Since my first year in college when I wrote an essay about Edward Gibbon’s work on the Roman Empire, I’ve been a sucker for a book about the topic. Outside of the Chinese dynasties of old, there are no comparable powers that have influenced the world like Rome. Which is amazing when you think about it as a city, not an entire country.

Adrian Goldsworthy has become one of the leading Roman scholars of our time, and his book How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower is a great new perspective on the topic. Goldsworthy argues that the Western Roman Empire did not fall due to many of the popular theories that others have advanced. It wasn’t invading Barbarians or the rise of Persia, it wasn’t Christianity or economic collapse, it wasn’t environmental conditions or a lack of technological superiority.

It was rather more mundane than all of those ideas. According to Goldsworthy, it was the internal rot of the political and bureaucratic systems around Rome. In the last centuries of the Roman Empire, emperors had to worry first and foremost about their own well being. So many of them were killed by rivals and civil wars were so common that an Emperor had to operate with his own interests first and foremost.

The result was a civilization that slowly lost confidence in itself as talent was replaced with expediency. It’s an interesting concept — one that could never be proved definitively. But Goldsworthy makes a worthy effort and the scholarship here is excellent.

If you love Roman history, this book is a must read.