#ZeeJLF2017: The Fall of Rome and the End of Western Civilisation

of greek culture at the university of cambridge a well-known specialist in the ancient greek and roman worlds he has appeared on bbc tv and radio and written widely for the guardian the times has um i'll start again tim whitmarsh's a.d levint is professor of greek culture at the university of cambridge a well-known specialist in the ancient greek and roman worlds he has appeared on bbc tv and radio and written widely for the guardian the times literary supplement the london review of books and other newspapers please welcome tim mundmarsh well thank you very much for that generous introduction i i don't deserve the generous introduction today i'm here solely to introduce one of my great heroes professor brian ward perkins who's the professor of late antique history at the university of oxford brian wrote a fabulous book on the end of the roman empire what he's going to do is he's going to talk us through the contents of this book for 40 minutes or so then i'm going to throw one or two questions that i have that are burning questions that i feel i may not get another chance to ask i'm going to ask brian these questions and then we'll open it up to you so without any further ado as i said great honor and privilege to welcome brian ward perkins uh thank you all and before i start i just have to say being at the jaipur literary festival is an extraordinary experience in just three days i've heard more interesting talks i've had more interesting conversations that i'd have normally in a year i mean it is and the organization is formidable so i'm going to be talking about a book that i actually published in 2005 called the fall of rome and the end of civilization suitably portentous title uh partly uh agreed with the publishers of course uh the publisher is saying you know you've got to give it a title that makes people want to pick the book up it doesn't really matter whether it's totally okay but the important thing is people need to pick it up and read it actually i'm happy with the title and i will explain why in this talk i'm going to be talking about the roman empire and just to remind you there is the roman empire on the slide but in fact most precisely i'm going to be talking about the western half of the roman empire because at the end of the fourth century the empire is divided between two brother emperors who rule each half separately and in fact it remains divided for the rest of its existence and the eastern half survives the problems that i'm going to be talking about it is the western half which is the blue provinces uh and westwood that have the difficulties that i'm going to be talking about in my book i actually talk about two separate things first of all the nature of the invasions and to remind you what happens in the fifth century is people from beyond the rhine that the romans quite simply called the barbarians but which we now call the germanic people enter the empire and through a long process it takes about 70 years they gradually take over complete power so that by 476 there is no roman ruler left in the western empire but there are a series of kingdoms ruled by barbarian kings over different peoples vandals goths franks a whole series of different peoples the first half of my book is a defense of the idea that this was really rather an unpleasant process because in modern scholarship this is modern anglo-american scholarship italians have been perfectly happy with the idea that it was an unpleasant process but anglo-american scholarship was suggesting that in fact the incoming barbarians were not really invaders they were people who were invited in and they used the term accommodation for what i would call invasion but i'm not really going to be talking about that in any detail but it is important that i argue that it is an invasion because the second half of my book really depends on the idea that the invasions were highly disruptive historians have had this tendency to play down the importance of the fall of the western empire and they have tended to stress continuities through time and the buzzword that is fashionable in the west at the moment for the process of the disintegration of the roman empire and the establishment of the new germanic kingdoms is transformation now i think transformation doesn't fit the bill at all it is much too calm and soothing a word i think something very much more dramatic happened now the reason that historians can argue for transformation is that they look at texts many of the texts are actually produced by the new regimes precisely to give an impression that nothing has changed and we see this brilliantly on this slide here at the bottom of the slide is a coin minted by the ostrogothic king of italy theodric a totally autonomous king of italy who has taken over complete power in italy in the 490s but up above is a coin of the contemporary roman emperor in constantinople anastasius now the thing that is extraordinary about this is that theodric's coin is identical to the anastasius coin it has the figure of the emperor anastasius on it not theodric the inscription is an inscription saying that this is a coin of our lord and master anastasius not theoderic theodric does not feature anywhere on that coin so the presentation is a presentation of continuity so it's understandable that people have argued for a quiet peaceful transformation from one state of affairs the roman emperor to the new state of affairs the germanic kingdoms and they are largely historians now my background is partly as an archaeologist and i was also born in rome and if you're born in rome you do tend to see the end of the roman empire in slightly cataclysmic terms unsurprisingly but if you're an archaeologist you also notice that if you look at things in other words material culture which is what archaeologists look at something very dramatic happens with the end of the empire what i'm going to do is i'm going to take you through that looking first of all at the roman world now we all know that the romans could build spectacularly large buildings buildings like this the pantheon hundreds of thousands of bricks possibly millions of bricks i'm afraid i don't know the answer a huge concrete dome and a set of columns at the front which are monoliths of granite carved out of the top of a mountain in the eastern desert of egypt laboriously transported down to the nile floated down the nile to alexandria put on massive ships in alexandria taken to austria and then taken into rome i mean huge enterprises were done by the roman state which is impressive in itself but what i think is even more important and actually more impressive is to look much lower down the scale of the material evidence of what the romans did with ordinary things and what i argue in my book and i will now present you the evidence is that the romans produced ordinary things to very high quality in massive quantities and distributed them very widely indeed not just geographically but also socially so that it's not just the elite who actually benefited from the sophistication of the roman economy it's people much much lower down the social scale who also gained from it i'm going to look first at pottery the reason is that pottery survives perfectly in the soil it's a wonderful archaeological product because it's easily broken and then it's discarded but once it's discarded it's almost impossible to destroy a piece of pot you have to grind it up so archaeologists find almost all the pots that have ever been broken in the world are still there somewhere so it's a remarkably good product it's also very good because you can date it because archaeologists have done a lot of work uh studying the typologies of pot and stratifying it in archaeological excavation so you can give a date to a type of pot and you can provenance it you can tell by the style of the pot where it came from and if you're in any doubt you can do a petrographical analysis of the clay and in fact pin down its geographical location so pottery is a formidably useful instrument of research and i also think it's very very useful because it is a basic product it's not a luxury item now the romans produced pottery by the tongue if you are a classical archaeologist or if you worked on a classical archaeological site in the mediterranean you will realize that pottery is actually a menace there's so much of it that vast amounts of time are spent washing it categorizing it storing writing little labels on it it's a menace it's a real pest and it's very easy to show the the quantity but first of all i want to look at the quality it's very difficult to judge the quality of pottery from pictures but this is these are the products of a kiln site in the south of france at la grove which i'll be talking about in some detail and you can see that these are little bowls they're produced they're produced from refined clay they're produced on a fast wheel so they've got very thin walls they're fired once they're then dipped in a gloss and they're fired twice so they come out with this nice smooth glazed look and they're very very standardized i have actually brought along some pieces of pottery i had a sort of fond imagination that the mughal tent would be a little you know intimate space where i could pass around my bits of pot but i brought some bits of pot so if anybody actually wants to feel a piece of roma pottery and feeling pottery is the way to get its quality do come up afterwards and have a feel you're very very welcome so quality is one crucial thing but also we then have the scale of production and la grofa zenk has produced this marvelous piece of evidence because the la grofa sank has this gun off is it still working okay um the the la grofa zenk uh pottery kilns were massive structures and a series of individual potters clubbed together to build these massive kilns which they then stacked together but then they had to know which were their pots that came out of the firing and fortunately they wrote their records scratched onto pieces of pottery from lagro for zinc so that is a la growth dish with a graffito recording the stacking of a kiln it's in three columns first column is a name which must be the name of the potter the second column is a type of pot the name of a type of pot and the third column is a number which must be the number of pots that have been put into the kiln and what is extraordinary is that this records up to thirty thousand pots being fired at one time in one of these huge kilns as i said i mean quality is important and people like that lagrofazenk potters were proud of their wares it's very frequent with these types of pottery to stamp them with the name of the potter and in fact the piece i brought along which you can see at the end is actually got a name stamp on it quality control was remarkable this is lagro for zenk again it's we're looking down into a pit and you are looking at a whole series of vessels in the bottom of the pit there were ten thousand vessels dumped into this pit some of them were obviously defective some of them are near perfect but not quite perfect this is the la grofa zang enterprise discarding seconds making sure that they don't enter the market in order to devalue the quality of their goods and some of the complete vessels actually have a little pickaxe hole punched into the base of them to make sure that they absolutely don't get out into the market distribution is then also extraordinary that's la grofa's ink the large red dot all of the small red dots are places where lagro for zinc pottery has been found i don't think la grofa's anc pottery ever reached india but actually the earlier pottery of the aratine kilns even reached india via the red sea trade i'm sorry to sort of bang on about pottery but as you can tell i'm quite an enthusiast for it the romans have the dubious distinction that i think they're the they're certainly the first culture in the west to actually have to create a garbage crisis they produce so much stuff that huge areas of land are just covered in rubbish this remarkable slide here is the rubbish dumps of a town called antinopolis in middle egypt and more or less going two-thirds up the slide all of that is just bits of pot discarded in the fourth fifth century in antoniopolis that detail shows you a better idea of what this is this is a huge garbage pile it's perhaps a dubious distinction but nonetheless it's impressive about the scale and the sophistication of the roman economy now pots are very good evidence and some people have said to me you know you're a bit obsessed about pots do they really matter well yes they do matter because in fact in terms of a basic human need eating and cooking they are very fundamental and in fact in this early period before there's a large scale availability of metal cooking wears and also plastic for storage they are basic for cooking and storage much more than they are today so they are important but also they're a very very good surrogate for things that we know much less about pots survive most organic things don't but i believe it's reasonable to argue that if you have complex sophisticated potting industries able to move things over very large distances and sell them in remote markets you almost certainly have exactly the same thing for things like clothing footwear agricultural tools domestic tools i it seems much more logical that that same complexity exists for these other things which we cannot document so well archaeologically than to argue that actually pots is it's an anomaly this is a sort of strange thing that just happened to happen and also there is actually plenty of supportive evidence for the picture i'm giving coinage you can do complicated things through barter but coins unquestionably facilitate exchange with barter you have to either immediately transfer the goods or you have to trust the person that you are bartering with that they will deliver the goods that you want later barter requires either immediate contact or trust coins means you only have to trust the coin and that is much easier and definitely facilitates exchange and the roman world is awash with coins and very importantly it's a wash with copper coins small denominational coins which shows that people in an ordinary day-to-day life are using coin as as a crucial to their exchange and purchasing we happen to know a lot about this from britain because in britain there's a remarkable recent scheme called the portable antiquities scheme in britain it's actually legal to use a meta metal detector but you can't use it on protected sites but you can use it in general in in the countryside but you are encouraged to report your fines to a portable antiquities officer in a local museum so lots of metal detectorists are out there finding coins all over britain and then reporting them and when they're reported they're photographed they're weighed and they're put on a single database so you can actually tell an awful lot about coinage in britain today and this shows you the fine spots of one single type of coinage uh from the mid to late fourth century in britain and as you see they're actually interestingly they don't reach the most remote parts in the far north and the far west but in the southeast they're ubiquitous and crucially they are found not just in towns not just on aristocratic villa sites they're also found on ordinary rural settlements coins are being used one can say by everyone [Music] there's also evidence from one very important sector that we haven't looked at at all which is the agricultural sector i mean so far i've just looked at the production of goods uh and the availability of coin and obviously most people are actually working in the countryside probably 80 percent of people the evidence from the countryside is that it is densely and apparently prosperously settled through most of the roman period this is a particularly spectacular example of it these are villages in northern syria in a limestone hills of northern syria those look like rather smart houses they're actually ordinary farmers houses they're very simple there's two rooms above for living in and there's two rooms below for storage and for animal husbandry they're actually very basic houses but they are beautifully made of cut limestone they must have been made by professional masons the people buying these houses are paying people to make their house they're not just running up their own house and they once had tiled roofs so seemingly these people in syria who are not they're certainly not aristocrats they're they're probably not the poorest but they're certain they're not they're not they're not exceptional people are living in extraordinarily well appointed houses we're lucky there because because they built in limestone and because people haven't lived there subsequently they're so well preserved they also do this love superb thing for us they write inscriptions over their doorways with a date so we know that these are fourth fifth and into the sixth century now that part of syria isn't peculiarly well suited to agriculture so how was this being supported we see the nature of the landscape here there are pockets of arable but most of it is that rather dry lands limestone terrain that you see in the background and in fact on the ridge top right that's one of these roman settlements so most of it is that dry limestone but in that dry limestone there are pockets of soil and in fact it was very very suitable for growing olive trees and all of these villages have a mass of olive presses around them so almost certainly what is happening here is that the roman economy is sophisticated enough to allow for specialization of agriculture in particular regions that are suited to it and that these people are able to sell their olive oil and buy the other basic agricultural and food products that they need that's a remarkable picture admittedly this is exceptionally good evidence but there are suggestions that you know this is quite widespread through the roman world what it also suggests of course is that productivity increases through the through the enabling specialization the thing i want to emphasize and i've probably emphasized it enough already uh is that what this roman economy is doing is it is actually benefiting people way below the level of the ruling class and if you go to a place like pompeii you see this vividly pompeii has nice paved streets it's even got you can probably just see it stepping stones for being able to walk across the street in case they happen to be covered in horse manure or whatever would you say you don't want to dirty or nice roman shoes pompeii also has a network of public water fountains that's one of them marked by the red arrow they're dotted around the town so that there is water access for any citizen in pompei and that water is piped clean water being brought into the city and in india i don't think i need to emphasize the importance of piped clean water as a fundamental urban amenity so every person living in pompeii had access to good water that is not a mean achievement uh in the west we tend to take this sort of thing for granted because we're so used to it but actually it's worth emphasizing how extraordinary uh and important this is now all of this changes in the post roman centuries almost all the economic sophistication gets caught in a downward spiral that i think you will see the evidence is far more serious than just a recession in my view it is reasonable to see it as a collapse and indeed the end of a civilization though later i will have to justify my use of the word civilization uh to talk when talking about this process if we look at manufactured goods an extreme case is britain britain in the third and fourth centuries had a number of regional specialized pottery makers the top right all of the lozenges are regional pottery makers these people are making pots like the pot below fine wheel turn pottery with a gloss decoration on top rather like the stuff from lagro for zinc the map on the left it shows one it the arrow shows the the place where these pots are being made it's near oxford and the other dots are a distribution map of where oxford where pottery is found so britain has sophisticated pottery industries and one thing that actually i forgot to mention earlier but i can throw it in now is pottery distribution amounts of pottery are peculiarly striking because pottery is not easy to move it's heavy it breaks very straightforwardly and furthermore you don't make a lot of money out of selling an individual pot to create a distribution map like that you must have a very sophisticated large-scale uh distribution system working now in the post-roman period that goes i mean britain is i have to admit peculiarly dramatic but in just the space of a few decades all of these pottery industries disappear and the only pottery made in britain from the late from the mid 5th century into around the end of the 7th century is stuff like this basic cooking pots which actually have been made without the use of the wheel they're hand shaped they're very badly fired there are there's no evidence of kilns in this later period they're probably piled up on the ground wood is put on top of them and essentially you have a bonfire and you fire your pots within it it's an extraordinary fact but it is true that there is no wheel turned pottery in later fifth and early sixth century britain the use of the wheel one of the most basic technologies when it comes to making pots disappears people ask me why and i i don't really know i mean but i can tell you it's a fact the only hypothesis is that the the market has been so disrupted and has become so local that it's not even worth investing in a potter's wheel which is hard to believe but you have to come up with an explanation for it this happened why it happened we can speculate about but we certainly have to confront the fact that it did happen in the rest of the mediterranean it's not quite so in the mediterranean regions it's not quite so dramatic but all those fine tablewares disappear there's a small amount of import into the seventh century but very very little and basically you only have cooking pots wheel turned some of it of quite good quality like that nice piece in the middle there most of it fairly straightforward and essentially really just get one type of pot these little sort of bulbous cooking pots and furthermore the quantities are extraordinarily much smaller as i said if you're a roman archaeologist pottery is a menace if you're an early medieval archaeologist you get very very excited when you find any pottery at all and it's a complete contrast from the situation earlier coins roughly the same story uh britain coinage completely disappears there's no native minted coinage in britain between 500 and 700 a.d 200 years of no native coinage all there is is a tiny quantity of imported gold from the continent so these are frankish coins uh in a king's burial from the famous sutton who ship burial 625 and the evidence i think is unequivocal that coinage is not being used for exchange this is high status luxury items being used as gifts rather than in any economic function on the continent it's a little bit different because uh people the kings did continue to mint but only in gold copper coinage disappears uh from the entire west roman empire so that means that all that local exchange should have been facilitated by the and uh and i i mean it's literally the millions and millions of copper roman coins goes agriculture which is fundamental uh presents a problem there's no doubt at all uh that the archaeological evidence is quite dramatic here we should see an area north of rome that's rome down at the bottom which has been surveyed extensively by the british school of rome in fact under my father in the 1950s and 1960s and every single one of those dots is a roman rural settlement if you can see them the the open circles are aristocratic villas but the little black dots are ordinary peasant farmsteads hundreds of them scattered across the landscape that's the situation first century a.d the same area in the fifth and sixth century a.d probably reduced to about a third the number of sites maybe even a quarter of the number of sites there is a difficulty though because archaeologists find these sites by their surface remains so you need to have bits of pot that can be dated in order to find the site and it is possible that what we're looking at here is not quite the devastating drop in population that the evidence immediately suggests but a devastating drop in the availability of dateable pottery that in itself though is interesting it shows that peasants in the 1st century ad have access to fine pottery which we can identify and date peasants in the 5th and 6th century do not and we can say that absolutely categorically i suspect there's also a quite a dramatic population drop but that's more difficult i mean so that's impossible to prove because of this variable about the availability of of dateable and findable material this is a society that does not have those comfortable nice things that were available widely in the roman period and if we look at a town in this period this is a site called luna in northern italy this air view shows in the middle of the slide the rectangular forum square and the rectangular forum square was flanked by porticos which opened into shops so that you could go shopping in the shade or in the drive it was raining and buy from the a little bit like the jaipur streets as it were you know an amenity is provided for shoppers there is piped water there are water fountains there's a paved road which you can see going off at the right going down to the port and there are also spectacular public buildings a great big basilica a huge temple it's got all the stuff that we're familiar with in a roman town and it's comfortable i excavated here in the 1970s and the side of my excavation is that shown by the arrow the white arrow it's a little corner of the forum and what we found is that the forum had been completely abandoned all its public buildings were no longer functioning it had been robbed of its marble and the forum was covered by a thick layer of silt and on top of that silt were small two roomed wooden houses no use of stone no use of mortar no use of tiles these are little wooden houses presumably with thatched roofs and that is typical of the picture even in italy as it were the sort of heart of the former roman empire we are looking at towns of a dramatically different type in this post-roman change period so big change i hope i've convinced you of that from complexity which actually brought a degree of well-being that's that reached far deeper than the the simple elite down to a much simpler society that is also considerably less comfortable i call this the end of a civilization i was very careful in my book to make it clear that i didn't imply any moral superiority to the romans i think we all know that highly civilized people are capable of being very very unpleasant indeed there is nothing as it were morally superior in having technological mouse but i did suggest that what we're looking at that we can use civilization in a broader sense like for instance the way we talk about the indus valley civilization basically we're talking about complex societies that are able to sustain complicated and intricate things like cities that's that's the way that i use civilization and i think it is reasonable to talk about the end of roman civilization my books actually entitled the fall of rome and the end of civilization uh not roman civilization in the west and i actually can defend that because at the very end of my book i explain why i think the end of civilization in the in the west roman empire is important for us firstly it shows that civilizations do die or sorry so far they always have uh we think ours will go on forever uh it is worth realizing that that is probably unlikely also and so therefore we need to have a degree of care for our civilization and we need to have a degree of humility about our position in the world the truth is in the west after the fall of rome from about 600 onwards the trajectory of economic sophistication has been ever ever more complex and ever more prosperous but is that actually going to go on forever and the second point i make which is very important is that the nature of the collapse which i hope you can accept is dramatic was actually partly a function of the precise sophistication of the roman economy the roman economy depended on specialized labor in fact the roman defense defended on a specialized professional army that's fine as long as everything works but if you are a peasant uh in central gall and you're buying your pottery from la grofa's inc and the disruptions of the fall of the roman empire mean that that market is disrupted uh what do you do you don't have local potters anymore you don't have the local know-how so in fact you're in a much worse position than if your economy was slightly less evolved and still contained local elements to it and in fact i mean i argue this in my book the situation in the fifth sixth century in the west archaeologically is worse if we can use the word worse than the situation in the immediate pre-roman prehistoric times actually the the recession has gone down deeper even than pre-roman times and i argue that's precisely because of the complexity of the roman world which has actually made the economy extremely fragile our economy i don't want to put a figure on it is probably a thousand times more complex than the roman one and we need to realize that you know if our economy does collapse we really are in very very very serious trouble so that's why i actually thought calling the book and the end of civilization was valid because it's making a contemporary point i've got five minutes so i'm just going to spend those on a couple of reflections this book was published in 2005 and i was actually delighted well no sorry i wasn't delighted the financial crash of 2008 in some ways made my point uh and i was picked up by some newspapers you know they said oh you know look at the roman empire look at 2008 and the 2008 i mean it did make exactly the right point you know the complexity we got ourselves into meant that when things started to go wrong we were in a mess that was fine more recently it's been picked up by people uh who are worried about the refugee crisis in europe and they've argued that actually i'm arguing that europeans need to be more aggressive in keeping refugees out i don't that certainly wasn't what i was writing about and i'm not particularly happy about it this is the danger about you know making modern parallels when you're writing a history book you might be used by all sorts of people in all sorts of different ways and in fact a fellow academic in york wrote some really very unpleasant things about me because he said that you know what i was arguing about was that you know we needed to keep all foreigners out of britain i mean actually the roman empire was really good at absorbing foreigners i mean there was no in a sense that they wanted to keep armed barbarians out i think that's not unreasonable but they were perfectly happy i mean the frontiers were totally open and i'm certainly wasn't talking anything about you know we need to defend our borders much more closely coming to india and being a brit i mean i obviously also thought what does this tell us about empires um because you know i'm arguing that roman empire's rather a good thing now i hasten immediately to stress that this does not mean that i think that all empires are a good thing but what i think it does show is that empires can be very very different the roman empire is extraordinarily different to the british empire for a start the romans were much more culturally adaptive than the british when they took over the greek east they actually uh looked up to the greek culture that they took over it's as if you know the british had arrived in india and thought here is a much more sophisticated and old culture than our own let's take it on so the romans behave and even when they're taking over northern barbarian lands like britain when they get to the site of somewhere like bath and there's a temple of a local god called saul they build a new temple and they call it sul minerva identifying saul with one of the roman gods that is not the british way of doing things and the roman empire it was brutally imposed that is beyond doubt as brutally as any empire has imposed its will and people in the early centuries rose up against it wanting to be free people like verse and get rich in gaul buddhica in britain but by the fourth century there is no evidence that people living under roman rule wanted to get out from roman rule with a single exception of a difficult group the jews whose religious identity did tend to keep them separately and they do occasionally revolt as jews wanting to be free we do have revolts in the fifth century but they're social revolts they're revolts by peasants and slaves who want to be freed of servitude they've got nothing to do with wanting to be out of roman rule they just want to be free of the social oppression now that's an extraordinary fact and the roman empire has actually been successful in bringing in the people that it ruled and very remarkably the roman oh i'm sorry the roman emperors actually spent very little time anymore in italy roman empire doesn't have a center and a periphery like say britain and india the actual emperors are spending their time in the shaded areas near the frontiers and they come from they're actually born in what's uh now the north was now the north balkans they're not actually italians this and their aristocracy is a mix of people from all over the empire completely different say to the british in india it's as though queen victoria uh came from was born from a sikh family and she actually spent her time in melbourne delhi cape town ottawa and just occasionally made ceremonial visits to london the roman empire is a very different empire and a fascinatingly different empire for that reason i've run my 45 minutes thank you very much well thank you so much for that brian that was wonderful also from a chair's point of view um i don't know if you can well you can't see the clock but um brian finished exactly on 12 o'clock which is from my point of view as i say um well worth a round of applause for in itself um i wanted to begin by asking you about two areas or at least picking up two areas where i think you've been extremely radical here one is by giving us a talk in the later the latest roman emperor i don't know what i should have done giving us a talk on the later roman empire without mentioning christianity at all most scholars in on this era are obsessed with the image of christianity and they they because this is the era when uh christianity comes in and in particular when in the fourth century constant signs conversion or whatever it was um adoption of the christian cult actually normalizes eventually normalizes christianity within the roman empire so brian hasn't told us about any of that whatsoever he's focused much more on the trade and the economic side of it which is uh as i say within the field that's a revolutionary gesture the other thing that i thought was significantly revolutionary about this was that you were taking these very unfashionable concepts like civilization and decline and saying that if we have a nuanced approach to these things they can do some work for us people are very cautious about terms like civilization and decline because they have been overworked because there have been far too imperialistic if you like models being built around them 150 years ago or so so reappraising these terms and thinking about how they might be useful was one of the radical gestures so that's where i wanted to start really and i wanted to ask a first question which was about going on what you were saying at the end of your talk whether you think there are lessons that can be learnt from this story clearly it's not a lesson about how empires are great but do you think complex economies everyone in society that might be one reading of your book that if we want to have a world of prosperity for all we need to have these really elaborate distribution networks we have to have specialized labor we have to have all sorts of people from all over the world interconnecting that's a very interesting question and i don't really know the answer because obviously in the present day we are worrying precisely about that and obviously the consequences of globalization which have been positive for china and india have had problems elsewhere and actually when i was re-reading my book for this talk you know i did realize that you know the potters of la grofa zinc put potters out of business in the areas they're selling their pots which is something that doesn't even occur to me when i wrote the book but now when globalization is discussed you know there's a there's that downside for those people i don't think i can answer that question the one thing i do know is that everybody wants and it's hard not to say that everybody has the right to a decent standard of comfort that i can say i'd also would like to emphasize that at the bottom of roman society there were the very very poor we don't know how many uh there were also slaves um so it's i mean it's not i'm not saying it's paradise in the roman world but what i am saying is it's a world that's able to provide decent amenities to a lot of people can i ask you guys pick up that point about slaves uh one very crude caricature of the way in which labor um operated shifting from say the third century ce a.d through to the eighth century is that you get a shift away from slave labor from unfree labor towards surf labor free but um disempowered surf labor firstly is that a correct caricature of the situation and secondly for those people at the very bottom would it be fair to say that their lot may have improved marginally even though you wouldn't still want to be you wouldn't choose that life for yourself i suspect in terms of material comfort their lot was better under the roman empire that i suspect uh in terms of their sense of well-being hard to say but actually the very important thing to realize is that roman slave labor agricultural slave labor was very confined regionally and it wasn't the norm and there are also plenty of slaves in the post-roman period slavery disappears very very slowly okay well it's probably enough for me let's open it up to questions here there's a question at the front here if we have a microphone it's coming sir this is a slightly unrelated question but there's a wonderful author called alan massey from scotland news to write about roman emperors he's still writing alan massey yes is a wonderful a scottish author is to write about roman empire emperors is he still writing i don't know if there's a question there behind you oh thank you so for that wonderful talk so you talked about how we need a complex economy for most number of people to benefit right and you say that the romans were very they absorbed different cultures and then you also made the point that the economy and the society we have today is vastly more complex so do you think we should be more tentative in absorbing people since the effects the spillover effects of being very open could be more than the than they were to the romans i'm terribly sorry you're going to have to repeat a little bit slow at the end of that question yeah i'm asking that you made a point that the economy and the culture and society we have right now is vastly more complex than what the romans had and you also said that the romans were more absorbing of different cultures right so should we we be more tentative in absorbing because the spillover effects which because we are more fragile would be more should we be more careful than the romans were since the you know the after effects can be more devastating or whatever ah i i didn't suggest that the the the romans cultural accommodation was dangerous to them no i think it's actually a great positive in the for the romans because it does mean they can construct an empire with which people then identify and they can absorb i mean the romans are very good at absorbing immigrants uh and also and taking over areas and then making them part of the empire don't think that was part of the the danger to them it was actually a positive that the romans founding myth was that they were founded by immigrants they always thought of immigration as a positive thing there is a okay right if i could just ask about when the barbarians invaded why were they not repelled by the famous roman army so would it be that the leadership from the empire emperors ceased would it be that the military efficiency crumbled or had they run out of money because that that must be the catalyst as to what why weren't they actually stopped or do we just not know um we don't know but um i think the most important thing to realize is that the balance of roman power and pub one fundamental thing is the economy beyond the frontier is less sophisticated people are less prosperous so there is a pull factor into the empire from people outside a number of things can explain it there's the appearance of the huns who disrupt the germanic world and actually force people westward also the crucial fact that actually the balance between roman power and barbarian power is always quite finely balanced and in fact in the third century the roman empire almost collapses in exactly the way it does in the fifth century it could have collapsed in the third century it happens not to but it could have happened and a number of things it's it is i think straightforwardly there are just too many germanic invaders and it is too common it's not helped by the fact that romans fight a series of civil wars at exactly the wrong moment i think it's sort of bad luck bad policy a difficult situation that was always quite finely balanced and well women at the back with yeah very good afternoon so so i'm particularly interested in the institution of slavery in rome at that point of time and how was it different from the institution of slavery in greece in greece that's a question i do not know i'm afraid i my expertise starts with the later roman empire and goes on i don't know um tim might know well uh put very simply the major difference is that in greece people were usually earlier periods in greece because of course at this stage greece is part of the roman world but in the earlier times greece uh slaves in greece were seen as confined to that status by nature so there weren't there was very little opportunity to become free whereas in the roman world there's a fairly fluid boundary between the free and the slaves so lots of people do save up money and gain their freedom and then their children become roman citizens the same as anyone else but let's thank brian one more time thank you so much brian for that very illuminating uh talk and thank you to tim for the

Channel: Jaipur Literature Festival

Views: 4,834

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Keywords: ZeeJLF2017

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Length: 55min 15sec (3315 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 19 2017