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Peter Heather QUOTES

Peter Heather QUOTES

1 " Foreign policy often involved nothing more than the decision whom to make war upon. "

― Peter Heather , The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians

2 " The way to a landowner's heart was to tax gently. "

― Peter Heather , The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians

3 " The cornerstone of the Roman legionnaires' astonishing fighting spirit can be attributed to their training. "

― Peter Heather , The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians

4 " The factor that made him so powerful was also his greatest liability. "

― Peter Heather , The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians

5 " He was a stylist, not a thinker. He spent time trying to say things in as complicated a way as possible. "

― Peter Heather , The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians

6 " Never base motivation or fear, entirely. "

― Peter Heather , The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians

7 " Reality confounds image. "

― Peter Heather , The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians

8 " The most important thing for morale was to maintain a united front among the officers. "

― Peter Heather , The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians

9 " The author describes the attitude of some on the frontier at Rome's twilight as exhibiting "a kind of London-in-the-blitz determination to carry on being more Roman than usual. "

― Peter Heather , The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians

10 " [W]ithin a generation, the Roman order was shaken to its core and Roman armies, as one contemporary put it, 'vanished like shadows'. In 376, a large band of Gothic refugees arrived at the Empire's Danube frontier, asking for asylum. In a complete break with established Roman policy, they were allowed in, unsubdued. They revolted, and within two years had defeated and killed the emperor Valens - the one who had received them - along with two-thirds of his army[.] "

― Peter Heather , The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians

11 " With ancient history writers most immediately in view, the author indicates "tendency to look to the virtues and vices of individuals when seeking causes. "

― Peter Heather , The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians

12 " Cultures reflect the interactions of mixed populations. "

― Peter Heather , The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians

13 " History has all too often been guilty of favouring the viewpoint of autocratic rulers in describing their glorious victories, when there is so much else that needs to be said. "

― Peter Heather , The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes and Imperial Pretenders

14 " To reach Greenland, turn left at the middle of Norway, keep so far north of Shetland that you can only see it if the visibility is very good, and far enough south of the Faroes that the sea appears half way up the mountain slopes. As for Iceland, stay so far to the south that you only see its flocks of birds and whales. So, ROUGHLY PARAPHRASED, run the navigational directions in an Icelandic manual of the Middle Ages, "

― Peter Heather , Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe

15 " By virtue of its unbounded aggression, Roman imperialism was ultimately responsible for its own destruction. "

― Peter Heather , The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians

16 " Biberunt ut Gothi – ‘drinking like Goths’ – would be a proverbial expression in Italy by the sixth century. "

― Peter Heather , The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians

17 " An emphasis on reading individual texts with a view to understanding the ideological visions of the world that underlie them has also had a dramatic impact. This type of interpretation requires historians to treat ancient authors, not as sources of fact, but rather like second-hand-car salesmen whom they would do well to approach with a healthy caution. "

― Peter Heather , The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians

18 " When Constantine converted to Christianity, there basically was no Christian architecture. Local Christian communities met in converted houses, and especially in the face of periodic imperial persecution, the religion had developed no specific architectural forms of its own. In the fourth century, therefore, as imperial patronage and ongoing processes of conversion caused large numbers of specialist churches to be built for the first time, the religion took over an old form of public building from the Graeco-Roman world: the basilica. This was a rectangular, shallow-vaulted building, usually equipped with aisles around an elevated central nave and an apse at one end. It had long been used for town council buildings and audience chambers across the Mediterranean world, with the apse being occupied by the presiding figure of power (or indeed the emperor in the case of a palace audience chamber). For Christianity, the apse worked nicely for the sacred space of the altar, and the basilica was a building form essentially designed for meetings, which worked, too, as a space for church services "

― Peter Heather , Rome Resurgent: War and Empire in the Age of Justinian

19 " One answer to the transitory nature of imperial rule, in short, is that there is a Newtonian third law of empires. The exercise of imperial power generates an opposite and equal reaction among those affected by it, until they so reorganize themselves as to blunt the imperial edge. "

― Peter Heather , Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe

20 " Having sliced Odovacar in half in early spring 493, Theoderic ruled his Italian kingdom for the next thirty-three years, until his own death on 30 August 526. "

― Peter Heather , The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes and Imperial Pretenders