If Rome Hadn't Fallen

by Timothy Venning

  The likeliest pattern of government would have been that of the bureaucratic, Catholic imperial state of Spain over its American empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There was official colonial subordination and the regular despatch of top officials to head the colonial administration, but a good deal of autonomy in practice and the evasion of central governmental orders. The central viceroyalty governorships would probably have been of defined geographical areas, e.g. the southern and the northern east coastal plains, the Mississippi valley, and the Canadian areas around the St. Lawrence basin (and Mexico south of the Rio Grande, if conquered). Given the lack of inter-State and inter-faith warfare in Europe, there would have been no Francis Drakes or Dutch privateers preying on the Imperial shipping that exported loot and trade-goods to Europe. Instead, the energies of restless European coastal provincial adventurers could have been used to establishing a western trade route across the Pacific to China. The amount of state power and direction of labour available to Rome would have made it an easier matter to order the digging of a canal across the Panama isthmus than it was in reality, particularly if the survival of Ancient World documentation had enabled the preservation of details of the Pharaonic canal digging in Egypt at Alexandria. Slaves, mainly prisoners-of-war, would have been easily available to work at the project for as long as necessary and the Empire would have had as little compunction as the Spanish Viceroyalities in impressing local labour for such projects.

  The existence of a continuing central bureaucratic government, and a Catholic religious structure, across Europe could well have led to an exodus of people seeking more automony from government control to the Americas and thus an evolution of more democratic local government there within the provinces (at least for the wealthy farmers and merchants), centred on advisory councils to assist the governors. Given stronger central direction from Europe than in real-life British North America, probably on the basic pattern of Spanish America, a local settler ethos would have developed on the lines of creole society in the Spanish empire, and the cultural precedents their thinkers had to study should have led to an interest in the Ancient Greek colonial’ precedents of autonomous colonial societies such as republican Syracuse and city-states in the Hellenistic kingdoms. The expansionist nature of a society of rugged independent minded farmers fighting local tribesmen should also have led to interest in the precedent of early republican Rome in Italy and the cultivation of republican farmer virtues as celebrated by Livy, indeed, the interest in heroic Roman Republican virtue of the real-life French revolutionary era and of Jeffersonian America are natural developments to have been replicated in the Roman American colonies.

  Society in post-fifth century Roman Europe.

  Something like the physical structure of sixth century Eastern Mediterranean life would have been the norm for a continuing Western Roman social and economic world in the sixth and seventh centuries. The only caveat to this scenario is the possible impact of the epidemics and climate, problems that seem to have afflicted all Europe for decades from the early 540s, quite independently of the military situation. Recently David Keys has constructed a theory of far-reaching political, economic, and psychological results arising from this train of disasters in his study Catastrophe.10 The famines and later the plagues of the period are traced to the apparent ‘dimming of the sun’ for months in 535/6 reported by Procopius,11 and connected to the effects of a massive volcanic eruption in the Krakatau islands off Java that caused dust-clouds to circle the Earth and prevented the sunlight ripening the crops across the world.12 The overall effects of these disasters remain contentious, but even in a fairly settled Europe the loss of manpower would have severely affected urban life and trade besides causing famine in the countryside. Particular hardship would have fallen on the poorer classes, affecting the government’s ability to raise taxes and to feed the cities and armies.

  If a large ‘Diocletianic’ bureaucracy and an army on the scale of that listed in the Notitia Dignitatum were still in existence in the sixth century West, loss of manpower would have affected the ability of the citizenry to pay for them. It could have caused a (temporary?) flight from the towns to avoid the onerous duties of the curial classes in making up for their fellows’ tax defaulting. The physical effects of this would have included a decline in the ability of the civic taxpayers and the town councils to repair civic buildings and carry out expensive new projects, with the untaxed Church and monasteries at a distinct advantage. Some villages in the rural areas could have disappeared altogether, along with smaller towns, as in the similar mixture of bad weather, famine, and plague in the fourteenth century, but it is likely that larger towns would have survived as they did then. Isolated peoples not on the regular trade routes, such as the Vikings and remote Slavic settlements, would have been at a demographic advantage. As a result, the untaxed Church could have preserved its wealth and the fabric of its properties better than the rest of society, and Church buildings could have been more dominant in the surviving towns as they were to be in those of surviving Byzantine cities that had a Classical origin (e.g. Constantinople, Thessalonica, Ephesus, and Nicaea).

  It is noticeable that the public context of civic life in Byzantine cities tended to be centred around the Church rather than the secular buildings that had been the centre of life in the Classical era, most especially the public baths. The cost of maintaining the latter in a time of financial stringency, and possibly a shortage of skilled masons to maintain the fabric, must have played a part in this decline for secular civic culture. There is also the factor of the Church’s disapproval of the inheritance of the ancient Greek sporting ‘ethos’ for nudity and immorality. Theodosius I’s closure of the Olympic Games in 394 is often cited as an exemplar of the new Christian puritanism, though it is unclear how popular such spectacles still were.13 The Church, following St. Paul, denounced Greek athletic nudity – which had not originally been a Roman practice.

  It is not clear how may of the local pagan Games and other cultural or sporting competitions of civic Greece, recorded for the second century in the travelogues of Pausanias, survived the chaos and economic dislocation of the third century crisis and were still active at the time of Theodosius’ prohibitory legislation. The most prestigious Games, e.g. at Nemea, seem to have survived. Even if there were dramatic contests in the theatres at Athens and Epidaurus until 394, there is no record of new drama being created; instead, the traditional repertoire continued ritually to be performed. Without the formal bans on all non-Christian festivals and seizure of shrines’ property by Theodosius, it is probable that these aspects of established tradition would have continued for generations under local patronage. Important buildings vital to the practice of ancient Greek cultural practices, such as the sanctuary of the ‘Mysteries’ at Eleusis, which Alaric’s Goths sacked in 396, would have survived but for Constantinopolitan politics and military crisis. But the major series of famines and epidemics in the mid-sixth century would have added to the strain on the curial classes’ purses of maintaining these buildings, and Procopius’ vehement comments on the mid-sixth century civic tax burden shows the state of the people who paid for them. The greater emphasis on private, as opposed to public life (except in religion) argues against civic buildings seeming as vital as in the classical period anyway.

  The cost of government and war would have been high, particularly after the plague of the 540s, and affected these classes’ ability to pay for the physical structure of ‘civilized’ classical life. The anti-pagan legislation of Theodosius, followed by the active persecution of all religious deviants by the obsessive Justinian, only accelerated an ongoing decline. It is noticeable that the orthodox Christian State backed vigilante actions against local pagan temple buildings, as when under Theodosius I the militant Christian state commissioner Cynegius toured Syria wrecking such buildings with the puritanical enthusiasm of the Taleban destroying statues of the Buddha. Theodosius and Justinian both sanctioned official razzias of destruction li
ke Mao in the Cultural Revolution. Systematic vandalism of pagan shrines was also carried out by the Patriarchs’ heavies in Alexandria in the early 390s, notably at the great Temple of Serapis.14 But murders of blasphemous pagan philosophers are known on only one occasion, the lynching of the female lecturer Hypatia, a feminist icon, by the Patriarch’s men in Alexandria.

  It is unrealistic to assume that the ethos of Classical sport and entertainment would have survived unchanged if the Empire had not fallen. The developments of the fourth and fifth centuries under the Christian Emperors are instructive. The gladiatorial content of the games in Rome had already been halted before the West ‘fell’ in real life, initially by Constantine and finally possibly as a result of an incident after Stilicho’s victory over Alaric in 402.15 Thus there would have been no continuation of the Games familiar to the early Empire; sporting enthusiasm would have probably transferred to chariot racing as in Constantinople, with the great racing teams serving as the foci for partisanship. Rome had had a long history of racing at the Circus Maximus, and post-fifth century Rome would thus have had its own racing riots and political interventions by the racing faction demes as well as Constantinople.

  As analysed by Alan Cameron, the races were an important occasion for the Emperor to connect with his people and show that he shared their interests and was available to listen to their complaints.16A politically astute ruler would pretend to take an interest in the races to show his affability and democratic instincts, like a New Labour minister showing an interest in football today. A disgruntled Hippodrome crowd was capable of hailing a new Emperor, as they did to Justinian at the Nika Revolt in 532. He had to send in the troops to carry out a massacre before the rioting ended.17 The factions of rival Hippodrome race teams had a major role in city life, and it was seen as a matter of major import that Justinian’s wife Theodora had a family background in the racing world as daughter of a Hippodrome bear trainer. After her father died his racing faction refused to give his family a pension, so Theodora always backed their rivals.18This was not merely ephemeral show business; in 532 the usually fratricidal Greens and Blues joined together to try to depose Justinian, and in 602 the factions helped to depose Maurice. It is unclear, however, if the rigid ceremonial of the Byzantine races would have been as apparent in the Western Empire; the formality of fourth century Western state ceremonial could have been reversed at a later date by more democratic rulers. This was, however, unlikely as long as the Church, with its year-round rituals, was a major prop of the state. The evolution of ceremonial at the eastern court had a religious function to present the Emperor as the ‘equal of the apostles’, with religious ceremonies frequent; this ‘holy’ aspect of the imperial capital was developing in Rome too in the fourth and fifth centuries, but had another focus than the Emperor, i.e. the Pope as heir to St. Peter.

  The Emperor at Constantinople served as the focus of religious devotion, as the heir to the ‘thirteenth apostle’ Constantine, and the local patriarchate was a newcomer to the religious hierarchy. The see had initially only been a bishopric, being elevated to patriarchal status relatively late, and lacked the antiquity of the venerable sees of Rome, Antioch, and Alexandria, all founded by apostles. But in Rome the religious leadership had the advantage of a first century foundation by the man charged by Christ with leading the Church, and was making the most of it to claim local disciplinary authority even in the third century. Rome had the relics of Ss. Peter and Paul, martyred in situ; Constantinople had to import its relics and was only a minor Greek town in the first century.

  There was thus every political reason for the authorities at ‘nouveau riche’ Constantinople, which lacked the authority given by age and apostolic associations, to consciously build up an atmosphere of holiness centred on its Emperor as religiously unchallengeable. The dynamic Patriarchs Theophilus and Cyril of Alexandria had overshadowed both Emperor and Patriarch of Constantinople as chief defenders of orthodoxy in the early fifth century. But in the West there was less religious controversy over the form of official doctrine, and no rival patriarchs to challenge the bishop or Emperor in Rome. There was thus no need to build up the Emperor’s role or his sacred status. An Emperor living at Milan or Ravenna might have been relatively free from the sort of religious atmosphere to his public appearances that developed in Constantinople, or even at Rome he might have played it down.

  The Church would have held great power and continued to draw in able careerists, but would have had a rival in the continuing Roman civil service and been subject to secular control as in Byzantium. The Papacy would not have held more than a primary position of honour. And in due course a revival of interest in pagan culture and rejection of the Church attitude towards ancient philosophy would have stimulated a renaissance, perhaps after the military threat posed by the Vikings to the new urban centres and monasteries of Northern Europe had passed. The leisure and politically stable conditions that enabled such interests to develop would have been unlikely in a sixth centuryWestern Roman world affected by plague or an eighth to ninth century world afflicted by Vikings, but could well have emerged by the later eleventh century when real-life theological speculation began to flourish in France and Italy.

  The ethnic composition of Europe would have been much different from reality, with no (or few) Angles and Saxons in England, no (or few) Franks in France, no Goths or Arabs in Spain, and no Lombards in Italy. The nature of civilization and politics in any ‘Twelfth Century Renaissance’ would have been much different from that of reality, not least with a powerful Emperor and a weak Papacy, though Latin would still have been the lingua franca. Crucially, the stimulus given to development by autonomous or independent local towns in Italy and Germany would have been absent. Each district would have been under an Imperial governor, whether or not the division between civic praeses and military duces introduced circa 290 had continued. These men would have continued to be bureaucrats, regularly appointed place holders under the direction of the central government, not the hereditary rulers of medieval Europe.

  The nature of central control over the localities would have been beyond that of any medieval state, even late Capetian France. The role of the Church in the localities would have been smaller, as also its monopolization of career paths for the literate. Also, Church control of intellectual speculation in the universities would have depended on the backing of a still powerful secular State. In the Eastern Empire the autonomy of the university school of Athens was ended, along with the rights of pagans to teach, by Justinian in 529. This is traditionally supposed to have closed the institution founded by Plato nine hundred years before, with its pagan scholars emigrating to more tolerant Persia under the patronage of the learned Great King Chosroes Anushirvan.19 This convenient and symbolic break with Ancient humanism and tolerance, at the hands of the belligerently Orthodox Justinian, may be an exaggeration. But Justinian seems to have been as keen to destroy incorrect thought as Stalin or Mao, though in his opinion no doubt it was his godly duty. Poor evidence makes it unclear exactly how much postsecondary teaching by acceptable Christian scholars survived in post-529 Constantinople, or even in Athens. Crucially, Procopius seems to have expected to be well read by an Empire-wide literary elite but evidence of scholarly activity crumbles even for Constantinople after 600, possibly due to the wars for survival. In Heraclius’ time, local Greek took over as the ‘lingua franca’ at Court.

  But when university teaching of Classical philosophy revived in ninth century Constantinople it was subject to constant intolerant Church interference, the pagan philosophers being regarded with extreme suspicion. Careful scholars had to genuflect before the requirements of Christian orthodoxy and make it clear that they did not accept the ancients’ religious beliefs, even if (like Michael Psellus in the 1040s) they had close Imperial connections and patronage.20 This greatest of Byzantine ‘revivalist’ enthusiasts for Greek philosophy had to be careful of Church hostility, and found it prudent when Imperial support waned to retire to a
monastery as reassurance of his orthodoxy. Emperors were to back the Church against undesirable philosophers of dubious orthodoxy, e.g. John Italus in the 1080s, who was put on trial amidst public demonstrations of hatred.21 Notably the term ‘Hellene’, with its ancient Greek cultural and religious connotations, was not back in usage in Eastern Roman culture until the fourteenth century, and even then Platonist enthusiast George Plethon could not teach in Constantinople. Ironically, he settled near ancient Sparta at the local Imperial appanage capital, Mistra. The same difficulties for unorthodox thought could have occurred in the West.

  The continuation of peace and settled conditions across Northern Europe and the presence of an urban civilization as a market for produce would have stimulated agriculture, though the problems of bad weather and disease would have held it back. The existence of large aristocratic estates under the late Empire would have continued, with the peasantry as ‘coloni’ rather than feudal serfs but equally subordinate to their masters; freer communities would have had a better chance to develop in newly-acquired territory e.g. the north-east German/Polish plains and Denmark, or maybe Ireland. The optimal climatic conditions of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries thus could well have led to a population explosion in the prosperous Western Empire and the need for new acquisitions of territory, with secular knowledge of land management and agriculture surviving from the classical world. As a result of debateable numbers of Germanic warriors and their dependants not having been able to migrate west of the Rhine or into Britain from 406, there would have been more physical pressure on the land in Germany with the probable destruction of forests and settling of farms on a wider scale than really occurred in the ‘Dark Ages’. Pressure for new lands in the East would have been likely by about 1200.