The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization
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THE FALL OF ROME AND THE END OF CIVILIZATION
Bryan Ward-Perkins teaches History at Trinity College, Oxford. Born and brought up in Rome, he has excavated extensively in Italy, primarily sites of the immediately post-Roman period. His principal interests are in combining historical and archaeological evidence, and in understanding the transition from Roman to post-Roman times. A joint editor of The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. XIV, his previous publications include From Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages, also published by Oxford University Press.
THE FALL OF ROME
AND THE END OF CIVILIZATION
BRYAN WARD-PERKINS
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6DP
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PREFACE
This book has taken an unconscionable time to write; but, as a result, it has had the benefit of being discussed with a large number of colleagues, and of being tried out in part on many different audiences in Britain and abroad. I thank all these audiences and colleagues, who are too many to name, for their advice and encouragement. I also thank the very many students at Oxford, who, over the years, have helped make my thinking clearer and more direct. The career structure and funding of universities in the UK currently strongly discourages academics and faculties from putting any investment into teaching—there are no career or financial rewards in it. This is a great pity, because, in the Humanities at least, it is the need to engage in dialogue, and to make things logical and clear, that is the primary defence against obscurantism and abstraction.
I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Alison Cooley, Andrew Gillett, Peter Heather, and Chris Wickham, for reading and commenting in detail on parts of the text, and, above all, to Simon Loseby, who has read it all in one draft or another and provided invaluable criticism and encouragement. I have not followed all their various suggestions, and we disagree on certain issues, but there is no doubt that this book would have been much the worse without their contribution.
The first half of this book, on the fall of the western empire, was researched and largely written while I held a Visiting Fellowship at the Humanities Research Centre in Canberra; this was a wonderful experience, teaching me many things and providing the perfect environment in which to write and think.
Katharine Reeve was my editor at OUP, and if this book is at all readable it is very much her doing. To work with a first-class editor has been a painful but deeply rewarding experience. She made me prune many of the subordinate clauses and qualifications that scholars love; and above all forced me to say what I really mean, rather than hint at it through delphic academic utterances. The book also benefited greatly from the very helpful comments of two anonymous readers for OUP, and from the Press’ highly professional production team. Working with OUP has been a real pleasure.
My main debt inevitably is to my family, who have put up with this book for much longer than should have been necessary, and above all to Kate, who has been endlessly encouraging, a constructive critic of my prose, and ever-helpful over difficult points.
Finally I would like to record my heartfelt gratitude to my friend Simon Irvine, who always believed I would write this book, and to the three men who, at different stages of my education, taught me a profound respect and love of History, David Birt, Mark Stephenson, and the late Karl Leyser.
Bryan Ward-Perkins
20 January 2005
CONTENTS
I. Did Rome Ever Fall?
PART ONE: THE FALL OF ROME
II. The Horrors of War
III. The Road to Defeat
IV. Living under the New Masters
PART TWO: THE END OF A CIVILIZATION
V. The Disappearance of Comfort
VI. Why the Demise of Comfort?
VII. The Death of a Civilization?
VIII. All for the Best in the Best of All Possible Worlds?
Appendix: From Potsherds to People
Chronology
Notes
Bibliography
Picture List
Index
1.1 London in ruins, as imagined by Gustave Doré in 1873. A New Zealander, scion of a civilization of the future, is drawing the remains of the long-dead city.
I
DID ROME EVER FALL?
ON AN OCTOBER evening in 1764, after some intoxicating days visiting the remains of ancient Rome, Edward Gibbon ‘sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol’, and resolved to write a history of the city’s decline and fall.1 The grandeur of ancient Rome, and the melancholy of its ruins, had awoken his curiosity and imagination, and had planted the seed for his great historical endeavour. Gibbon’s fascination with the dissolution of a world that seemed quite literally set in stone is not surprising—deep within the European psyche lies an anxiety that, if ancient Rome could fall, so too can the proudest of modern civilizations (Fig. 1.1).
In Gibbon’s day, and until very recently, few people questioned age-old certainties about the passing of the ancient world—namely, that a high point of human achievement, the civilization of Greece and Rome, was destroyed in the West by hostile invasions during the fifth century. Invaders, whom the Romans called quite simply ‘the barbarians’ and whom modern scholars have termed more sympathetically ‘the Germanic peoples’, crossed into the empire over the Rhine and Danube frontiers, beginning a process that was to lead to the dissolution not only of the Roman political structure, but also of the Roman way of life.
The first people to enter the empire in force were Goths, who in 376 crossed the Danube, fleeing from the nomadic Huns who had recently appe
ared on the Eurasian steppes. Initially the Goths threatened only the eastern half of the Roman empire (rule at the time being divided between two co-emperors, one resident in the western provinces, the other in the East (see front end paper)). Two years later, in 378, they inflicted a bloody defeat on the empire’s eastern army at the battle of Hadrianopolis, modern Edirne in Turkey, near the border with Bulgaria. In 401, however, it was the turn of the West to suffer invasion, when a large army of Goths left the Balkans and entered northern Italy. This began a period of great difficulty for the western empire, seriously exacerbated at the very end of 406, when three tribes—the Vandals, Sueves, and Alans—crossed the Rhine into Gaul. Thereafter there were always Germanic armies within the borders of the western empire, gradually acquiring more and more power and territory—the Vandals, for instance, were able to cross the Straits of Gibraltar in 429, and by 439 had captured the capital of Roman Africa.
In 476, seventy-five years after the Goths had first entered Italy, the last Roman emperor resident in the West, the young and aptly named Romulus Augustulus (Romulus ‘the little emperor’), was deposed and sent into retirement. The West was now ruled by independent Germanic kings (see back end paper). By contrast, the eastern Roman empire (which we often call the ‘Byzantine empire’) did not fall, despite pressure from the Goths, and later from the Huns. Indeed, in the 530s the eastern emperor Justinian was strong enough to intervene in the Germanic West, capturing the Vandals’ African kingdom in 533 and starting a war of conquest of the Ostrogoths’ Italian kingdom two years later, in 535. Only in 1453 did the Byzantine empire finally disappear, when its capital and last bastion, Constantinople, fell to the Turkish army of Mehmed ‘the Conqueror’.
According to the conventional view of things, the military and political disintegration of Roman power in the West precipitated the end of a civilization. Ancient sophistication died, leaving the western world in the grip of a ‘Dark Age’ of material and intellectual poverty, out of which it was only slowly to emerge. Gibbon’s contemporary, the Scottish historian William Robertson, expressed this view in a particularly forceful manner in 1770, but his words evoke an image of the ‘Dark Ages’ that has had very wide currency:
In less than a century after the barbarian nations settled in their new conquests, almost all the effects of the knowledge and civility, which the Romans had spread through Europe, disappeared. Not only the arts of elegance, which minister to luxury, and are supported by it, but many of the useful arts, without which life can scarcely be contemplated as comfortable, were neglected or lost.2
In other words, with the fall of the empire, Art, Philosophy, and decent drains all vanished from the West.
I was born and brought up in Rome, the heart of the empire, surrounded by the same ruins of past greatness that had moved Gibbon, and my father was a classical archaeologist whose main interest was the remarkable technical and architectural achievements of the Romans. The essential outlines of Robertson’s view have therefore always come naturally to me. From early youth I have known that the ancient Romans built things on a scale and with a technical expertise that could only be dreamed of for centuries after the fall of the empire. Ancient Rome had eleven aqueducts, bringing water to the city through channels up to 59 miles long (which is roughly the distance from Oxford to London), sometimes on arches 100 feet high; and sixteen of the massive columns that form the portico of the Pantheon are monoliths, each 46 feet high, laboriously extracted from a quarry high up in the eastern desert of Egypt, manhandled down to the Nile, and brought hundreds of miles by water to the empire’s capital. It is very difficult not to be impressed by achievements like these, particularly when one finds them replicated, on a smaller and more human scale, throughout the provinces of the empire. Pompeii—with its paved streets, raised pavements, public baths, and regularly spaced water fountains—and the hundreds of others cities of the Roman world that were like it, in their own quiet way make an even deeper impression than the overblown grandeur that was Rome.
Despite my upbringing, I have never much liked the ancient Romans—to me they too often seem self-important and self-satisfied—and I have much more sympathy for the chaotic and difficult world of post-Roman times. On the other hand, it has always seemed self-evident that the Romans were able to do remarkable things, which, after the fall of the empire, could not be done again for many hundreds of years.
Banishing Catastrophe
It has therefore come as a surprise to me to find a much more comfortable vision of the end of empire spreading in recent years through the English-speaking world.3 The intellectual guru of this movement is a brilliant historian and stylist, Peter Brown, who published in 1971 The World of Late Antiquity. In it he defined a new period, ‘Late Antiquity’, beginning in around AD 200 and lasting right up to the eighth century, characterized, not by the dissolution of half the Roman empire, but by vibrant religious and cultural debate.4 As Brown himself subsequently wrote, he was able in his book to narrate the history of these centuries ‘without invoking an intervening catastrophe and without pausing, for a moment, to pay lip service to the widespread notion of decay’. ‘Decay’ was banished, and replaced by a ‘religious and cultural revolution’, beginning under the late empire and continuing long after it.5 This view has had a remarkable effect, particularly in the United States, where Brown now lives and works. A recent Guide to Late Antiquity, published by Harvard University Press, asks us ‘to treat the period between around 250 and 800 as a distinctive and quite decisive period of history that stands on its own’, rather than as ‘the story of the unravelling of a once glorious and “higher” state of civilization’.6 This is a bold challenge to the conventional view of darkening skies and gathering gloom as the empire dissolved.
The impact of this new thinking has, admittedly, been mixed. In particular, amongst the wider reading public a bleak post-Roman ‘Dark Age’ seems to be very much alive and well. Bernard Cornwell’s historical novels about this period are international best-sellers; the blurb on the back of The Winter King sets the grim but heroic scene: ‘In the Dark Ages a legendary warrior struggles to unite Britain …’. Arthur (for it is he) is a battle-hardened warlord, living in a wooden hall, in a Britain that is manly, sombre, and definitely decaying.7 At one point the remains of a half-ruined Roman mosaic pavement are further shattered, when dark-age warriors bang their spear ends on the floor to approve the decisions of their leaders.
However, amongst historians the impact of the new Late Antiquity has been marked—particularly on the way that the end of the Roman world is now packaged. There has been a sea change in the language used to describe post-Roman times. Words like ‘decline’ and ‘crisis’, which suggest problems at the end of the empire and which were quite usual into the 1970s, have largely disappeared from historians’ vocabularies, to be replaced by neutral terms, like ‘transition’, ‘change’, and ‘transformation’.8 For instance, a massive European-funded project of research into the period 300–800 chose as its title ‘The Transformation of the Roman World’.9 There is no hint here of ‘decline’, ‘fall’, or ‘crisis’, nor even of any kind of ‘end’ to the Roman world. ‘Transformation’ suggests that Rome lived on, though gradually metamorphosed into a different, but not necessarily inferior, form. The image is of a lively organism evolving to meet new circumstances. It is a long way from the traditional view, in which catastrophe destroys the magnificent Roman dinosaur, but leaves a few tiny dark-age mammals alive, to evolve very slowly over the coming centuries into the sophisticated creatures of the Renaissance.
Accommodating the Barbarians
Along a parallel route, leading in essentially the same direction, some historians in recent decades have also questioned the entire premiss that the dissolution of the Roman empire in the West was caused by hostile and violent invasion. Just as ‘transformation’ has become the buzzword for cultural change in this period, so ‘accommodation’ is now the fashionable word to explain how peoples from outside the empire ca
me to live within it and rule it.
Here too old certainties are being challenged. According to the traditional account, the West was, quite simply, overrun by hostile ‘waves’ of Germanic peoples (Fig. 1.2).10 The long-term effects of these invasions have, admittedly, been presented in very different ways, depending largely on the individual historian’s nationality and perspective. For some, particularly in the Latin countries of Europe, the invasions were entirely destructive (Fig. 1.3). For others, however, they brought an infusion of new and freedom-loving Germanic blood into a decadent empire—witness, for instance, the words of the eighteenth-century German philosopher Herder: ‘Expiring Rome lay for centuries on her deathbed … a deathbed extending over the whole World … which could … render her no assistance, but that of accelerating her death. Barbarians came to perform this office; northern giants, to whom the enervated Romans appeared dwarfs; they ravaged Rome, and infused new life into expiring Italy.’11
But, while there has always been a lively debate about the long-term consequences of the invasions, until recently very few have seriously questioned the violence and disruption of the Germanic takeover of power.12 Indeed, for some, a good bloodletting was a decidedly purgative experience. In a book written for children, the nineteenth-century English historian Edward Freeman robustly defended the brutality with which his own Anglo-Saxon ancestors had eliminated their rivals the Romano-Britons, the ancestors of the Welsh: ‘it has turned out much better in the end that our forefathers did thus kill or drive out nearly all the people whom they found in the land … [since otherwise] I cannot think that we should ever have been so great and free a people as we have been for many ages.’13 While the children of Victorian England may have enjoyed Freeman’s prose, one wonders what was made of these sentiments in Wales.