On the other hand, the evidence for the very widespread use of literacy, and, in particular, for its trivial use, which is such a striking feature of Roman times, is far less apparent in the centuries that followed the fall of the empire. The numerous stamps, seals, and painted or scratched inscriptions that had characterized the commercial and military life of the Roman world seem to disappear almost completely. The need to label and stamp large quantities of commercial goods appears to have evaporated, presumably because production and distribution were now much simpler and less extensive than they had been before. There are some rare stamped tiles known from the seventh and eighth centuries; but the wording of their inscriptions suggests that they were added to enhance their patrons’ prestige, rather than as a means of keeping track of production.34 Similarly, the disappearance of the professional army, maintained by a complex system of supply, brought to an end the thousands upon thousands of military inscriptions, and that very striking feature of Roman life, an army that was even more widely literate than the society that spawned it.
Most interesting of all is the almost complete disappearance of casual graffiti, of the kind so widely found in the Roman period. Graffiti are known from the fifth to ninth centuries, as the example carved by Turo shows. But these scratched inscriptions are primarily semi-formal and votive records of pilgrims’ visits to shrines such as S. Michele sul Gargano and the catacombs around Rome. Some of the pilgrims undoubtedly wrote their own names (including a few visitors from the northern world to the Gargano, who wrote in runes), but others had their names carved by people practised in writing into stone or plaster.35 Although rightly described as ‘graffiti’, in that they are lightly carved and unimpressive in appearance, these pilgrimage records had a much more formal intent than Phoebus’ casual account of his visit to a Pompeian brothel.
Of course, we have no early medieval Pompeii that would allow us to make a true and fair comparison of levels of casual secular literacy between Roman and post-Roman times. But we do have plenty of domestic objects from both periods, and these are a rich source of scratched letters and names in the Roman period, as well as of occasional messages (like those we have seen on tiles from Britain). In the early Middle Ages, domestic objects are almost always mute.36 They do very occasionally have names carved or scratched on them, but these are almost invariably very neat, suggesting that they have been applied with some care, perhaps even by a specialist writer, rather than roughly scratched by the owners themselves.37 There is no group of finds from the post-Roman centuries that remotely compares with the 400 graffiti, mainly scratched initials, on the bottoms of pots from a Roman fort in Germany, which were almost certainly added by the soldiers themselves, in order to identify their individual vessels.38
In a much simpler world, the urgent need to read and write declined, and with it went the social pressure on the secular elite to be literate. Widespread literacy in the post-Roman West definitely became confined to the clergy. A detailed analysis of almost 1,000 subscribers to charters from eighth-century Italy has shown that just under a third of witnesses were able to sign their own names, the remainder making only a mark (identified as theirs by the charter’s scribe). But the large majority of those who signed (71 per cent) were clergy. Amongst the 633 lay subscribers, only 93, or 14 per cent, wrote their own name. Since witnesses to charters were generally drawn from the ranks of the ‘important’ people of local society, and since the ability to write one’s name does not require a profound grasp of literary skills, this figure suggests that even basic literacy was a very rare phenomenon amongst the laity as a whole.39
It is a striking fact, and a major contrast with Roman times, that even great rulers could be illiterate in the early Middle Ages. Many were not—the Frankish king Chilperic (561–84) and the Visigothic king Sisebut (612–21) both tried their hand at Latin poetry, and the latter also wrote a life of Saint Desiderius of Vienne.40 But others are known to have lacked even the most basic facility with the written word. Einhard, the biographer of Charlemagne, tells us of the emperor’s valiant efforts to master his letters in later life—his royal father had apparently not considered writing to be an essential part of a Frankish prince’s education. According to Einhard, Charlemagne kept writing tablets under the pillows of his bed, so that he could practise writing during quiet moments; but even Einhard admits that this attempt at self-improvement was more of a pious hope than a great success.41
Was this the End of a Civilization?
The concept of the ‘end of a civilization’ has gone profoundly out of fashion, for reasons I shall examine in the final chapter. ‘Civilization’ is a word that people now prefer not to use. Certainly, if it is charged with any sense of moral superiority, the concept is best avoided. Twentieth-century experience has taught us that highly sophisticated and cultured people are capable of the most heartless and ‘uncivilized’ behaviour, often supported in this by a belief in their own superiority. The camp commandant, relaxing to the music of Mozart after a hard day’s work slaughtering innocent people, has indeed entered the mythology of modern times. Even a cursory look at the Roman world provides plenty of evidence of similar attitudes. The Romans’ certainty of their superiority over the barbarians justified merciless cruelty in defence of the ‘civilized’ world (Figs. 2.3 and 2.4, at pp. 26 and 27), and the cultivated aristocrat Symmachus saw the tragic and heroic suicide of his Saxon gladiators only as an irritant sent to try him (p. 24).
However, ‘civilization’ can also be used as a shorthand term for ‘complex societies and what they produce’ (as in the ‘civilizations’ of ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia). It is this sense that I have been exploring in this book, because it is my belief that modern scholars have thrown this particular baby out with the bath-water of moral judgement. In wanting to depict the post-Roman centuries as ‘equal’ to those of Roman times, they have ignored the extraordinary and fascinating decline in complexity that occurred at the end of the empire.
Although high culture was also affected, I have deliberately focused on people in the middle and lower ranks of society, and on the access that they had to sophisticated tools and products, such as writing and good-quality pottery. As we have seen, this access was widespread and impressive in the Roman period, and very restricted thereafter. In this sense, ancient ‘civilization’ came to an end in the West with the fall of the empire. Of course, what the ancients had done with their sophisticated ‘civilization’ was as varied, and often as questionable, as our own behaviour. It enabled a peasant near Luna to eat off a Campanian dinner plate, but it also built a mountain of rubbish at Monte Testaccio; it allowed a slave in Britain to express his wish for freedom, but it also enabled a Pompeian perfume-seller to record a particularly good fuck. Such things, as much as a multitude of books and impressive buildings, are the characteristics of a complex society, or, if one prefers, of a ‘civilization’.
VIII
ALL FOR THE BEST IN THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS?
IF THE WEST was overrun by violent invasion during the fifth century, and if the sophisticated civilization of the ancient world collapsed over the following centuries, how is it that such radically different, and rosier, views have recently been propounded? Why is this key period currently being interpreted in such a novel way?1
The Home of Late Antiquity
In part it is a question of perspective, and, as I have freely admitted, my own view has certainly been conditioned by a very ‘Roman’ upbringing and early experience. In Italy, the primacy of ancient civilization is seldom doubted, and a traditional view of the end of the Roman world is very much alive. Most Italians are with me in remaining highly sceptical about a peaceful ‘accommodation’ of the barbarians, and the ‘transformation’ of the Roman world into something new and equally sophisticated.2 The idea that the Germanic incomers were peaceful immigrants, who did no harm, has not caught on.
In parts of Italy, indeed, some very simplistic and wholly negative views of the barbarian conquests
are alive and well. The Last Legion, written by a professor of Classical Archaeology in Milan, is a best-selling popular novel set in the late fifth century. Its Romans are, almost to a man and woman, noble, brave, and pure—they fight, against impossible odds, to defend the last emperor and to uphold the values of Rome’s glory days. At one point the band of heroes, Christians and pagans alike, lift their voices in the Carmen Saeculare, Horace’s great hymn to the gods and to the glory of Rome. The barbarians, by contrast, are wreckers, taking on Roman ways only if they think that this will help them in their mission to subdue the Romans; they are brutal and cruel, consume untold quantities of bad meat and beer, and have bits of food stuck in their beards.3 I suspect that this view, by an author who lives in Bologna, owes as much to his experience of German and British tourists in the pizzerie of Rimini as it does to the fifth century.
Unsurprisingly, it is in northern Europe and in North America that the idea of the invaders as peaceable immigrants has its home. It is scholars from Austria and Germany, from England, and from Scandinavia who dominate the recent volumes, sponsored by the European Science Foundation, that examine the fifth-century settlements and depict them as essentially undisruptive. English and French were the official languages of this project, but I am told that the discussions that produced these particular volumes occasionally veered into German, the obvious common language of the participants.
The historians who have argued for a new and rosy Late Antiquity are primarily North Americans, or Europeans based in the USA, and they have shifted their focus right out of the western Roman empire. Much of the evidence that sustains the new and upbeat Late Antiquity is rooted firmly in the eastern Mediterranean, where, as we have seen, there is good evidence for prosperity through the fifth and sixth centuries, and indeed into the eighth in the Levant. I did a rough tally of the short entries in the recent American Guide to Late Antiquity and found 183 entries concerned with people, places, and things that were specifically eastern, and only 62, some 25 per cent, western. In the new Late Antiquity, parts of the ancient world that were once considered marginal have become central, and some western areas, which were once considered important, have dropped out of sight. There are, for instance, in this Guide, no entries for the Franks or Visigoths, the two peoples who dominated sixth- and seventh-century continental Europe, and none for the Britons and Anglo-Saxons.
There is a great deal that is positive in this approach. It is very healthy to be reminded that the peoples of Britain might not merit an entry in a handbook covering the third to eighth centuries, while the culture of the East was flourishing into the later sixth century and beyond. The new Late Antiquity is in part a deliberate corrective to a previous bias, which assumed that the entire Roman world declined in the fifth century, because this is what happened in the West. Relocating the centre of the world in the fourth to eighth centuries to Egypt, the Levant, and Persia is a stimulating challenge to our mental framework and cultural expectations.
There is, however, an obvious problem in imposing, on the basis of eastern evidence, a flourishing Late Antiquity on the whole of the late Roman and post-Roman worlds. In the ‘bad old days’ western decline at the end of Antiquity was imposed on the eastern provinces. Now, instead of all the different regions of the empire being allowed to float free (some flourishing in the fifth to eighth centuries, others not), a new and equally distorting template is being imposed westwards. A long and rosy Late Antiquity, reaching even to AD 800, may well be an interesting and constructive way of examining the history of the Levant; but it seriously distorts the history of the West after about 400, and that of the Aegean region after around 600. For these areas, the imposition of a single and dynamic period, ‘Late Antiquity’, to cover the years between 250 and 800 has involved ignoring dramatic change and discontinuity in political, administrative, military, social, and economic life.4
The only way that ‘Late Antiquity’ can work as a unit for the whole Roman world, and a positive one at that, is by a concentration on the one ‘positive’ change that did impact on the entire post-Roman world and the whole period between 250 and 800: the spread, and momentous triumph, over the older religions of Rome and Persia, of two great monotheistic cults, Christianity and Islam. The new Late Antiquity has indeed been built around these developments and the remarkable changes that they brought about in attitudes towards many central aspects of the human condition, such as sexuality, death, and the family. Modern Late Antiquity is primarily a spiritual and mental world, almost to the exclusion of the secular and material one. Until fairly recently it was institutional, military, and economic history that dominated historians’ views of the fourth to seventh centuries.5 Quite the reverse is now the case, at least in the USA. Of the thirty-six volumes so far published by the University of California Press in a series entitled ‘The Transformation of the Classical Heritage’, thirty discuss the world of the mind and spirit (primarily different aspects of Christian thought and practice); only five or six cover more secular topics (such as politics and administration); and none focuses on the details of material life.6
In some ways what we see in the new Late Antiquity is a return, in a much more sophisticated and less sectarian form, to an older interpretation of the post-Roman centuries as an age of the spirit, even an ‘Age of Faith’. For instance, the opinion of the ‘Dark Ages’ expressed in 1932 by the English Catholic writer Christopher Dawson has close echoes in recent scholarship, although his religious enthusiasm and affiliation are much more transparent than those of most present-day historians:
To the secular historian the early Middle Ages must inevitably still appear as the Dark Ages, as ages of barbarism, without secular culture or literature, given up to unintelligible disputes on incomprehensible dogmas … But to the Catholic they are not dark as much as ages of dawn, for they witnessed the conversion of the West, the foundation of Christian civilisation, and the creation of Christian art and Catholic liturgy. Above all, they were the Age of the Monks …7
A look at the short entries in the recent American Guide is again very instructive. If we seek the peoples of the late antique world, we have already found Visigoths, Franks, Britons, and Anglo-Saxons to be absent. But ‘Demons’ and ‘Angels’ both get entries; just as there is an entry for ‘Hell’, and separate ones for ‘Heaven’ and ‘Paradise’. Secular officials get short shrift, whereas a host of different heretics and ascetics get individual entries. I looked in vain for one of the most powerful figures in late Roman politics and administration, the ‘Praetorian Prefect’, but found nothing between the entries for ‘Pornography’ and ‘Prayer’. As with the geographical coverage, this new emphasis is a useful corrective to a previous interest in solidly administrative, political, and economic topics—but, again, perhaps it has got a little out of hand. The new Late Antiquity has opened up research into a mental and spiritual world that is fascinating and important; but most people in the past, like people today, spent the majority of their lives firmly in the material world, affected less by religious change than by their standard of living.
The Euro-Barbarian
The changing perspectives of scholarship are always shaped in part by wider developments in modern society. There is inevitably a close connection between the way we view our own world and the way we interpret the past. For instance, there is certainly a link between interpretations of the Germanic invaders as primarily peaceful, and the remarkable (and deserved) success that modern Germany has had at constructing a new and positive identity within Europe, after the disastrous Nazi years. Images of the fifth-century Germanic peoples and their settlement in the western empire have changed dramatically since the Second World War, as ideas about modern Germans and their role in the new Europe have altered.
At the time of the Nazi threat and in the immediate aftermath of the war, the fifth-century invaders were, not unnaturally, viewed by most Europeans in a very bleak light. In the 1930s, the English medievalist Eileen Power wrote an essay about the late Roman e
mpire and its fall. It is full of foreboding, and presents a very straightforward contrast between Germanic barbarism, and the civilized Roman world, which it threatened and eventually overran:
The battle sagas of the [Germanic] race, which have all but disappeared or have survived only as legends worked up in a later age; the few rude laws which were needed to regulate personal relationships, this was hardly civilization in the Roman sense…. Rome and the barbarians were … not only protagonists but two different attitudes to life, civilization and barbarism.8
In the immediate post-war period, two distinguished French scholars, André Piganiol and Pierre Courcelle, independently published books about the fall of the West, which were heavily influenced by the German invasion of France in 1940 and the occupation that followed. Piganiol laid responsibility for the destruction of a flourishing Christian empire at the door of Germanic tribes that, according to him, had achieved the remarkable feat of living for centuries on Rome’s frontiers ‘without becoming civilized’. He closed his book with two memorable sentences: ‘Roman civilization did not pass peacefully away. It was assassinated.’9 Courcelle meanwhile drew overt parallels between France’s recent past and the fifth-century experience of barbarian invasion, and used arguments and language that are explicitly and richly anti-Germanic: the invaders were ‘barbares’, ‘ennemies’, ‘envahisseurs’, ‘hordes’, and ‘pillards’; their passage through the empire was marked by ‘incendies’, ‘ravages’, ‘sacs’, ‘prisonniers’, and ‘massacres’; they left behind them ‘ruines désertes’ and ‘régions dévastées’.10 Only the Franks, ancestors of the French, get a better write-up: Courcelle’s final chapter tells of how, eventually, they adopted Catholicism and other Roman ways, and thereby paved the way for the achievements of Charlemagne.11
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