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Ian Hughes’ books on the period where the Western Empire dissolved into nothingness have been very good at providing a clearer picture of the process. I think this volume might be the best one of the lot.

Like his earlier book on Stilicho, this traces the career of one man, who many with the barest of knowledge of the period will know of because of his commanding the Roman side at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains against Attila the Hun.

The early section looks at Aetius’ early life, and positions him as part of the Roman upper class. He was traded to the Huns as a ‘hostage’ during his teenage years; Hughes is at pains to talk about the actual nature of hostages as political insurance in the pre-modern world, something that needs looking at more often. At any rate, this part informs a large part of his thesis. The Roman military had become very conservative with manpower and emphasized sieges and the like to set-piece battles. The Huns and other tribal confederations still emphasized combat and set-piece battles of various sizes, and Aetius’ career shows the same pattern, so Hughes assumes that much of his military training and style comes from his period with the Huns.

Aetius also relies on support from Hunnic factions, particularly early in his career. Hughes also figures this comes from friendships formed in his time with them. This is important during some early maneuverings, which could easily have ended up with Aetius dead as a rebel, but after stong-arming the other faction, ended with him working quite effectively inside and with the system for the next two decades.

It can reasonably be said that his use of Hunnic troops during his internal fight against Boniface was part of the downfall of the Western Empire. Hughes doesn’t go too much into that, but does spend a good amount of time and thought on various settlements of barbarians inside the empire. This too he sees as not necessarily destructive of the Empire as it had successfully been done before. In his concluding part though, he talks about the various methods by which this was done, and points out that the Goths in southern Gaul had been allowed to settle with their leadership intact, instead of it being sent elsewhere, generally as leadership in a different section of the army. This put people used to politics and power with a built-in power base inside the Empire, and that is what Hughes points to as the dramatic step towards the dissolution of the western Empire.

Often what is known of Aetius comes straight out of Gregory of Tours, and Hughes does a good job here pulling together the sources, and giving the outline of his character. I think Hughes may have trended towards being too sympathetic to him, but his conclusions are reasonable.

Hughes provides a good overview of the end of the western Empire in this volume. He does analyze things, and come to conclusions, but the primary focus is providing a chronological outline of events.

That latter is the primary value as it can be hard to find any coherent look at the four decades from the death of Aetius to the death of Odovacer. There’s no central figure, which is part of the point, political power and fortunes were so fractured by this period that no one entirely rises above the other players.

However, Ricimer (who should be more prominent in synopses of this era) does provide the central focus for part of this book (enough so that I wonder if Hughes really should have focused in a little bit more and done a book purely on him). He is generally considered to have been the ‘power behind the throne’ for, oh, maybe fifteen years, and often takes the fall for the instability of the West. Hughes gives good reasons to believe that this is not the case, and that his actions were often in response to other political pressures.

This largely comes down to the Roman Senate, which, like in his book on Stilicho, takes the blame for a fair number of ills without introducing any real evidence. He may reference some pertinent sources in the end notes (which I have not gone through), but there is nothing in the main body. Nobody from the senate is mentioned by name. No description of what the senate was like in the Fifth Century is provided. Now he ascribes the senators as a whole with motives that are likely (protecting their own position, and the safety of their own lands), but there’s nothing here to actually support these assertions, so it’s nothing more than an axiom of the book.

Other than that hole, there’s a lot of interest here. Beyond any problems with the Senate, problems of the division of the Empire between East and West are made manfest. Thanks to a lack of a stable dynasty, and a horde of ongoing problems, in the West, the Eastern Empire has become the senior political partner, which ends up crucially weakening the West. Any time an Emperor dies (too common), there is a wait while the choice of a new Western Emperor is coordinated with the East. If the Eastern court doesn’t care for what’s going on, political and military support can get withdrawn, which leaves the West’s leadership high and dry. Additionally, Marcellinus maintains an almost independent existence as comes rei militaris Dalmatiae for almost this entire period as he’s supported by the East, but refuses to work with Ricimer’s administration of the West.

And of course, at the same time there is growing ‘barbarian’ influence in the territories outside Italy and Dalmatia. The book has about one map per chapter showing the slowly shifting patterns of who had control of what. Now, these groups are settled in the Empire by agreement, and acknowledge it’s authority. Mostly. Even the better actors, like the Visigoths under Theoderic acted largely independently of the administration in Italy, even when pursing the same goals. Meanwhile, Vandal kingdom in Africa raided Italy regularly, and the book shows two attempts to counterinvade that came apart utterly, and likely recriminations did much to make the situation in Italy worse. Hughes figures Gaiseric to be the most able leader and diplomat of the period to explain his long stable reign, and the Empire’s inability to reclaim Africa.

Hughes sticks to a largely chronological format, which means he doesn’t give any one subject his full attention as nothing got wrapped up neatly within one year. Mostly, this is well handled, but with some real long-term trends going on here, I think seeing something concentrating on just one of them would be a real plus. I don’t recommend this one for a more casual read because of this, but it is definitely a great framework for anyone in an interest in the last years of the Western Empire.

This basically a follow-on to McLaughlin’s study of trade across the Indian Ocean. Despite being almost the same size, it feels like an appendix to it.

Whereas his former book spent a lot of time giving specifics of particular trade goods and where Romans were going to get them and trying to get an idea of the overall Roman budget, this is more of a jumbled history of some of the land area between Rome and China. He starts off with a discussion of what Rome had to get from China, which is interesting.

The obvious part is silk, and he goes into the difference between ‘domesticated’ silk, and ‘wild’ silk, where the latter uses threads from cocoons where the larvae ate it’s way out, cutting the strands. Chinese ‘domesticated’ silk is so good because it has extremely long single strands to work with. At any rate, the lesser version was produced in many places, including the Greek island of Cos. More surprising is the assertion that Chinese steel was superior to what Rome could produce, so high-quality steel was an import. I’d like to see some sort of study of the history of metallurgy to check that. The most surprising part is indications that Rome was exporting silk to China. It wouldn’t have been much, but the Roman world had access to some brilliant dyes that China did not, so dyed silks left the Empire again.

Most of the rest of the book takes a look at various areas and regimes along the northern trade routes that made up the Silk Road(s). He starts with China’s troubles with the Xiongnu (Huns!), which started China exploring to the south of their territory looking for potential allies against them. This eventually gets them to Bactria… but just as the post-Alexandrian nation there is dissolving into fragmented city-states.

There is some look at the Chinese economy, but it’s not nearly as well developed, and most of the book he seems to try to avoid discussing their currency. (“Han revenues: 12,300 million cash”, without saying cash what.) At one point near the end he does define the wushu, which seems to be the currency base for his calculations. He spends some time discussing the differences between revenue collection between the two, which could probably stand to be more in depth, though I’d have to spend a fair amount of time thinking about it to make sense of everything he does have there.

All that is basically the ends of the book. In between, there’s a discussion of various regions in between, their contacts with other areas, trade routes through, but mostly little on the actual trade itself. It makes for a good history of central Asia from ~200 BC to ~100 AD, also with some helpful notes on the geography involved, but it doesn’t integrate them with each other very much except for a time line given in the front. So, it’s nowhere near as useful as The Roman Empire in the Indian Ocean, though it is interesting, and good books on this region are rare.

The ‘ghosts’ that provide the excuse for the (admittedly great) title of this book are the cannenses, the survivors of the Roman army comprehensively defeated at Cannae. And there’s some interesting info on what seems to have happened to them, and just how unforgiving the Republic was of people who dared survive a debacle, they’re not really enough of a focus to name a book after.

In an epilogue, there is another form of ‘ghost’. O’Connell looks at how well regarded Cannae has been throughout history. This actually provides a fair amount of myth-busting. Certainly, it was written about, but for most of the last two thousand years, Cannae was not a battle written about often. And it certainly didn’t have the near mythological status it has today. Most of the current reputation and study of the battle stems from Alfred von Schlieffen (yes, that von Shlieffen, of the ‘Schlieffen Plan’) becoming fascinated with the battle at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.

Interestingly, O’Connell goes all the way back to human evolution to look at the sources of organized war before giving a brief overview of more recent history of the area, naturally concentrating on the First Punic War. This shows that this is purely ‘popular’ history, and doesn’t even pre-suppose that readers regularly read military history. So overall there’s not a lot new here for people who have had an interest in the period and done a fair amount of reading on it previously. However, he does pay a bit more attention to the original sources than many, and does a good job of showing what he is pulling out of them and how, making it better than a number of popular studies that way. Best yet, the book is excellently written, with some very nice analysis and modern analogies.