"The Accidental Suicide of the Roman Empire" by Michael Kulikowski

well thank you very much for the invitation to come here it's a pleasure to be back I see lots of faces I recognized below it and and it is it's been I guess 13 years or so 14 years since I was here and I have to say that even I in every position I've had since then I've always thought well I have students as good as I had my first year and it's not just that I was working harder than I've ever worked in my life because my first job I think actually Washington and these students really were the most rigorous students that I've ever taught and the most prepared to work very hard and also play very hard and that was something that I'm sure hasn't changed and it's a real pleasure it's a real pleasure to be back here and to see so many faces and to be here at the invitation of Sarabande who is going to uncertain go on to do great things in the field of Roman and late Roman history I'm going to talk today about the cuts our topic in my current research which is the accidental well the title is the accidental suicide of the Roman Empire what I'm really working on is the question of Rome's fall and how it fell and this is you know obviously something that has been in the news a lot recently because the question that everybody always wants to know is are we row right I mean that was an airport bestseller four or five years ago and so it's something that it's a topic that never loses its currency in a sense it's the topic of the fall of Rome fascinates endlessly because we're always all of us half convinced that our civilization our culture is hovering on the brink of collapse or at least irreversible decline it's a constant rhetoric in in modern culture and every generation makes its fall of Rome in its own image so early in the 20th century Germans like or Hosea and Tennie Frank for instance an American like Tony Frank put the fall of Rome down to race-mixing after 1917 the exiled Russian aristocrat mikail Rostov chef argued that the recruitment of the rootless proletariat into the Roman army caused Imperial collapse the Nazis saw the fall of the Roman Empire as historical evidence for German Lebensraum and the SS created its own inner BER specifically to follow Hitler's conquering armies and uncover the ancient foundations of Germanic settlement after the 1960s eco catastrophists had a brief moment there was a period when lead poisoning was meant to have brought down the Roman Empire more recently specific political concerns have made a mark as well in the 1980s for instance a very important book called corruption and the decline of Rome nowadays reads like footnote on the iran-contra scandal and the fall of Reagan's America again soon thereafter in the 1980s and particularly the 1990s in the warm glow of European unity scholars across the continent decided that the Roman Empire had never really fallen surfing on giant waves of EU cash the European Science Foundation sponsored five years of conferences and 15 volumes of proceedings on the transformation of the Roman world which we are meant to think was as friendly a merging of Romans and Germans as was the EU of Francois Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl now all of these different falls of Rome are an improvement on the several decades of work that preceded them which had mapped the app that sort of mapped the conflict of Axis and Allies on to the fall of the Roman Empire when somebody like Pierre course L wrote movingly about less of a soldier Monique readers saw the ver marked on the March and repeat ano with his epigrammatic Roman civilization did not die peacefully it was murdered left no one in any doubt that the murderers were very specifically Germans and nowadays partly in reaction to this rose-tinted EU vision of Roma no barbarian harmony a violent scholarly backlash has set in British scholars particularly English scholars of a certain class background have won plaudits for insisting that the fall of the Roman Empire really was a murder that it was the death of a healthy policy that stupidly let in too many foreigners unassimilated barbarians to survive and I find it hard not to diagnose this as a reaction to the rise of multiculturalism in Britain in the 1990s be that as it may all of these explanations and hundreds more like them there are literally hundreds of explanations for the fall of Rome they have in common one fundamental belief and that is that whatever happened to the Roman Empire the barbarians from Northern Europe had a lot to do with it and that's not surprising because the idea of barbarians bringing down the Empire is rooted in the 16th century when the Northern Renaissance and the Reformation posited a virtuous northern past to contrast with a debauched and papist south while the recently discovered manuscript of Tacitus is Germania provided a ready-made handbook to the authentic superior vigor and virtue of the barbarous Germans and ever since then the end of antiquity has always been seen as about the opposition between a Roman Mediterranean and a Germanic barbarian so I'm laboring this point and my research Labor's this point for a very simple reason that it's the tracks of scholarly debate have been worn so deep for so many centuries that all argument naturally runs along the same tracks even when one's attempting to critique the critique this at the are at the level of a meta-narrative one simply cannot help but engage step by step with a script that has been with us so long that we can't ignore it right it's just been there too long to ignore and the point that I'd like to make is that just because a script has been around for a long time doesn't make it true my own research is an attempt to a sort of radical rewriting of the script of rome's for and what I propose overall is that by turning one basic analytical assumption about the ancient world on its head many other not very controversial aspects of relate Roman history start to make considerably more sense and it's on the basis of this that I'm going to eventually today pronounce my verdict of accidental suicide but let me get the hard technical bit of the talk out of the way and for the students in the audience bear with some some technical scholarly stuff but it's the there's no way to talk about this it's the most controversial there's no way not to talk about it it's most controversial part of my research it's the key to the monograph that this this paper will eventually be part of and it's also the analytical insight that cracked open the problem of understanding the four hundreds the 300 and 400 seee for me it's been a long time coming I've been working on this project for seven or eight years now in rough in rough embryo and when I began it when I started my research I did it from the accepted analytical standpoint that is I now believe to be entirely wrong what I were where I started I'm sure I now know I was entirely wrong when I was started I was I when I started I was already convinced the barbarians were not enough to explain the fall of the Roman but I did think I knew a barbarian when I saw and they looked like that and they looked like this all this but they did not what they didn't look like was that right and you can see this but these pictures are meant to illustrate even are the good governor is that I accepted a binary distinction between barbarian and Roman as a historical reality right a historical reality that contemporaries recognized and acted upon that because contemporaries recognized this contrast it's a valid heuristic for us to use to analyze the past and what I've since discovered and what I discovered after about a year of working on this was that that's not the case the binary distinction that this set of images makes for instance the binary distinction between barbarians and Romans exists solely as a rhetorical device in politics it's not actually how practically speaking anybody taxonomy as other individuals it was purely a rhetorical binary device and the fourth century world is absolutely absolutely suffused with totalizing rhetoric pick any topic you like any topic you like and you'll find that in the 4th century Empire it's figured rhetorically as a binary opposition between irreconcilable categories so Christian and Pagan Orthodox heretic roman barbarian binaries that are utterly exclusive of one another and what I've come to realize is that rather than automatically accept these binaries as descriptions of ancient reality we need to discover how rhetoric and practice intersected and when and in what circumstances rhetoric and practice intersect and so the rhetorical figure of the Barbarian is a universal non-roman other you know the the other a stereotype of alterity composed of vices to balance Roman virtues and if we take this rhetorical binary face-value Romans and barbarians are actual categories that contemporaries recognized and then if we do that if that's so then it's perfectly reasonable to assume that the contrast between Roman and barbarian civilization and barbarism is drawn along a geographical line that corresponds to the imperial frontier Roman Barbary right it's perfectly reasonable if these categories are our real categories the contemporaries recognized inside is Roman outside is barbarian and so we can assume we could assume that anyone from outside the Imperial frontier would automatically have been subject to the rhetorical stereotyping of a barbarian and that's what we've always done we've assumed that and it's perfectly rational to assume it until you realize that the late antique rhetoric of civilization and barbarism cannot be taken at its face value what the 3rd and 4th century sources actually show is that the polarizing rhetoric of barbarian roman does not correspond to real categories in the way politics in the way politics is practiced and certainly not to a geographical distinction between different sides of a frontier on the contrary Lane antique thinking about barbarians is actually about its to two entirely separate discourses two entirely separate discourses of difference on the one hand we have the totalizing rhetoric the totalizing division of barbar barbarism and civilization barbarian and Roman a rhetoric with roots that go back almost a thousand years to the Athens of the 5th century BC on the other hand though we find an equally ancient tradition of ethnography of ethnography which is a genre that's primarily concerned with classifying and distinguishing among different groups of real people right real people not binary distinctions but of real people and the crucial point and this is the the key that cracked it wide open for me what we've always missed is that the ethnographic discourse is not a subset of the binary the ethnographic discourse operates the same way on both sides of the frontier so what I mean we have always viewed ethnic discourse as a subset of a larger distinction between barbarian and Rome so that in the modern scholarship ethnic groups from outside the frontier are analyzed as barbarians and ethnic groups from inside the frontier are analyzed as Roman provincials turns out though that the sources actually don't warrant this approach at all contemporaries are entirely alert to ethnic differences they're very alert to the differences between different ethnic groups in the world around them and they're very stereotyping about those ethnic differences but they are not actually arranged inside a higher level distinction between barbarian and Roman and therefore we as scholars cannot impose a binary distinction as a tool of analysis because it doesn't allow us it doesn't help us analyze anything at all if we do so we actually falsify the reality of late Roman politics and we assume we make the basic error of assuming that some individuals are automatically alien to the Roman state on the basis of their birth the basis of birth outside the frontiers and that's just not so that's just not so ethnic and regional factions are a reality of the 4th century barbarian and Roman factions barbarian and Roman groups are not a reality and this means that we can be historians as historians we can analyze the strategies of allamani or Syrians or Franks within Imperial politics as real historical phenomena that contemporaries recognized as going on amongst them what we cannot do and what we should and what the sources do not do not accurately let us do is to contrast the strategies of barbarians as opposed to the strategies of provincial Romans because those categories aren't real they're created by us they've been created by moderns moderns as analytical lenses on the basis of late ancient rhetoric not on the basis of late antique practice and once we realize this we can go on to ask how and to what ends the rhetoric of civilization and barbarism was applied in late Imperial politics and what we find is something that might not be surprising to you we find is that the rhetoric is part of the armory of political invective the are the the armory the of political invective it's deployed for various purposes and against varying opponents depending upon the circumstances and so for instance a military usurper like this general mag mag mensches can be reimagined as a barbarian invader after he lost the Civil War again common soldiers might be subsumed within the stereotypes of Roman values or they might be condemned under the stereotypes of barbarism depending upon the rhetorical point and offer wishes to make and the key is that a tool of invective as a tool of invective the rhetoric of barbarism is no more likely to be applied to a franc like like the general Sylvanas or than to a Pannonian somebody from modern Hungary inside the empire like the Emperor Valens in other words neither actual regional backgrounds nor earth Nick stereotypes automatically elicited a classification as a barbarian or a Roman and now I'm done with the technical part so thank you for your patience I'm going to ask you to take what I just said for granted today I can demonstrate it through a series of case studies of individual careers that's actually the major part of this book in some cases but I've once tried to give a paper on one of these men's careers you couldn't watch the audience's faces melting in boardrooms I'm not gonna do that and what I'm going to talk about is the my analysis of the fall of the Roman Empire what does this have to do with the fall of the Roman Empire and what's the what's the point of that the things I've been talking about all come down to the ascent bring me to the key point of my analysis which is that the way we choose to talk about our world has a profound effect upon how the world actually works and to give you an example that's been dominant for the POE in our lives for the past ten years think about this country's efforts to deal with a wide variety of violent Islamic fundamentalism by talking in military language rather than the language of policing or of the security forces we've created one reality rather than another it's not necessarily a better or worse reality but it's a different one from what the language would have created and the actions implied by the language that we've used and so choices about actions follow from choices about words and I believe that this actually helps us understand the otherwise inexplicable speed with which the Roman Empire disappears as a polity in the course of about thirty years between 395 and by 430 the Western Roman Empire was effectively on inoperable at almost every level and I believe this Abba thet's observation that the way we talk about reality constructs the way politics function is the key to understanding the fall the fall of the Roman world I'd argue that late Imperial reliance upon totalizing discourse upon these binaries that I've been discussing actually creates the conditions in which the Empire can fall and so my current the what the work really centers on this question why does the late Roman Empire develop its preference for totalizing rhetoric why does it develop this preference and then how does it taste how does the taste for polarizing rhetoric structure political life in a world where regional faction are a political reality in Roman history for the first time so the 4th century world that I start from is pretty stable Imperial collapse was not inevitable and what I think I want to argue is that the gap between totalizing rhetoric within which politics is conducted and the reality of how its practiced by shifting regional policies and factions make it possible in the air at the end of the century of the 4th century for the Empire to fall when nobody wants it to and so I'm going to take about two to three minutes to sketch what I take to be the origins of the late Imperial mode of totalizing rhetoric and then I'll move on to the question of the fall where does this rhetoric come from I would argue that it stems from a fundamental change in the character and aspect of Roman government between the end of the 1st century AD and the middle of the 3rd century and the type of the name I'd give that changes equestrian ization the Roman the Roman historians in the audience I hope will forgive this a simplification but in the transition from Republic to Empire after that transition the Roman aristocracy comes to be divided into fundamentally separate - something fundamentally separate elites senatorial and equestrian and both groups had roots in the Republic obviously in the pub and the politics of the Republic but under the Empire they come to play different roles in an increasingly complicated business of governing a territory that's vast and continues to expand for almost 100 years senatorial families are limited in number new senators can only be created on the basis of a personal relationship with the Emperor on the other hand the equestrians class had begun as a mere census category and it meant the barriers to entering imperial service as an equestrian were much lower than the barriers for entering senatorial service the Equestrian Order is therefore spread much more widely across the empire than is the senatorial order and the increasingly professionalized nature of the scent of the equestrian class is a function of the equestrians entering and and taking over functions of empire that had simply not been needed under the Republic and could not be filled by senators and there were never enough senators to fill all the posts that needed filling anyway so we have lots more equestrians distributed much more widely and doing many more things and this increasingly professionalized administrative specialist class fills evermore positions that had previously been filled by Senators as time goes by like any good bureaucracy they also create more tasks for themselves to do and therefore the need for more bureaucrats and you can tell them a department head won over because I say that this was a silent revolution in the Roman state and it's not until the third century AD that the natural right of senators to rule is is is really surpassed by an unembarrassed acknowledgement that an equestrian elite should staff the main ministries of the Roman state and the one consequence of this equestrian ization that I think is significant for the later Empire in in this context is that it brings with it a mindset that helps create this preference for totalizing rhetoric one of the consequences for Roman government that equestrian ization has is a new belief that it's possible to manage things in a fundamentally reproducible and impersonal impersonal way across different provinces in the early Empire where indeed in the in the Empire of Tacitus that many of you will have read about provincial administration had been haphazard it had been variable based on ad hoc arrangements that had been put in place sometimes hundreds of years earlier when a region was conquered by Rome and so in the third century this new attempt at uniformity of governance was something that was just very very new in the annals of the Roman of Roman history one of its earliest expressions is an edict by the Emperor Caracalla in the year 212 which grants full Roman citizenship to every or almost every inhabitant of the Empire at one level this is a megalomaniac gesture by a Emperor who is by all accounts probably mad but but at another level it also is a product of this process that I'm talking about because it makes imperative it makes imperative the need to work out what giving access to Roman law means for hugely diverse populations who always just done things the way they'd always done them had their own laws we're not subject to Roman law suddenly after 2:12 this part a population of has overnight become Roman citizens and half that bureaucrats have to work out what that means they don't have to deal with these tens of thousands of people who weren't Romans until the day before and so that in turn leads to the multiplication of more experts and more bureaucrats and more Roman lawyers by the to twenties we can see about two twenties 80 we can see an effort to homogenize practice across the entire empire Universal repeatable practices that simply had not been necessary before and what this means is that late Roman emperors late Roman emperors can aspire to a level of uniformity in every aspect of the empire of governance that no early Imperial regime would have imagined possible or believed to be necessary and so in this aspiration to uniformity in this aspiration to uniformity of governance I think is where we find the ideological shift to the totalizing discourses characteristic of the 4th century it's for the first time not just to contemplate an abstractly Universal Emperor Emperor but also to contemplate uniformity of government government across his empire and that's because the primary shapers of government are an equestrian elite for whom governance is first and foremost managerial it's a managerial problem and so this transformation in the bureaucratic attitude was coupled with a crisis of imperial legitimacy in the third century and what we find is a rhetorical attempt to coerce recognition of unstable Emperor's and a bureaucratic conviction that uniformity can be achieved and therefore should be achieved in a rhetorical binary that Brookes no compromise and the most immediate example is one that you will all have know about and that is Christian persecution under the Emperor's Decius and valerian this is probably the most striking example of a consequence of this change in governmental culture the Christian persecutions of under both Decius and valerian articulate an unmistakable message of complete uniformity as the principle that legitimizes these weak and illegitimate Emperor's complete uniformity because the Roman Empire can only be protected if every Roman citizen honors Rome's traditional gods but at the same time persecution assumes that this complete religious uniformity is just a managerial problem just a managerial problem bureaucrats supervise and annotate each person's active sacrifice and issue little tickets issue little cheats of compliance what we have it's exactly like tax the like proving you paid your taxes what we have in this is an epitome of an equestrian managerial attitude working on behalf of the new totalizing conformist discourse and so at the end of the third and the beginning of the fourth century Diocletian and his co emperors the tetrarch's there saw one of whom as Sarah pointed out was adopted by his adoptive father on today in 293 Diocletian his co emperors really saw the systematic value of bringing practical managerial aspects and aspirations of governance together with ideological uniformity and they implemented it in every sphere of life from religion to law to a wholly new system of uniform taxation and law illustrates what this what this meant the practical content of this man's legislation practical content of diocletian's legislation is fully in accordance with classical Roman law but its form is not classical at all on the contrary it adopts a new rhetorical tone that was until very recently until 15 years ago mistaken for imprecise bluster that led to confusion it's a change actually but it's now been shown that the Diocletian ik law is perfectly standard Roman law beautifully in conformity with juristic law it's just written in a totally different rhetorical style and Constantine lifts this register to a much higher pitch and so it becomes the normal rhetorical mode for the imperial chanceries in the fourth and the fifth century legislation is the force is the first large body of evidence to reveal the gap between rhetoric and content that I regard as the single most salient feature of late imperial government and that is this rep this totalizing rhetoric that stands at odds with the actual practice of government below the surface and that's because the reality of fourth century politics is a vastly expanded Imperial bureaucracy penetrating much further down into provincial society than ever before and regional elites operating as regional factions within the Empire now this is this is where we come to the question of the fall under the early Empire under the period that classicists normally study whatever a small percentage of the regional elite chose to leave their hometown or their home region for a place in Empire wide environment did so in terms of a single Empire wide government and not merely as products of their local place by the 4th century because of the much deeper penetration of imperial government joining the structure of the Emperor's government no longer meant deracinated from your home province you could be both an imperial official and the provincial aristocrat at the same time and from the 330s onwards we can trace regional and provincial cliques competing for control of the functions of Imperial government in order to benefit men from their own home regions and one of the tools in fact the most important tool of winning these competitions is the totalizing rhetoric from which I began what's the most effective way of placing oneself and one's friends in positions of power whilst simultaneously excluding rivals it's to successfully paint your rivals as the bad half of a rhetorical binary that is to say to prove rhetorically not merely that your rivals are less qualified for power but rather that they were in their very being in their very being necessarily excluded from the Roman polity not part of it and excluded from the protection that the Roman policy offers and so after Constantine's conversion to Christianity for instance pagans and heretics also join barbarians as the negative half of a totalizing rhetorical binary and throughout the 4th century if you are able to paint your enemy your political enemy as a heretic or as a pagan in the face of the state's machinery you not only exclude them from power you put their life in danger it's a very effective way of excluding someone from is getting them killed and so consequently you also increase your chances of winning something in the game of politics and this is where we come to the question of accidental suicide looks like all functional like all functional systems of government and the 4th century government retains spaces in which people can behave in ways that contradict what they said they were doing so exclusionary rhetorics of civilization and barbarism are available to everyone regardless of background and you for use against anyone regardless of background and although they were inescapable as rhetoric you you had to conform to them rhetorically you could be tacit you could tactically ignore them in practice that's to say the gap between political rhetoric and political practice in the 4th century was wide and as long as its existence was not acknowledged long you didn't acknowledge the gap between rhetoric and practice political life is very stable so long as everyone spoke as if the world was structured as absolute and also simultaneously pragmatically was acted pragmatically in their deployment regional factions political provincial elites benefit from government enough that it's stability is ensured but but the sheer stigmatizing force the sheer stigmatizing force of rhetorical binaries is such that once the gap between words and practice was acknowledged if the binaries if the binaries were the gap between them and practice was acknowledged the brittle framework of political stability is shattered and that's exactly what happens at the very end of the fourth century that's exactly what happens at the end of the fourth century the gap between the rhetorical belief in how politics is practiced and the actual behavior is AK is recognized is acted upon and the stability of the entire system breaks down how to put it simply a all number of men at the very end of the fourth century realized accidentally that the rhetoric of barbarism could work to their advantage and not in the traditional way of as a brush with which to tar one's enemies right rather it can be embraced as a tool that allows one to do things that are totally impossible inside the equilibrium of traditional politics and there are several such men there's a half half a dozen careers that we can reconstruct along this lines but the best documented example is the Roman general Alaric probably known to most of you as the Visigoths who sacked Rome he didn't look like that Alaric was born inside the Roman Empire but he was born as part of a population that had been settled in the Balkans after five years of warfare and without being fully integrated into the legal structure of the Roman state because the Roman state for a period of about five years was too weak to integrate the generation of a lurex parents the third and earlier fourth century empires had a well-established mode of integrating ambitious members of the subaltern classes into the higher levels of society and they generally did it through the army through an officers training corps unlike for instance the British colonial system in which native officers remain subordinate to British officers the late Roman state did not have a two-track officer corps recruitment as an officer trumped any questions of background at the time and successful officers tended up to tended to end up as powerful players in Imperial politics and this is a typical image of a late Roman officer the integrated function of the officer corps continues to work right through the Year 400 or so but but the warfare in the Balkans in the three 70s and three 80s means that that population in the Balkans is excluded from this traditional Avenue of achievement the population from which Alaric was recruited came into it was recruited into its own separate units which were never part in an integral part of the Roman army when Alaric rose through the ranks he did so from a position of subordination as a sort of native officer that had really been recreated for the first time in about 300 years in Roman history scholars have always seen Alaric as the first in a long line of barbarians in Roman service of officers in Roman services part of the Barbara's ation of the Roman army and they've argued about whether this was a good thing or a bad thing but my discussion of rhetoric and and my analysis of how fourth century politics actually works suggests the barbarians in Roman service barbarian officers do not exist as categories and did not exist for contemporaries as categories they were simply men from different regional backgrounds men of different ethnicities all of whom served in the Roman army Rey went through the same system even though they came from different regional backgrounds some of them inside the frontier some of them outside the frontier all of whom equally might be demonized as barbarians in Wrath in political rhetoric but not because of where they came from not because of their birth and so viewed from with this sort of point in mind Alaric and his fellow officers were not part of a barbarian continuum which doesn't exist but rather there's something new representatives of a population that couldn't function in the way other 4th century regional functions did and despite this the old model of advancement by the officer corps remained attractive for Alaric because it was normative and he attempted to play by the rules of the game and he tried to advance by that route he commands his native unit valiantly he achieves promotion he wins the notice of the Emperor Theodosius and throughout his career you can see that what he wants is I mean what he's what he thinks he wants is to be like a normal Roman officer his demands that on the imperial system are without exception those of a tonne of ambitious your officer they include promotion for himself and more advantageous service conditions for his men but his subaltern alaric subaltern position it turns out cannot be erased and quite unintentionally it's what destroys the normal assumptions of fourth century political life alaric seeks a traditional role for himself within the imperial military hierarchy and he seeks to do it through violence again so far so traditional that's not revolutionary there was a script it was a time-honored script for violence in 4th century governance you operate within one and it divides the script that operates within the existing hierarchy of ranks at its most extreme it ends in usurpation which if successful replaces individuals but leaves the system wholly intact losers like the general Magnus who I showed you a coin of earlier would be remembered as having stood outside the Roman polity all along although until they failed to win the throne they were no different from anyone else playing the game but Alaric because of his business circles dances did not stick to this script and that was revolution when he was attacked and demonized rhetorically as a barbarian Alaric embraced the implications of the role and instead of the sanctioned violence of usurpation he sought to win an improved place for himself by threatening to attack and destroy the system within which he wants to place he would actually act as the stereotypical barbarian other alternatingly or sometimes he tried to act as a fully socialized Roman officer and his cycle of withdrawal negotiation and attack sought a position within the Emperor's military hierarchy from the position deliberately consciously of an outsider and this shocking novelty displaces the whole discursive stability of 4th century politics this means that Alaric is in fact a turning point and not because he led a of unassimilated savages to destroy Rome and not because he sacked Rome the city which soon recovered on the contrary Alaric is a turning point because he was able to recognize a hitherto unseen corollary of 4th century political rhetoric there was an advantage to be had from playing at the stereotype of the barbarian while attempting to work within the imperial system and rise through his ranks he was also able to step outside them step outside the role and threaten the government as if an outsider that's what barbarians were always meant to do after all rhetorically but no one before Alaric had seen that there was a point in embracing this row and this ku imaginative ku is so great that Alaric himself cannot profit from it when he sacks Rome it's not a triumph it's the culmination of a frustrated career it's an act of despair after his every attempted compromise had met with rebuff or betrayal but the utility to his approach to politics to actively play the Barbarian was instantly appreciated by others around him and by those who followed him the ability was inherent in the totalizing discourse that I started from the but once the secret was laid bare it's only a matter of time before it its user becomes habitual and so the practice of stepping outside the Imperial system and attacking it only in order to find a place in it was adopted by every political figure of any consequence in the fifth century whether a powerful general like iet s a client king like Theodoric a pirate chieftain like Marcellinus or the short-lived Emperor Maggiore n' they all follow the example of Alaric and each time the tactic worked further power drained away from the organs of a Roman state that could be handled with such evident contempt regional aristocracies which had long been used to playing for a position at the imperial court in the 4th century found themselves back upon their own resources or the local strongman who happen to be nearest at the time and all of this stems from the recognition I would argue of a gap between the recognition of the gap between rhetoric and practice of fourth century politics the 4th century rhetoric of civilization and barbarism is just that it's a political rhetoric used as a weapon to portray an opponent as standing outside the Roman Commonwealth but that same political rhetoric contained within it a set of options for political behavior that might be embraced as useful in themselves once the way had been shown by a man Alaric who was demonized as a barbarian and then decided to do what no one had done before and act like a barbarian the sheer utility of the approach made its widespread adoption inevitable and it also destroyed the Western Roman Empire over several decades of soldiers jockeying for position within a system by threatening to destroy it the system itself ceased to be worth fighting for once the unintended consequences of fourth century rhetorics were disclosed it took only a couple of generations for a couple of decades rather a couple of decades for a generation to realize with genuine surprise that the whole structure of imperial government was now so weak that they no longer needed an emperor at all no one wielded the knife and no one had willed the end to come but the political rhetoric of the relate Roman Empire had driven it to suicide thank you I wanted to take this group freak minute Kocher very much for providing the one for Chillicothe coming speak to us today and give special thanks to the head of the history department seventeen and two secretaries and security partners Jennifer - words without which this would not have been possible so I think we're gonna go ahead and take questions sighs Linda also take a minute to acknowledge everyone anything anything at all that's probably not too much in that too - um to be getting on with so because there was a satisfactory Avenue other than available to them funded funded fundamentally that there was there was an option an Alaric Alaric and his generate really it his and and there are options available to lots of people at ala Rex own time they keep doing it they think they they continue to to put to try to play by the old fourth century rules and continue to continue to effectively even while Alaric is going through this the process of his career it's just I really do think it's this question of and the accident of a subaltern population of a sort that just had was was new to the was new to the for the very end of the fourth century Empire I think so I think I think it's an accident that Alaric is one of the really close to being the first person put in a position where this suddenly the circumstances make it possible for him to see this I'm a specialist in value I have where God's trafficking and juiciest is not pretend to kiss about because lean was in right exactly I mean the the you know the the events of 376th through three seven eight which culminate in the Battle of Adrianople where of course an emperor is killed on the battlefield just shocking there the combination of you know that's not it's not a barbarian invasion of any sort it's it's a it's a it's a negotiated transfer of populations that goes very very badly wrong through incompetence and it's exactly and again it's very much an accident that the type of maneuver that had worked perfectly well for hundreds of years you could bring tens of thousands of people from across the Rhine or Danube and settled them comfortably in the Roman provinces been going on for centuries and never it really never caused me problems and then going forward it stopped causing problems I mean it could worked again several times afterwards what went wrong was very simply not having enough hit users phrase but not having enough boots on the ground at the time to to actually and make the population transfer work and once the rebellion started it got violently out of hand and that's into what you have is the Balkans in flames but I don't and but it's eric is a descendant of that moment in a sense Alaric is the the end of that the end result of the adrianople campaigns is the settlement somewhere and somewhere in what's now Bulgaria probably of this population that almost certainly would eventually have been reintegrated in but in the three 90s when theaters was who had not yet been integrated into the structure of the Roman army and so we so served in their own units and it's again this sort of I mean accident it the interplay between between circumstance and and system is a really really significant way of looking at lots of events in the ancient world I think and again you we spoke briefly at lunch we talked about all castis today after and the way in which the achievement of all of of Octavian who becomes or Gustus is fundamentally a set of tiny historical accidents but none of them would have been possible without the structure of a failing Republican system right and it's the structural failure of the Republican system that makes August as possible but but its historical accident that makes more gustas happen and and so I think that's really what we what we see here is that there's no inevitability of the fall of the fall of Rome I mean that's know of the for Verona and it's you know Rachel in brief well you know the difficulty of course is is recording any non-elite voices in the ancient world I mean the one the one the one thing I will say is that coins disseminate this rhetorical binary so widely that I think everybody and and the Roman Empire's a hue is a heavily monetized economy in the fourth century small changes everywhere and you know that I should have actually put up a picture of the reverse of one of the most common coins which is of an emperor dragging a barbarian by the hair or of a horseman with the spear lancing a little barbarian like this on the ground and so in a sense of the diffusion of the image of a binary between Roman Emperor looking stone on one side of the coin and barbarian being trampled on the other it's I mean there is a there's the that binary must have penetrated very widely as a as a meme or something his fashion sculptures that we're having what the literature was it was early cheese to bring my Mary unless you keep her alive right I mean that's it's all part of the to love yes the answer is yes now and and and in fact the literature is what shows you that these binaries don't correspond to real categories right because the same person who is take the Emperor Valens who is a learning model Roman Emperor in some discourses and is and is literally made into into into the image of a barbarian savage and other in other accounts and you mentioning a meal as Marcellinus would be would be one of the main places where where Valens is portrayed and not just desert as a bumbling rural don't but as an actual barbarian and and again it's very much it's very much circumstantial but yes of course we do we have we have quite a lot of in fact sometimes the same author depending upon what the speech or the literary text is for we'll write about the same person placing them subtly in a different one camp or another or in a different way and we find the same thing I mean there's a level at which this or the everything I'm talking about has already been worked has already been worked over very thoroughly in terms of heresy in orthodoxy so the all the last 25 years of talking about constructing orthodoxy verses and and constructing heresy through politics of church councils it's very similar to what we find in the literary sources for this they were formulated suggesting I think that lingered and preoccupied with every concerns and that's just driving in our country follow and as you presented this you know our demonization of the atomic world I'm on your bacteria this is meant for light on I'm well - yeah the Achilles heel civilization it's no no I think we need no not at all I mean I think you know I think that every generation does remake its own make its own version of the fall of Rome my book I wrote about the Goths was reviewed in Germany as being the post 9/11 American version of the Gothic wars and it was reviewed in the Weekly Standard as an anti American tract so it was you know quite liberally and as and so again I flagged that up in order to very consciously point out that I am there's no way not to be informed by what you see in the world around you and in your reading of the past and not not because anyone reading of the fall of Rome is right and I mean there's some that we can exclude I don't think lead poisoning brought down right but but there are lots of things this is you know this reading is not exclusive of a dozen other equally important ways of thinking about the fall of Rome but it's clear to me that my eye my thinking about how Imperial structures function at the edge of empire and amongst subaltern classes and groups is clearly informed by what we see going on around I've seen going on around me in the past 10 15 years and also by you know the difficult book but the book blow back that talks about you know who effectively the creation of problems for the American Empire by both Soviet and and American behavior during the late stages of the Cold War and I think that there's a level at which that's you know clearly had an impact on on my thinking that I couldn't possibly deny so you're welcome thanks for thanks for having me you

Channel: Washington and Lee University

Views: 132,953

Rating: 4.437058 out of 5

Keywords: Roman Empire, Michael Kulikowski, History Department

Id: ltjH6HPs7vg

Length: 55min 52sec (3352 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 15 2012