Clifford Ando | The Long Defeat: The Fall of the Roman Empire

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Clifford Ando, David B. and Clara E. Stern Professor; Professor of Classics, University of Chicago speaks at third lecture in our four-part series: Why Did Civilizations Collapse: Internal Decay or External Forces? The Long Defeat: The Fall of the Roman Empire in East and West.

The Roman Empire remains one of the world's longest lived polities. Its collapse has therefore endured as a great historical puzzle. Was it barbarians or internal decay? Or was Christianity to blame? The lecture will explore a range of theories and consider in detail why the two famous theories, those of St. Augustine and Edward Gibbon, have found so little favor.

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/alllie 📅︎︎ Jun 14 2019 🗫︎ replies
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The trouble, as I've sometimes said in this role with introducing somebody, reminds me, it reminds me of a rather famous writer whom I used to be acquainted with, who said that the problem with speaking in praise of somebody else is that you risk distracting valuable attention from yourself. So, in order to avoid that pitfall, let me begin by telling you that when I was in college, I went to a movie called "The Fall of the Roman Empire." And I know you're thinking, "Oh, surely, when you were in college, they did not have moving pictures." But they did. They did, and it was called "The Fall of the Roman Empire." And it began with Marcus Aurelius, standing with his back to the camera, conversing with his daughter, Debbie Aurelius, or something, also with her back to the camera. And they were standing in a dark evening in a dark forest in a windswept part of Germany. And Marcus Aurelius was saying Marcus Aurelius type, philosophical things about empire and how foreboding it all was. And then they both turned around and faced the camera. And Marcus Aurelius turned out to be Alec Guinness. And so we learned that this was a foreshadowing of Obi-Wan Kenobi and an empire of an entirely different sort. But when Aurelius's daughter turned around, she was the young and remarkable, especially when she turned around, Sophia Loren. So, today, fifty years later or so, half a century or so later, I find myself standing on the podium once again, introducing something on the fall of the Roman Empire. And this time, instead of the remarkable Sophia Loren, it's the remarkable Clifford Ando. Now, when I think about this, of course, it tends to confirm my hypothesis that at the level of individual experience, progress is a delusion. Nevertheless, I can tell you that although Clifford Ando is not remarkable in the same way as Sophia Loren he is remarkable, nevertheless. I have here his vita, and were I to share even a fraction of the detail of this with you, I would do more than risk distracting valuable attention from myself. The comparison would be so invidious that I would have to shrink from the platform in shame. So I will tell you only a little bit about what makes him remarkable. He is the author of, well, four published books, and according to this vita, there are three more in progress, I presume one with each hand and one with one of his feet, leaving the other free to hop over here from dinner and share some of his thoughts on the fall of the Roman Empire with them. He has held fellowships and received prizes from august institutions in many civilized countries, including France, and Germany, and Great Britain, and even California. Too numerous to mention, so I won't mention. He is an authority, both local and international, on Roman law, on Roman religion, and of course, what goes with both of those, Roman order. And he has written on many of these topics at more length than I can begin to tell you about. All of this has happened since he received his PhD from the University of Michigan, where by the way, I also received my PhD, in case your attention is wandering to tonight's speaker. He received it in 1996, and he is now, among other things, the David B. and Clara Stern Professor of Humanities, here, at the University of Chicago. And I take enormous pleasure in presenting to you the pleasure of hearing tonight's speaker, Clifford Ando. Thank you. [Applause] Well, thanks, man. I have absolutely no idea how to follow that up. It's a great, great pleasure to be back at the OI. I've spoken here, I think, three times before, and I'd have to say that, you know, speaking before the OI membership is just one of the distinct pleasures of having come here from California to find an, you know, an educated, intelligent, inquiring, occasionally aggressive audience outside, as it were, faculty meetings. It's just a, it's just a distinct pleasure. So, I'm very pleased to be here and to participate once again in the OI Membership Lecture Series. Can you fix the microphone? Thank you. But then I risk focusing on this the whole evening. So, what I'd like to do today is to talk to you briefly about the historiography on the fall of the Roman Empire, to talk to you a bit about how people have gone about explaining the fall of the Roman Empire. Before turning--so first, I will, I will open with a section which I talk ever so briefly to try and put in stark terms of what it was that fell, to try and basically be a map, to try and explain why it is that people are concerned with the fall of the Roman Empire. Before turning to a moment to talk about the diversity of explanations people have given, and for that matter why have people given so many different explanations to the fall of the Roman Empire, and why do they care? I will then ever so briefly talk about, as it were, a correlate, that is to say something like a recent disinterest, if not un-interest, in the problem of decline and fall. Before I will take up the question of: Have we got any accurate way of measuring what it was that fell? And for a brief moment, and I suppose it's just as well that the AI is co-sponsoring, I will talk ever so briefly about various kinds of indices, or measurements, that we might use to discuss the problem of decline and fall. How it is we might think that something like the collapse of a basically, super-ordinate political form might, in fact, have mattered. I mean, if you were to listen, if you were to compare the Roman Empire to a contemporary federal structure, and you were to imagine yourselves in the shoes of a contemporary member of the Tea Party, you might say that the collapse of the federal government would bring nothing but good to your lives. So then there's an open question, right? Would the citizens or residents of the various population groups of the Roman Empire, would they in fact have noticed? If very, very, very far away, perhaps on the German border, with effects echoing in Constantinople, the Roman Empire happen to have fall? Or would it have basically no meaning at the local level? Or might it in fact amount to an improvement? So the question is, what kinds of measurements might we have to assess this question? I will then finally, at last, turn to a problem, to a comparing of the situation of the Roman Empire in the third century to the situation of the Roman Empire in the fifth. As I will lay out then, in the third century, the Roman Empire suffered an immense number of attacks from beyond its borders. As it did once again in the fifth. And at a sort of structural level, the response of the Roman Empire in the third century bares many resemblances to the response, as it were, of the Roman Empire in the fifth. But the story of how the third century ended and the story of how the fifth century ended are, of course, extremely different. And, in conclusion, I'll try to offer some thoughts on why that happened. Although, given the number of slides I have, if we haven't got time for that, um, you know, I'll just I'll be very cruel and just leave you without explanation, we'll break to wine. I think, I was supposed to add that there's, there's a fee to collect the wine at the reception. You can only have a glass of wine if you hand in your new AIA membership application. This was something Petro was not authorized to disclose. But, um, okay. So, just as a brief illustration of the broadest possible kind. Oh. I think I'm--sorry, right. So, as a illustration of the broadest possible level of what it was we're talking about, in, when we talk about the fall of the Roman Empire--not telling anything you do not know. Here's a map of the Roman Empire in the age of Septimius Severus, which is to say circa 200 C.E. And here is one possible map. I will show you several others, because the maps, at some level, are merely imaginings of one of several different possible ways of thinking about the organizations of populations, and the stability of states in the 6th century. But here's one possible map of the Roman Empire in 526 C.E. Why 526, rather than a quartile like 525? Well, 526 is the year that Theodoric, the Ostrogoth emperor of--the Ostrogoth ruler of Italy died, and historians need something like dates, to hang something on. You might accuse historians of just being sort of servile slaves of particular kinds of political or biographical narratives. I think it's rather that's it's actually just easier to hang dates or hang, hang, hang information onto specific points in time. This is an image of the Mediterranean world in the 6th century, C.E. And, as you can see, what was once, at least, gave the appearance of an enormously unified structure, has fragmented not only into a bunch of blotches of color, which you might imagine as being something like successor states. I wouldn't encourage you to do that but you could think of them as successor states to the Roman Empire. So, at least if you had the luck to live in a colored blotch, like, your Social Security check would still arrive, it would just come from a different government. Imagine the horror of ending up in a white blotch, where there was something like no state structure. And, this, this gap, however we measure it, between something like an enormous world-encompassing state, with pretensions both to being a world empire and, frankly, also to being eternal. This gap, between the one state and this highly fragmented, diversified world of the sixth century, is essentially the gap that motivates the enormous amount of attention and historical and intellectual energy that's been devoted to the problem of decline and fall since at least the 15th century. The reason to come back to the problem of this world as unified is because from the perspective of the early modern world, this world of the Roman Empire, at the end of the 2nd century CE, looked to have, and as it turns out, did in fact have, a higher population than Europe would again achieve for at least another eleven hundred years. It was also something like a state--well, I won't exactly call it a state, but it was certainly something like a state--that encompassed at the level of diversity, of language, religion, culture, cuisine, dress, what-have-you that encompassed an extraordinarily diverse population, more diverse, certainly, than any European state, say, since the 15th century. Since people began to problematize the question of decline and fall. And because this state, the Roman Empire of the second century, cut across a whole series of divisions, geographic and otherwise, that seemed from the perspective of the early modern world, to essentially be ontological divisions, that is to say, massive huge cultural divisions which surely went, at least in their imagination, all the way back in time and might as well be eternal. The division between Europe and Asia, Christian and Muslim, Europe and North Africa, Catholic and Eastern Orthodox, and so on. Hence, in what was the perhaps the most famous piece of historical writing, not only on this subject, but I think actually in my experience, the greatest piece of historical writing in something like the modern scholarly tradition, in any language. In the words of Edward Gibbon, at the opening of his "History of the Decline and Fall," the first volume of which was published in 1776, he writes, "In the second century of the Christian era, the Empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth and the most civilized portion of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valor. The gentle but powerful influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury. The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence. The Roman Senate appeared to possess the sovereign authority and devolved on the emperors all the executive powers of government. During a happy period of more than four-score years, the public administration was conducted by the virtue and abilities of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the two Antonines. It was the design of this and the two succeeding--" sorry, "It is the design of this and the two succeeding chapters to describe the prosperous condition of the Empire, and afterwards, from the death of Marcus Aurelius, to deduce the most important circumstances of its decline and fall, a revolution which will ever be remembered, and is still felt by the nations of the earth." Note how, right, as I talk about the gap between the one world and the other, note how the theme of the praise of empire and the problematic, as we might call it, of decline and fall are intertwined. That is to say that the fall of Rome matters because of the height that we attribute to the Roman Empire from which it fell. That is, the Roman Empire, the Roman-- the fall of the Roman Empire matters because we attribute to the Roman Empire, to use the kind of language of Peter Brown, a solidity. Or to use a sort of modern sociological terms, we think of the Roman Empire more like a unified state, in which case its fall matters because it's, the Roman Empire represents to modern, represented to modern Europe, and in a way still represents to a whole body of modern theory, an earlier version of ourselves. And its success or failure in unifying and pacifying a remarkably diverse world represents, as it were, some better, ghostly, haunting, ancient version of our own possibilities. So it is for these reasons--probably not totally legible, but I wanted to put up there Alexander Demandt's name. There have been recent years been two quite remarkable, remarkably interesting studies of the history of histories of decline and fall. The first, from the early 1980s, is a book by a German named Alexander Demandt, who wrote a book on the fall of Rome. But it is in fact a typology and a history of histories of decline and fall. Now, unfortunately, it was never translated, so to the extent that any Americans have ever heard of it, it is because of the QT appendix he throws in as something like a joke on the very last page, page 695. In which he tries to reduce to a single word all the 210 causes that have been attributed to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. If anybody, rather than reading Alexander Demandt's work, wants to read either page 695, or, here I supply for you a translation made, the only bit of the work that was translated--which, as I say, is terribly unfair, and I'll come back to why it's unfair in just a second-- a translation made of the appendix by the classicist Karl Galinski in an appendix to an article of his on the historiography of decline and fall. Which includes, as you can see, everything from abolition of gods, abolition of rights, absolutism, you know, bobhevization, bureaucracy, Byzantinism, complacency, excessive foreign infiltration, earthquakes, division of labor, god forbid. Irrationality and Jewish influence, which are not the same thing. Lack of orderly military succession, lack of religious, lack of seriousness. I think if there's one thing we can agree on, it's that the Romans of the second century were a deeply serious people. Hypothermia. I mean, I have read a great deal about the fall of the Roman--but I cannot identify for you now who has advanced hypothermia as a cause of the fall of the Roman Empire. It was, it was either racial degeneration or racial discrimination, I actually don't know which. Either they were sleeping around or they weren't, but either way it was a bad thing. I like a vainglorious-ness. So. Now, somewhat more seriously. Somewhat more seriously. One thing I would like to take away from this enormous range of material--which obviously range from explanations that are at some level structural, and at some level cultural, and who knows what--is that in the huge range of books you could now find, and there probably are at least 20 books you could buy today in the Seminary Co-Op bookstore, and which of course you should buy tomorrow in the Seminary Co-Op bookstore. How you tell the story of the fall of the Roman Empire, and for that matter when that story begins, and at some level when the story ends, very much depends on the cause that you identify. Apart from very obvious landmarks, like say the sack of Rome in the end of the first decade of the fifth century, or the deposition of the last of the Roman emperors towards the end of the fifth century, if you even take that event seriously, which becomes an event more or less because we need an event to mark the end of the Roman Empire in the West. The story depends on the cause, and the beginnings, and the ends, and so forth. One of the perhaps most interesting things about the legacy of Edward Gibbon is, although I think everyone would concede that his has been by far the most influential of all explanations of decline and fall in any language, and perhaps one of the most influential works of historiography in any field of historical study, is that I know of virtually no one who has ever followed Edward Gibbon in identifying the fall of Constantinople in 1453 as the end of the Roman Empire. And I'll come back to that problem in just a moment. Just to be fair to Alexander Demandt, let me just say that Demandt's analysis does a great deal more, that is in if you are willing to look at the material between the title page and page 695. Demandt identifies a whole range of types of explanation for the fall of the Roman Empire. There are religious explanations. There are socio-economic explanations. There are natural scientific explanations--lead poisoning, I'm sure everybody's heard the Romans died because they had lead pipes. There are sort of endogenous, political explanations--there was some sort of failure of the political culture. There are morphological or structural explanations, that have to do with something like the cyclical rise and fall of states, it was a sort of time for it to fall. And there are exogenous explanations, meaning from the outside, barbarians came in, and that was just the end. What is more, and this perhaps worth saying, is that there is, I take it for us now, an unsurprising but nonetheless very interesting correlation between something like contemporary, intellectual currents and social anxieties and the kinds of explanations that were produced. So for example, in the late 17th and early 18th century, in the aftermath of the Wars of Religion, the fall of the Roman Empire was attributed to the rise of something like Christian monotheism and therefore Christian tolerance. That the Roman Empire, having been very tolerant in a way that Europe of the 17th century had not been, the moment the Romans became intolerant, they fell, which is why Europe deserved the wars that it got in the 17th century. Economic factors were particularly important in explanations given between the wars in the 20th century, at a time, of course, when economic issues were on the minds of nearly every intellectual and probably every person in the world. And naturally, immigration--or what we, in the Roman context, we call invasions of barbarians, or what the contemporary British call the invasion of Bulgarian workers under EU worker treaties--immigration or invasion of barbarians has been a prominent explanation at a whole series of repeated heated moments in European history. Since Demandt's work, there has been, now close to ten years ago, a really spectacular piece of historiography by John Pocock, the great New Zealand intellectual historian of the 20th century, who in contrast to Demandt-- this why I put the two--Alexandre Pocock attempts no catalog. But what Pocock does, which is really I think, terribly important, is begin the story of the history of histories of decline and fall in the second century BCE. That is, one of the things that come out comes out of Pocock's work, which is sort of like a chronological preface to Demandt's book, is the the incredible obsession of the Romans themselves on the eventual fall of the Roman Empire. The first account of which we have is actually a story of the great General Scipio. Scipio Aemilianus, Scipio the Second, Scipio not the winner of the Second Punic War but the winner of the Third Punic War, who is reported by a Greek contemporary who was his companion during the final sack of Carthage to have sat down and cried watching Carthage burn because he said, "As Carthage burned, so must Rome eventually fall." That is to say that all states fall, and so will Rome. One of the things that, one of the things that Pocock's work then highlights is the intersection between claims to eternity and the arrival of monarchy at Rome. Under the republican government, no one claimed that Rome was going to last forever. Rome was continuously imagined itself as engaged in the sort of zero-sum game for hegemony in the Mediterranean. And for people engaged in that kind of game, you win until you lose. It was really with the arrival of monarchy, and the first claim that we ever have in Roman literature that Rome would last forever, is-- coeval with the arrival of an emperor, with the Emperor Augustus. The second thing, second theme that Pocock brings out which is terribly useful, is is something like Christian denial of Roman eternity. Right? This is, of course, a terribly important problem that will bring us back to--which I will come back to later today. Which is to say that when Rome fell, or when the city of Rome was sacked, even though that wasn't the end of the Roman Empire. When the city of Rome was sacked, this produced something like a heated political argument between a still extant pagan population and a set of Christians, having to do with whether Christianity was to blame for the fall of Rome. That is to say, for so long as Rome had been pagan, the city had remained untouched--or so went the claim. But only 80 years, or 90 years, or depending on when you date something like the conversion of the Roman Empire. Perhaps if you date it to the notional conversion of Constantine, only a hundred years after the conversion of the emperor, Rome had been sacked for the first time in in a thousand years. The response on the Christian part was essentially to say, "The fall of Rome is no big deal. Rome doesn't matter." Right? Harkening back in part to earlier readings of the Book of Daniel, but also to other kinds of myths of the rise and fall of empires, and perhaps the notions of the succession of empire, of translatio imperii, in the Near Eastern Hellenistic and Roman tradition. The Christians were happy to say that earthly empires end. That's just what earthly structures do. The Christians lost this battle, but it's important to remember that the background, say--I mean the most famous work of literature generated by this controversy is Augustine's "City of God." But Augustin's "City of God" was itself preceded by a huge series of polemics, delivered by Augustine mostly in the form of sermons in which he said, "The fall of Rome or the sack of Rome just doesn't matter. It's just a city, and cities are no big deal." A third theme highlighted by Pocock that I want to mention now, because it's important to intellectual life if it doesn't become important later, is the problem of what we would might now call ethnogenesis. That is to say, coming back to this map. Sorry. That the emergence of Europe--oops. The emergence of Europe, as they knew it in, say, the 17th and 18th century. Europe cannot have come out of this without passing through this. That the emergence of a series of different nation-states, ideally according to early modern theory, organized around ethnic and culturally unified populations. That the emergence of European nation-states cannot have happened, right. Modern Europe could not exist without imperial structures fading away, whether through violence or simple self-effacement. And the final theme that Pocock draws out there, and a lot of other work he produced, had to do, has to do with whether the fall of Rome was preordained by features internal to the nature of states. Let us say here Pocock turns to a particular reading of Machiavelli, who argued, particularly in his reading of the Roman historian Livy, that Rome, that all states are either built for expansion or survival. States that are built for expansion, he thought, were better, because they will simply swallow up all states built for survival. Machiavelli's interest in this process lay in the collapse of democracy. That is, Machiavelli argued that Rome had been successful while it was a democratic empire, but it eventually became so big that it had to make a choice between giving up its empire and remaining a democracy, or giving up its democracy and remaining an empire. But there are a series of hints in the discourses on Livy that the same sort of dynamic was true at the level of the larger imperial structure itself. That the greater, essentially like a totalitarian order, or hegemonic argument, that the larger that the imperial structure becomes and the more successful it becomes, the more it necessarily will build into itself the structure of the structural requirement of its own decay. Now over the last two generations, historiography in the contemporary. particularly Anglo-American academy, has taken a somewhat surprising turn. That can more or less be indexed to the publication of two books within about seven years of each other, in 1964 and 1971 or two or so. The first was a book by a Cambridge historian, Hugo Jones, called "The Later Roman Empire," whose subtitle was, "A Social, Economic, and Administrative Survey." And in contrast to ancient historians, or what I think of as true ancient historians, which is to say people like myself, who have in the shadow of the German academy, spent an enormous portion of our lives cataloging stuff about the Roman Empire-- do we know where every legionary base was, do we know where every tax collecting station was, can we identify every census taker that ever lived under the Roman Empire? The nature of government, and the kinds of things that the study of government, and social and economic issues, patterns in landholding, and so on had received virtually no attention. Not none, but virtually no attention of this kind, in the later Roman Empire until Hugo Jones's book. It would just, it would be completely fair to say that it put a huge range of historical issues on the map for the very first time. But it was almost immediately succeeded. Seven years is a--seven years is a reasonably long time, but I'm not going to try to collapse that gap for you, but I won't do it here. It was almost immediately succeeded, and was in fact, even as it was published, overtaken by another movement, now associated with the very famous figure of Peter Brown. This is perhaps his most famous book, "The World of Late Antiquity," in which he advanced a claim that Late Antiquity--a period that might stretch from 200 to 700, or 300 to 600, or something like this-- amounted to an historical period of its own. Rather than separating the world at some division between the Classical and the medieval, we were now to make a distinction between the Classical the late antique, and the medieval. And a whole set of historical issues, a series of polities, you know, including for instance, the Sasanian Empire, a whole set of social issues having to do with, say, migration across certain kinds of boundaries within these polities, would emerge to salience, would become perceptible to historians the minute that they stopped looking at the Emperor Augustus as one sort of nodal point and, say, the coronation of Charlemagne as another point, in between which was a valley which seemed terribly dim and obscure. But of course, one effect of charting out some new historical terrain whose beginning was something like 200 and whose ending was something like 700 was that you had, you kind of had to efface or elide the sack of Rome, or even the fall of Roman power in the West, as a turning point of any kind. I mean, how can you have an historical period which stretches from A to B with a massive turning point in the middle? Why not make the turning point the turning point in historical epochs? And in order to accomplish this move, in order somehow to persuade people that the fall of the Roman Empire had mattered, Peter Brown and his coevals had to persuade people that the questions that motivated Hugo Jones had somehow been unimportant. That one could not speak of public politics or political culture in an old-fashioned way, and still say that the fall of Rome had not mattered. Hence, in sort of the opening move that created the field of Late Antiquity as a distinct field of historical inquiry, which now has its own graduate programs, it's had its own journals, and its own book series--in order to do this, Brown somehow had to persuade people, since they were coevals, that Hugo Jones's book, which covered exactly the same time period, somehow belonged to a different discipline. And you can watch this happen in a very famous and actually a spectacularly interesting book review that Peter Brown wrote of Hugo Jones's book, which offers as a summation that Hugo Jones had offered not, and here I quote, "A complete social history of the later Roman Empire, but the first, irreplaceable chapter in the history of the Byzantine state." Which was simply to take Hugo Jones's massive effort, which frankly covered, to the best that any human being possibly could have done, the entire western Mediterranean, as well. There's a problematic claim, but we could talk about it in the question-answer period. He had to take all of that effort on the part of Hugo Jones, simply forget at least a third of the book, and say, "No, no, no. Jones was writing the history of the Byzantine Empire. That's a different field of historical inquiry." Now what's important, and here I'll come back to two more maps. Brown's ideological effort, that is the reason why Brown was doing this, pushing Jones off the map, as it were, may not have been new. I mean sort of may have been new. The reasons why he did it may have been new, but Brown's action bears resemblance to a long-standing effort to label the Roman Empire as it existed in new Rome, which is to say Constantinople, as something other than Roman. With a problem that continues today. And by way of of affirmation of this, I offer you here and in the next slide two other maps that I sort of came across while I was trying to put together the PowerPoint display for this lecture, in which as you can see, the one thing this author does not wish to do is label the empire in the eastern Mediterranean the Roman Empire. No, no, no. It's the Eastern Roman Empire. Or here, is the Byzantine Empire. And in fact, it's here merged with another blotch of yellow, which is the Slavic peoples. Now, one of these sort of interesting claims that you could make about work in the field of Late Antiquity, which makes it in fact in a sort of structural way, look like our old-fashioned history of declines and fall, is that the concerns of the "new field" of Late Antiquity across the last 40 years have more or less been the abiding preoccupations of contemporary cultural studies. That is, as I said before, you could read a lot of histories of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire and come away with some kind of measurement of what were the contemporary preoccupations of intellectual culture? Immigration, economic collapse, blah blah blah blah blah. And all people did was project this onto the Roman Empire. And sometimes very fine historical work was done in this vein. The fall of the Roman Empire is a very complicated phenomenon, it bears many, many explanations. All I would wish to point out is that the field of Late Antiquity and its preoccupations have very much mirrored this other process. Whereas all of the major trends that Peter Brown and his students have identified as somehow central to life in the third, fourth, and fifth century Mediterranean are very much the preoccupations of something like 1970s Berkeley, that is sexuality, gender in the body, self-fashioning, aesthetics, and ethnicity. Whether these in fact turn out to be the major motivating polarities of discourse in the fifth century is another question. Now if I could just make one final aside about something like the last ten years. Empire studies have been going through something like a revolution in the last 10 years, or at least a renaissance in the last 10 years. We have, there have been published in the last, say 10 years, at least six books, even just in English, explaining the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. By people like Peter Heather, Bryan Ward-Perkins, Christopher Kelly, Guy Halsall, and so on. And as a correlate, as many of you may know, an enormous number of books have been published in American English--and here I will draw a distinction--about how to acquire an empire, and how empires are stable. And it's a very serious matter. I mean, as a, I have a--not only am I a Roman historian, I have a sort of vaguely, loose courtesy affiliation with a law school. But what this has meant in my life, in the very early years of the last decade, is that an enormous number of people ran around asking themselves the question, "Is America an empire? Do we have an empire? Are we getting an empire? Has somebody got a recipe for making empires last? We don't want to fall." And then, all these people--American law schools, American history departments--held conferences of this kind. And unsurprisingly, and I, it was never the Persians, the Babylonians they want to talk. Everyone said, "We should have somebody talk about Rome!" So at least 10 times immediately after our invasion of Iraq, I was sort of trotted in to conferences to talk about, you know, like, "How did the Roman Empire get so big?" And, you know. And of course, you know, you can imagine the kind of ideologues who ran these things. So they were like, "So Rome was big because of low taxation, right?" And either way-- So that--and as you may now guess from what I said about American English, virtually everyone who is now writing about the fall of the Roman Empire is actually speaking British English. Peter, Bryan, Guy, and Christopher--well, Christopher is an Australian, import back to the UK. But they're all writing about, they're all writing about not only the fall of empire, but they're particularly obsessed with immigration. Every single one of them is writing about barbarians, and particularly, the Huns. There is a serious component to this, and I should mention this, particularly, as my friend Richard Payne is in the audience. That it is now possible that collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of a sort of more serious form of archeology in Central Asia means that our knowledge of what we might now call loosely Hunnic peoples, and for that matter of the response to the Huns on the part of other territorial empires in Late Antiquity, is vastly more robust than it was at any time in the past. So apart from making fun of the British and their obsession with EU immigration, I should say that there is a serious component that underlies this trend in historiography. So if I might now, I'd like to turn to the question, and some classicists, some classes in the audience will be familiar with all of the data I'm now going to present to you. But I'd like now to return to the question that I mentioned earlier, which is: "At some level, did the fall of Rome matter?" And the question, the issue here is: Can we develop, as I said before, a set of measurements by which to talk about the fall of Rome that bypass the issue of whether we admire empire, or think large states are better than small states, and so on? So very, very quickly. I'm going to just point out that here are a whole series of measurements. Almost all of my charts will have a timeline on the bottom, and some other index. Something is being indexed. Here, lead in Greenland ice cores, which is to say, a measurement of the volume of a particular kind of metal smelting taking place. And as you can see, there is an enormous peak in the high point of something like the Roman Empire. Or, here's a famous chart. And here, this is by century. And here is a slightly more misleading--it looks more precise, but it's also slightly more misleading, because our ability to date some of these shipwrecks is problematic. But shipwrecks to be found in the Mediterranean by 20 and 25 year period, where you can see there's just a massive fall off that more or less correlates with the decline of Roman power in the West. These are a set of charts produced by the Archaeological Institute at the University of Trier of archaeological finds by century, with again, a fall off as Roman power collapses. Oh, sorry, the archaeological labs here are wood remains, by which, wood remains I mean remains of wooden buildings that they've been able to date. And here are bone assemblages in the wider Roman Empire. And lest you think that the point of bone assemblages is simply that it has something to do with the sacrificing of animals, the larger point is the issue of diet, that is to say, to what extent did people have access to meat, and so, as the best we can do to get this. Here is a measure of femur lengths from osteopathic analysis, right, where of course at some level the size of human beings correlates to a good deal with the quality of their diet. So to suggest that as the Roman Empire collapsed, and not only did bone assemblages go down, so it's not just as it were, Christianization and they were just eating non sacrificial meat. The actual size of human being seems to have gone down. And here, by way of a--oops. I don't know why that repeated. Um. I know why it repeated, I made a mistake, but. Here, then, are two pictures of--this one and this one. Are at some level, huge upticks in coin hoards in the middle of the 5th century in Roman gold. Why are coin hoards important? Because there is a belief. It's actually based on a theory with very little sort of evidence, except it sounds good. Which is to say that people, when they felt that their polity was under siege, or they had to flee, buried their coins in the hopes they could dig them up again later. And there seems to be a massive uptick. And these are two different moments, depending on when you, you know, how you, what kind of invasion was taking place in Gaul at this time of invasions in the 3rd century. By way of, in this is, as it were, I don't know, like a measure of panic. It's how many people in Gaul were, thought like, the world was coming to an end. Now, when I say coin hoards in the middle of the 3rd century, I'm obviously pointing to a moment well before something like the fall of Rome. So what, what was going on in the 3rd century that would cause people to take all the money in their wallet, put it in a ziplock bag, and bury it in the basement before getting in their car and driving away? Here, then, this one is a better map. I mean. they're better maps. but they're kind of too small. The 3rd century actually bears in some sort of interesting relations, sort of interesting structural relation, to the events of the fifth. That is to say, there were an enormous number of invasions of the Roman Empire in the 3rd century, primarily coming through Germany and across the Danube, and then across the Euphrates frontier. Now, I'd like to stress to you--I don't know how well you can see some of these dots--that the invasions as they took place in the 3rd, and for that matter of the 5th, century were not a surprise. I mean, any particular arrival of some guy yelling at you and throwing, like, a spear, dressed in skins or... I mean, that could be a surprise. But the fact that somebody came running at you from across the Rhine, that was not a surprise. If you look at the distribution of the Roman legions in the Roman Empire at the dawn of the period of barbarian invasions, they were laid out down the Rhine, across the Danube, and along the Euphrates frontier. The Romans knew they were coming. The problem was not something like surprise. The volume of barbarian movements, the volume of population migrations may have been. But it was not a surprise. What it produced, in the Roman case, is a military crisis that in turn provoked a political crisis. This is a chart. It's not actually important that you be able to read this. What it is is a series, is the names of the Roman Empires running on the left in various colors, right. With the means of their death on the right, and various kind of other things being indexed--did they manage to raise their children to the Emperor, and so on, and so on. And all it's really intended to convey is that the political system of the Roman Empire was sufficiently fragile that political threat, I mean sort of that military threats, pressure on the frontier, induced a massive crisis of legitimacy in the political sphere. Right? I mean, nowadays, I suppose what we say is that the--you know, very, very few presidents, Obama is an exception right, become get re-elected when unemployment is above, oh I don't know, choose your figure, seven percent. Roman emperors didn't stay on the throne if Germans were pouring across the Rhine. And the the problem of the Roman political system is then indexed here by the fact that, I mean I can't remember, it depends on-- there's so many figures you could possibly call emperors, that we actually have a whole bunch of ancient jokes about how to recognize an emperor. I mean, if some guy--you know, if a guy walks into a bar, says, "Excuse mex I'm the emperor of the Roman Empire." So one of the jokes goes, "If the guy, if a guy has a coin in his pocket, you know, that he produced with his name on it, he just might be an emperor." They wrestled with the question, how do we know? What mechanisms do we have for producing political legitimacy, or a social consensus about who emperors are? It didn't occur to them that he might have, you know, wheeled it out in some sort of fair the day before, on one of those coin-pressing machines. But that was, you know--the problem here, then, is that the the political system was unable to withstand the crisis legitimacy produced by military defeat. A further index of this-- and here I point you to the two bodies of emperors that appear on the left in red--is that under pressure from outside, two regions of the empire more or less split off and said, "If the central government isn't going to take care of us, we'll do it for ourselves." It's, you know, not unlike a state saying, "We'll set up a state exchange, thank you very much, right. We don't trust the federal government to do this kind of crap, we'll do it for ourselves." And the most extreme example being Vermont, which is more or less setting up a one-payer health system. Well in Gaul, the first four red names, and in Palmyra, the two names that follow, they more or less chose to go it alone. And the result was, and you could make an argument about to what extent these were truly autonomous polities, that the Roman Empire broke apart. I mean, in the most fundamental terms, there was no longer one empire in the Mediterranean, there were three. Now, of course, very rapidly. Here's another kind of rendering of it. And one of the reasons for the difference here in the attribution of Spain is that not only are our sources so bad, but frankly political communication in the period was so bad in a period of military crisis that we actually are not entirely sure where the borders of the Gallic Empire were. I could tell you a little story about recent discoveries in epigraphy in Moesia, but I'll spare you that. But the end result was--oh, I'd forgotten this had so many colors in it, but in any event. The end result was that after a series of emperors starting in around the year 270 were, through a period of gradual reconquest, having something to do with the withdrawal of Sasanian power in the east, were able to reunify the Empire. That somehow, the political, economic, and otherwise social structures that caused these people to adhere more than to disintegrate were stronger and were sufficient to enable something like reconstitution by the year 285, 290. There are various ways in which you might date it. If you just dated it by death of emperors, it would be the earlier in the 280s. The fifth century mirrors this in that, of course, and I'm ignoring some invasions in the fourth century. The fifth century mirrors, and there were a series of invasions in the fifth century. So here is a map that, about, as it were, the series of rapid invasions that took place in the years immediately before the sack of Rome in 405 to 408. Here is a broad and somewhat terrifying representation of barbarian invasions in the 5th century. I apologize that it's so dark. And here again is a map of something like population movements and fragmentation by the year 445. Now I'm basically, I'm really out of time. So let me just put up here a sort of aggregate picture of population movements. I'll stop calling them barbarians. So something like population movements into the Roman Empire over the first to fifth centuries. And let me just say a word about how to understand why the Roman Empire of the fifth century was not able to withstand external pressure in the way that it had in the third. And the explanation that I want to give is a reasonably simplistic one, and in a way, it's parasitic upon a really fascinating body of literature produced by historical anthropologists writing about the border states of the Chinese Empire. And it has to do with a theory particularly associated with a figure named Thomas Barfield, of what he calls "shadow empires." And what I want to try to suggest to you about, in the Romans' interactions with the people beyond its borders, quite apart from something like: Were there more people invading in one century, was the 3rd century worse than the second, and so on. There are many things we might say about that. Is that across the across the 3rd, and again across the 5th century, Rome faced a series of opponents who grew gradually structurally--in spite of our terming some of them Romans and some of them barbarians--who grew gradually structurally more similar to themselves. You might even say, as I've tried to say somewhere else, that Rome had, Rome ultimately reaped what it had sown, Now when I say "Rome reaped what it sowed," I don't want to invoke some kind of narrow model of historical causation, or some concept of balance, or for that matter even justice appropriate to long-term historical processes. I don't want to say that. say. the Sasanian Empire attacking Rome in the 3rd century was just payback for completely gratuitous and unmotivated attacks by the Roman Empire on the Sasanians in the 190s. Although that is at some level true. What I want, what rather to say, is that-- what I want rather to ask, well the question I want to pose is why did Rome find foreign aggression in the third century more difficult to repel than before? And why did it find foreign aggression in the fifth century even more difficult to repair? Repel. And that is, that there's a lot of reason to think that the polities that exist--again, now I'm switching from the term barbarian--that the polities or peoples or states that exist on the borders of empire gradually develop in something like homologous or homeomorphic relation to the states on their borders, to the larger and more sophisticated empires on their borders. And that is true, regardless whether the object of the state on the other side of the imperial border is to resist or to attack, right. Even if you're trying--so there's a sort of irony here, because one of the ways we think of resistance is around contemporary notions of sort of ideologies, of cultural autonomy, and so on. That the way to resist an empire is to go on being yourself. And what I want to suggest to you is that, in fact, the historical evidence suggests that one of the most successful ways, and in fact, inevitable consequence of bordering on a larger, more developmental-- more developed, more sophisticated state is that you develop a series of cultural practices and institutions that exist in structural relation to those of the more sophisticated state that you border. And it doesn't even matter whether you develop these in order to resist, or you develop these in a relation of mimesis, or whatever. It doesn't matter whether you develop them to resist, or to mimic, or in order to invade. They could even be result from direct stimulus, right. The Romans, themselves, in conducting various kinds of treaty and trade relations, invited as it were--I could describe what I mean by that--but they invited the states on their borders to develop institutional structures like themselves. When they invited parties across the border to sign contracts, when they invited them to sign treaties, they more or less invited those people to identify who in their off--who in their state was the leader, who spoke for the people, who had rights, did they census their population, how would you conduct exchanges of prisoners of war, and so on. There are all sorts of ways in which direct stimulus from Rome produced something like economic, social, and infrastructural development on the other side of the border. But the result, as I say, whatever the cause. The result were developments that enabled societies on the borders of the Roman Empire not simply to resist imperial power, when you think of the people who would actually settled on the other side of the border. But they resisted by becoming more like it. And of course, these developments that may also have ultimately enabled those people not simply to threaten the imperial, not simply to resist the imperial power, but to threaten it. And in that sense, right, I return to something like Demandt's sets of structural causes that had nothing to do with Christianity, or political changes internal to the Empire. Of course there were changes in the social and cultural makeup, or the social and cultural fabric of the Empire. All polities change. And moral evaluation, like saying it decayed, or it fell away from some peak, are relatively little use in explaining problems like the collapse of states. Rather, the political change internal to the empire matters because it needs to be indexed alongside the kinds of changes that we're taking in the polities along its borders, which, in becoming more and more like Rome--and they became even more like Rome once they were inside--they became more and more capable of defeating Rome. And in that sense, Roman success in making itself a model to other polities was, as much as anything, the cause of its own decline. And I'll stop there. Thanks very much. [Applause]
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Channel: The Oriental Institute
Views: 98,704
Rating: 4.4849095 out of 5
Keywords: Roman Empire (Country), Oriental Institute Chicago (Museum), Lecture (Type Of Public Presentation)
Id: 2vSGPHByAZc
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Length: 59min 4sec (3544 seconds)
Published: Fri Dec 27 2013
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