Download PDF | Peter Heather - The Fall of the Roman Empire A New History of Rome and the Barbarians.
650 Pages
INTRODUCTION
THE ROMAN EMPIRE was the largest state western Eurasia has ever known. For over four hundred years it stretched from Hadrian’s Wall to the River Euphrates, transforming the lives of all the inhabitants within its frontiers and dominating landscapes and peoples for hundreds of kilometres beyond. Interconnected fortress systems, strategic road networks and professional, highly trained armies both symbolized and ensured this domination, and Roman forces were not averse to massacring any neighbour who stepped out of line. The opening scenes of the 2000 blockbuster Gladiator are based on the victories of Marcus Aurelius over the Marcomanni, a Germanic tribe of south-central Europe, in the third quarter of the second century. Two hundred years later, the Romans were still at it. In 357, 12,000 of the emperor Julian’s Romans routed an army of 30,000 Alamanni at the battle of Strasbourg.
But within 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, at the battle of Hadrianople. On 4 September 476, one hundred years after the Goths crossed the Danube, the last Roman emperor in the west, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed, and it was the descendants of those Gothic refugees who provided the military core of one of the main successor states to the Empire: the Visigothic kingdom. This kingdom of south-western France and Spain was only one of several, all based on the military power of immigrant outsiders, that emerges from the ruins of Roman Europe. The fall of Rome, and with it the western half of the Empire, constitutes one of the formative revolutions of European history, and has traditionally been seen as heralding the end of the ancient world and the start of the Middle Ages. Like the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution, it changed the world for ever.
Starting with Gibbon’s multivolume epic published during 1776-88, there have been the odd hundred or two studies devoted to the subject, or to particular aspects of it, with as yet no sign of let-up. In the 1990s, the European Science Foundation funded a five-year project to investigate ‘The Transformation of the Roman World’, and its volumes continue to appear. As has always been the case, historians fall a long way short of general agreement, either on the big issues or — where you might more expect it — on matters of detail. Argument has always focused on what it was, exactly, that caused Rome to fall. Since they provided the military muscle behind the new kingdoms, armed outsiders — ‘barbarians’ — obviously had something to do with it. But historians both before and after Gibbon have felt that a power as great as Rome could not have been brought low by illiterates whose culture — political, social, economic, artistic — did not even begin to rival the sometimes astonishingly precocious levels of the Roman world. The Romans had central heating, a form of banking based on capitalist principles, weapons factories, even spin-doctors, whereas the barbarians were simple agriculturalists with a penchant for decorative safety-pins.t So while the barbarians had something to do with it, they couldn’t really have caused the fall of the Empire. Surely the barbarians merely took advantage of more fundamental problems rife within the Roman world.
But did they? This book will reopen one of history’s greatest mysteries: the strange death of Roman Europe.
My justifications for doing so are both general and specific. Generally, the period from about AD 300-600, covering the fall of the western Empire and the creation of its early medieval successor kingdoms, has been the subject of some of the most innovative historical scholarship of the last forty years. Traditionally, the era was a black hole, a no man’s land between ancient and medieval history, studied properly in neither. Since the 1960s, huge leaps have been made in our understanding of the many facets of this period, rechristened ‘late antiquity’. Many of these discoveries are now common knowledge among specialists, but have yet to feed through to the
general public, whose expectations (judging, at least, by the prejudices with which some of my students still come to the subject) are still conditioned by older traditions stretching back to Gibbon. In the last forty years, teachers and students have for the first time made the acquaintance of a later Roman Empire that was not on the brink of social, economic and moral collapse, and a world beyond its frontiers that was not characterized by simple, unchanging barbarism. Two generations of scholarship since the Second World War have revolutionized our understanding both of the Roman Empire and of the wider world that the Romans knew as barbaricum, ‘the land of the barbarians’. This book draws heavily upon that scholarship.
MORE SPECIFICALLY, THE enthusiastic ‘discovery’ of late antiquity occurred in an intellectual environment in which historians of all periods were realizing that there was much more to history than the economics, high politics, war and diplomacy that had been its traditional stock-in-trade. Late antiquity, with its wealth of written and archaeological sources, generated not least by the highly sophisticated literary culture typical of educated Roman elites, has proved a fruitful area for research in many disciplines: gender and cultural history, and the history of popular belief, for instance. It has also provided a rich vein for study in tune with recent trends in historical writing which have sought to challenge the unspoken prejudices which inform the ‘great narratives’ of traditional history. The image of the ‘civilized’ but ever declining Romans implacably at war with ‘barbarian’ outsiders is a prime example of one such narrative at work. Recent thinking has rightly tried to escape the clutches of this tradition, pinpointing the many instances that our sources provide of barbarian—Roman cooperation and nonviolent interaction. An emphasis on reading individual texts with a view to understanding the ideological visions of the world that underlie them has also had a dramatic impact. This type of interpretation requires historians to treat ancient authors, not as sources of fact, but rather like second-hand-car salesmen whom they would do well to approach with a healthy caution.
The intellectual impact of these trends on the study of late antiquity has been electric, but has tended towards fragmentation, leading scholars away from synthesis and into detailed studies of particular aspects. They have also tended to turn away from attempts to reconstruct a narrative of
what actually happened, to concentrate on how individuals and sources perceived and represented what happened. In the last decade or so pioneering monographs have appeared on many relevant topics and on individual authors, but there has been no attempt at a general overview of Roman collapse.2 I have no doubt that this kind of more intense study of the constituent parts of the subject was, and remains, absolutely necessary.2 But detailed reinterpretations of particular aspects of a period can have implications for the understanding of the whole, and it is time, in my view, to start putting the much-better-understood fragments back together and focusing on what they tell us about the fall of Rome itself.4 Readers will judge for themselves whether this approach is well founded.
I will also be arguing that it is vitally important not to lose sight of narrative in the midst of the current emphasis on ideology and perception, much of it inspired by recent trends in literary criticism. Some scholars have even been led to doubt whether it is possible, given the nature of our sources, to get past these sources’ representations of reality to ‘actual events’. Sometimes, it quite clearly isn’t. I would argue, however, that the kinds of intellectual process suitable for literary criticism are not always adequate for historical studies. The tools of literary analysis are hugely valuable when applied to individual sources, but a legal analogy, it seems to me, is more appropriate to the overall enterprise of history. All of our sources are witnesses, many trying to advocate, for their own reasons, a particular view of events, but what they are describing are not, or not all the time, constructs of their authors’ imaginations, in the way that literary texts are. History, like the legal system, does have measurably burgled property and actual dead bodies to deal with, even if an understanding of these phenomena has to be built from ideologically constructed sources. The Roman Empire encompassed many ideologies, as will emerge, and promoted a highly particular way of looking at the world. But it also employed bureaucracies, passed laws, collected taxes and trained armies. And in the course of the fifth century, the western half of the Roman Empire, along with all the structures and procedures it had maintained over centuries, ceased to exist, leaving behind the corpse that lies at the heart of this book.
What follows is an attempt, through narrative reconstruction, to understand this huge revolution in European history in a way that does justice to the wealth of sophisticated scholarship generated in recent years. My expertise is as much late Roman as it is ‘barbarian’. My teaching and specialist publications have dealt pretty much equally with both sides of the frontier, and focus on the later fourth and fifth centuries. And while I draw on other people’s work, the particular synthesis that characterizes this book is of course my own, as are some of the key ideas and observations upon which it is based.
BEYOND RECONSTRUCTING as best I can the history of Rome’s fall, and presenting the particular interpretation of it that I find convincing, I have one further aim for this book. Understanding the past is always a detective story. To get to grips with what was actually going on, the reader is invited to become a member of the jury — to extend the legal analogy — to become involved in the process of evaluating and synthesizing the different kinds of evidence that will be presented. The structure of the book encourages this approach. It is not simply a narrative of the collapse of the western Empire in the fifth century, but also an analytical exploration. Part One, therefore, is devoted to building up a picture of the state of the Empire and its European neighbours in the later fourth century. Without thus setting the scene, a real understanding of the subsequent collapse would be impossible. Analysis is also part and parcel of the more narrative chapters of Parts Two and Three; and throughout the book I have tried to involve the reader fully in the detective work, not simply casting him or her as the recipient of oracular answers. In the same spirit, where there are loose ends, where the trail disappears, as occasionally happens, I do not attempt to disguise it. One of the main reasons I have chosen to work on the middle years of the first millennium — apart from a fascination for ancient remains engendered in me by my mother during many childhood visits to Roman villas, baths and fortresses — is the type of intellectual challenge it poses. I love puzzles, and so much of the evidence is either missing, or comes enciphered in the comlicated codes of Roman literary genres (one of the reasons why postmodernist lines of critique are so helpful in this field), that very little is ever straightforward. For some, this is simply annoying and detracts from what would otherwise be a very interesting period. For others, myself included, it is part of the thrill, and I can always tell from their instinctive response to shortage of evidence whether or not my students belong among nature’s first-millennialists.
While telling the story — and it is quite a story — I also want to introduce the reader to the processes involved in its generation, therefore, and to open up the main bodies of available evidence. With this end firmly in mind, I tell as much of the story as possible, directly and indirectly, in the words of eyewitnesses, the individuals caught up in the maelstrom of events that would transform European history for ever. There are many more of these, and of a wider variety, than you might expect. Decoded, their writings make the collapse of the western Empire one of the most vividly documented eras in ancient history.
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