The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples

Rating:
Summary: Not easy reading, but worth the effort
Review: My reason for reading this book is that I wanted to know more about Roman Germany after visiting several sites in West Germany. I've had a lifelong interest in the Roman Empire and loved my Latin classes in high school. Since then I've occasionally read books about the Roman Empire. I am certainly not an expert in this field. This particular book is not easy reading. It is a serious, scholarly work in a solemn translation from the German. However, if one has the patience to plow through, it can be quite rewarding and provocative. I felt I was tracing the roots of our own culture when the author showed that so many of the tribes had a religion around a sacred sword. The author didn't mention Excalibur, but it immediately came to mind.

Roman Germany turned out to be far different than I had simplistically imagined. It was not a matter of conquering and occupying. There was a lot of wheeling and dealing going on. One system simply evolved into another over time. This book was tremendously informative to me. I feel that my understanding of the so-called "Dark Ages" is radically improved. As I said, this is not an easy read. It takes time and concentration. But I felt it was worth it.

Rating:
Summary: Not easy reading, but worth the effort
Review: My reason for reading this book is that I wanted to know more about Roman Germany after visiting several sites in West Germany. I've had a lifelong interest in the Roman Empire and loved my Latin classes in high school. Since then I've occasionally read books about the Roman Empire. I am certainly not an expert in this field. This particular book is not easy reading. It is a serious, scholarly work in a solemn translation from the German. However, if one has the patience to plow through, it can be quite rewarding and provocative. I felt I was tracing the roots of our own culture when the author showed that so many of the tribes had a religion around a sacred sword. The author didn't mention Excalibur, but it immediately came to mind.

Roman Germany turned out to be far different than I had simplistically imagined. It was not a matter of conquering and occupying. There was a lot of wheeling and dealing going on. One system simply evolved into another over time. This book was tremendously informative to me. I feel that my understanding of the so-called "Dark Ages" is radically improved. As I said, this is not an easy read. It takes time and concentration. But I felt it was worth it.

Rating:
Summary: Quite Lovely
Review: Only read this book if you are forced to. Not a casual read. Author bounces around dates with wreckless abandon. Accuracy is highly questionable.

Rating:
Summary: Quite Lovely
Review: The author presents a truly enlightening study of how the Empire absorbed the Germanic tribes, as well as the ultimate effect of the powerful Roman cultural hegemony on outlying provinces. As an Ancient Rome buff, I find this a necessary counterweight to Gibbon's "Decline and Fall..."

Rating:
Summary: A very interesting yet complex read
Review: This book, a survey of the histories of the various so-called Germanic tribes that eventually assumed control of Europe, spanning the years from roughly 250AD to somewhere around 800AD. One of Wolfram's main theses is that the actual barbarian "invasions" were events that were much more complicated than a simple onslaught of Germanic hordes. He does a relatively good job in describing how exactly the migrations took place. Along the way, he gives the reader some good ideas about how the Germanic tribes functioned as societies.

This is an enormously complicated subject. I'm sure no two people agree on everything involved, but I must take issue to some of the criticisms that has been written here. First, this is no easy book to read. It's a history book written by and for specialists. So, it's not simply a narrative of events that happened; there's a great deal of analysis and moving back and forth in time in order to make comparisons. He does provide a time-line, though. Nevertheless, it's going to be rough-going for someone looking for a quick scan of the topic.

As for Wolfram's sources, most of them are Roman texts or in German (the book itself is a translation from the German). There's nothing quoted here that's any more spurious than any other history book I've read. In fact, Wolfram spends a lot of time weeding out what's reliable in the Roman sources and what isn't.

Lastly, it should be pointed out that another of Wolfram's big points is to distinguish the Germanic tribes as political units as opposed to ethnic units (and thus somehow "related" to modern Germans). He's very effective at convincing me at least that most of these tribes were ethnically polyglots that subsumed various "races" according to political and economic need.