is what the alternative was. The complete folly of treating Roman exploitation as an absolute evil in a context in which the alternative was barbarian exploitation - much cruder and much more wasteful - should be clear to anyone who studies, exactly, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Study the internal relations of Greek states before the imposition of pax Romana; study the internal history of, say, the Kingdom of the Franks, ever after; and then tell me that the Empire was a Bad Thing. Of course, I do not doubt that Faulkner's fanaticism, his self-imposed ignorance disguised as morality, would be up to the task of finding ways around the facts. But to any reasonable person this is nonsense. When I read this to a friend who is further to the left than I am, but knows history, his hair stood on end.
Faulkner is a perfect example of the evil of programmed righteous indignation as a substitute for positive morality. The modern mind, especially in Britain, has taught itself to construct righteous indignation around any target perceived as evil or in need of reform, without ever postulating a positive ground for such indignation. It is full of things it is against with no equal list of things it is for. Chesterton said that quite elegantly in his analysis of Ibsen in HERETICS (1905); since then, we have become even more ignorant, even more prejudiced, even more hypocritical. And as a revolting side effect, when people brought up in the replacement of programmed righteous indignation for morality actually come close to the realities of political power - like New Labour - their empty categories crumble, leaving no buttress of positive values; and so we have displays of political immoralism to put Bismarck or Cardinal Richelieu to shame, not to mention an aimlessness and pettiness these great villains would never have imagined (would they, in contemporary circumstances, ever insist on the privatization of air traffic control and the London Underground? Of course not); no driving principle is left but a mean pseudo-realism. Faulkner, in short, is as typical of the worst kind of mind of our day as the fellow travellers of Fascism and Communism were in the past, and the result of this sort of arrogant self-righteousness will last, alas, long after we are dead; not only in the areas where it is obvious, but also where we do not expect it.

Rating: 4
Summary: How and why Rome fell -- a concise exposition
Comment: The decline and fall of Roman Britain Neil Faulkner; KSBN 0-7524-1458-5 Tempus Publishing, Ltd., 2000

I have just read this book, and would thoroughly recommend it to my colleagues. The print is small and the content is in a compressed language that becomes almost epigrammatic, so that it would mentally "unzip" to double the size.

He covers the whole course of the Roman "occupation" of Britain with solid archaeological examples. He has called in other surveying disciplines to produce telling trends in graphs. He uses modern but apposite terminology for political posts and activities that make their purpose clear. For example, he calls 'mansiones'travel-lodges; Augustus in his 'Res gestae' produced a party political broadcast; there were state 'apparatchik' appointed on a long-term posting. Even if you prefer more traditional translations, they make one think.

His main thrust is against the present-day establishment party line of archaeology, perhaps because he is looking at the social aspects in the round: "the fabric of Roman imperial society simply rotted away". He is striving to describe the conditions of the lower classes and the local gentry as well as of the better and favourably documented imperial grandees -- something that few attempt to extrapolate. His graphs amply illustrate how cities in Britain literally decayed, and the locals, abandoned by the army and the rich, returned to a

subsistence living, some in the ruined cities. His thesis reflects over the whole Empire -- when it could no longer feed off outside conquests, it had to feed off its own fat and then muscle.

The scope of the book omits to deal with how the Church seemed to perpetuate the culture of Rome -- but that was in cocooned pockets of geography and daily life, and has been the only evidence that has dominated thinking so far.

I would criticise it for not identifying quotes or map sources and for repeating phrases he is obviously -- even justifiably -- fond of, such as the words "robbery with violence", which he demonstrates to be the main driving force of the thousand-year Reich (my words, not his).

I read into the book precedents for the present-day resentment of "outside" authority to be found in Celtic and Saxon -- now British -- parts and the Northern fringe of Europe , such as the English trader who has recently been found guilty of offending a European Union law, because he was selling bananas in pounds and ounces on the excuse that it was simply to meet his customers' wishes. He sees yet wider current implications in the continuing imperial exploitations of the world's peoples and resources.

I suspect that I may already have thrown out more than one controversy here; but that is the beauty of the book -- it makes one think -- it is dangerous.