Best 11 quotes of Peter Heather on MyQuotes

Author describes one monarch's impressive table but conveys a contemporary's observation, "the weightiest thing at dinner was the conversation".

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

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

That the regime was willing to hit itts chief political constituency in the pocket was a clear sign of desperation.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

[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[.]