Description

Tapio Tiihonen
EKPYROSIS (talking book)
The Fall of The Roman Empire
Part I:
THE ROAD TO VANQUISHED GLORY
374-395 AD

Ekpyrosis

The Fall of the Roman Empire
Part 1: The Path of Decline, AD 474–395

In his exhaustive study, Finnish scholar and Doctor of Philosophy, Tapio Tiihonen, unraveled the events leading to the downfall of Western Rome in his comprehensive investigation spanning the years 374–481 AD. His 10-volume series meticulously traversed available sources and archaeological findings, meticulously dissecting the ideological, strategic, and territorial fractures of the Roman Empire. Utilizing resources such as the Theodosian Code, Notitia Dignitatum, Corpus Scriptorum Latinorum, Bibliotheca Augustana, numerous Church Fathers, Italian and Danish archaeological studies, as well as Rome’s archaeological compilations from the Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae, and the surviving fragments of pagan historical, philosophical, and scientific treatises (including Martianus Capella’s foundational medieval scientific exposition).
The result was a staggering narrative of Rome’s demise, wherein the chief architects were not the decaying Romans but the Christianized barbarians and their guides within the Roman power hierarchy. We witness the collapse of literacy within a generation and borders within a decade. We read Christian praises of Rome’s conquest, such as Augustine’s City of God, which offer a wholly new perspective on destruction.
In his English audiobook, Tiihonen revisits the roots of destruction: an epic tale of Hunnic onslaught, the transport of defeated barbarians into Roman territories, their rebellion against Rome, the Hunnic cavalry’s superiority over Roman infantry, and the cultural upheaval where Christian masses assail Roman teachers and culture. Beneath it all looms a triumphant march of mystic religion over natural inquiry, tolerant schools, temples, cultural centers, mathematics and science, architecture, medicine, and philosophy’s collapse, with monks supplanting philosophers and the grammatici of liberal arts and higher learning. Above all, we witness emperors filling their armies with barbarian mercenaries, and when they can no longer afford the wages of the settled barbarians within Roman territories, they resort to religious warfare. The religious war commences at a specific decree of the emperors – against Romans, with the support of barbarian soldiers. Rome’s defense mechanism crumbles in a grand Christian revolution and the barbarian migrations. This first part of the trilogy details how Emperor Theodosius displaces the so-called pagans and initiates his Christian dynasty – and Pax Romana is replaced by total religious war.
In his audiobook, Tiihonen, with the force of original sources, depicts a grand upheaval, the greatest in European history, with a Shakespearean flair, employing theatrical devices, bringing forth muses and demons of prose and poetry, ruler tragedies, and the new Asian rat swarms brought by Huns, stirring people to repentance through Asian and Catholic divinity. While theatrical elements punctuate the presentation, the historical description is underpinned by the facts of Tiihonen’s decade-long research.
Welcome aboard an epic journey into the chaos of Rome, at its heart pulsating a new order, gradually strengthening, crafting a new Europe and its cultural renaissance. Only one Roman code is needed, two magic words that will be found much later, as the Renaissance awakens. This chaos is woven together by a universal force of nature, which in this first part only gives faint signs of itself, but which is the fundamental power behind Tiihonen’s epic series: the golden ratio. Welcome to explore and be inspired by history, where golden spirals destroy and recreate everything anew – as witnessed by ancient Greeks: Ekpyrosis.