The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire by Kyle Harper

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire by Kyle Harper Benjamin Reilly The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire. By kyle harper. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. 417 pp. In The Fate of Rome, Harper applies new evidence to an old question: why did the Roman Empire fall? His answer is unequivocal but nuanced. In general terms, the empire collapsed due to a gradually souring climate as the Roman Climate Optimum (RCO) (to 150 a.d.) gave way to a transitional period of "favourable but fluttering" weather (p. 170) and then a Late Antique Ice Age after 450. More specifically, Rome fell because these climate changes helped to trigger both famines and horrific disease epidemics, including smallpox, haemorrhagic fevers, and Yersinia pestis, better known as the bubonic plague. While not discounting foreign invasion via the Eurasian Steppe as a factor in Rome's fall, Harper suggests that these invasions only succeeded because disease had left Rome dangerously drained of both manpower and revenue. As far as the fall of Rome was concerned, Harper quips, "Germs [were] far deadlier than Germans" (p. 18). While Harper puts the climate at center stage when discussing the fall of Rome, he avoids reductive determinism, arguing that Roman society exhibited considerable resilience against climatic and epidemic shocks. The end of the RCO and the outbreak of smallpox did not mean the end of the Empire, though it dented its regional dominance. The empire also managed to weather the crisis of the third century, triggered by an increasingly erratic climate and a significant rise in regional droughts. However, it did not survive unscathed: the third century saw the militarization of the Roman state as well as the gradual ascendency of Christianity over old Roman paganism, in part due to the utility of the pseudo-familial ties fostered by Christian brotherhood in this time of crisis. The empire was altered, but endured. However, Rome's resilience had limits. In the west, Rome finally succumbed to climate change and its accompanying famines and epidemics in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. Depopulation rendered Italy and the west vulnerable to foreign invasions, which were themselves the fruit of climate change, an unprecedented multidecadal drought to the Asian Steppe. Indeed, Harper presents the Huns as "armed climate refugees on horseback" (p. 192), impelled into Roman territory by the desiccation of the Asian steppe from 350 to 370 a.d. The eastern Roman Empire survived and even enjoyed a brief renaissance of prosperity and power in the fifth century. However, the East would eventually collapse as well, undone by what Harper calls "one of the worst environmental catastrophes in recorded history" [End Page 450] (p. 21)—the dual hammer blows of bubonic plague and the Late Antique Ice Age. Harper argues that the fall of Egypt and the Levant to the invading Arabs marks the true end of the Roman Empire, and that the millenarian doomsday intensity of the Islamic faith was itself a symptom of the era's extreme climate crisis. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and for the most part Harper's evidence meets this standard. As a trained classicist, Harper makes masterful use of Greek and Roman literature and epigraphy. To this, Harper adds a thorough survey of more recent paleoclimatological, genetic, and archaeological evidence relevant to the topic, ranging from tree ring analysis to DNA extracted from skeletal remains to computer models of the antique climate. All of this data is tied together with beautiful prose. Harper's writing style combines the straightforward text expected from an academic with the descriptive flourishes of a novelist, making The Fate of Rome an engaging read. This is not to say that the book is without problems. In particular, Harper's discussion of malaria's role in later Roman history could have been better fleshed out. As Harper points out, there are at least 210 extant theories on the fall of Rome, and one of the theories he should have given some discussion to is the classicist W.H.S. Jones' malaria hypothesis, as further developed by Robert Sallares and other authors, since it closely overlaps his...