The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History

by Peter Heather

  No wonder Ausonius didn’t send Symmachus the poem. He had him hook, line and sinker, and all Symmachus could manage in response, when he did finally reel in a copy, was a little sarcasm about the number of fish:

  I should certainly not believe all the great things you say of the source of the Moselle, did I not know that you never tell a lie: even in poetry . . . And yet, though I have often found myself at your table and there have marvelled at most other articles of food . . . I have never found there fish such as you describe.51

  Leaving aside the question of fish, Ausonius’ Mosella caught the prevailing mood of its Treveran audience and due rewards quickly followed. Symmachus’ countship had made him – briefly – Ausonius’ superior (fifteen–love). But ‘count third-class’ has a rather dismally dismissive ring to it anyway, which is not just to do with literal translation,52 and shortly after composing the Mosella Ausonius was promoted to comes et quaestor, count and quaestor. The quaestor was the emperor’s legal officer and ranked as count first-class (thirty–fifteen Ausonius). Then, on Valentinian’s death in November 375, Ausonius’ old pupil Gratian became emperor instead, and Ausonius’ family was launched on a round of nepotism that beggars the imagination. Ausonius himself became Praetorian Prefect (first minister) for Gaul and then for Gaul, Italy and Africa (an unusual combination). In the meantime, his son operated as joint first minister in Gaul, and then first minister in Italy; his father – now about ninety years old – became first minister in the western Balkans (Illyricum); his son-in-law became deputy first minister in Macedonia, and his nephew head of the imperial treasury (game, set, match and championship Ausonius). Such a spectacular gathering of the reins of power into the hands of Ausonius’ family could not have been predicted in 371, but the deft aim of the Mosella was enough to convince Symmachus that any sarcasm he might be tempted to vent needed to be tempered. His letter of complaint ended with praise of the verse, and was followed by many friendlier ones; Ausonius was too useful and important a contact at court for Symmachus to cut off his nose and spite his face over a few fish.53

  Symmachus’ senatorial embassy, and the literary exchange with which it ended, open up for us, therefore, the root-and-branch transformations that had remade the Roman world in the 400 years since Julius Caesar. Everywhere, the enthusiastic adoption of Roman values had made proper Romans of provincials. This was the true genius of the Empire as a historical phenomenon. Originally conquered and subdued by the legions, the indigenous people had gone on to build Roman towns and villas and to live Roman lives in their own communities. This did not happen overnight but nonetheless relatively early on – within two to four generations – in the history of an Empire that spanned 450 years. That the new subjects also swallowed wholesale the proclaimed virtues of the Latin language needs to be underlined. Not only did a few of the very wealthiest in the dominated areas attend metropolitan educational institutions – prompting modern parallels of Indian princes going to Eton, or the elites of Asia and South America to Harvard or MIT – but exact copies were set up in the provinces. Eventually, the teachers there became so expert that, as in the case of Ausonius, the provincials were able to instruct the metropolitans.

  These astonishing developments changed what it meant to be Roman. Once the same political culture, lifestyle and value system had established themselves more or less evenly from Hadrian’s Wall to the Euphrates, then all inhabitants of this huge area were legitimately Roman. ‘Roman’, no longer a geographic epithet, was now an entirely cultural identity accessible, potentially, to all. From this followed the most significant consequence of imperial success: having acquired Romanness, the new Romans were bound to assert their right to participate in the political process, to some share in the power and benefits that a stake in such a vast state brought with it. As early as AD 69 there was a major revolt in Gaul, partly motivated by this rising sense of a new identity. The revolt was defeated, but by the fourth century the balance of power had changed. Symmachus, in Trier, was shown in no uncertain terms that ‘the better part of humankind’ comprised not just the Senate of Rome, but civilized Romans throughout the Roman world.

  2

  BARBARIANS

  IN AD 15, THE ROMAN ARMY of Germanicus Caesar, nephew of the reigning Augustus Tiberius, approached the Teutobergiensis Saltus (the Teutoburg Forest, 300 kilometres north-east of Trier). Six years before, three entire Roman legions commanded by P. Quinctilius Varus, totalling with their attendant auxiliary troops maybe twenty thousand men, had been massacred there in one of the most famous battles of antiquity.

  The scene lived up to its horrible associations. Varus’ extensive first camp, with its broad extent and headquarters marked out, testified to the whole army’s labours. Then a half-ruined breastwork and shallow ditch showed where the last pathetic remnant had gathered. On the open ground were whitening bones, scattered where men had fled, heaped up where they had stood and fought back. Fragments of spears and of horses’ limbs lay there, also human heads fastened to tree trunks. In groves nearby were the outlandish altars at which the Germans had massacred the Roman ‘colonels’ and ‘senior company-commanders’. Survivors of the catastrophe, who had escaped from the battle or from captivity, pointed out where the generals had fallen, and where the Eagles were captured. They showed where Varus had received his first wound, and where he died by his own unhappy hand. And they told of . . . all the gibbets and pits for the prisoners.1

  The massacre was the work of a coalition of Germanic warriors marshalled by one Arminius, a chieftain of the Cherusci, a small tribe living between the River Ems and the River Weser in what is now northern Germany. The ancient Roman sources describing the defeat were rediscovered and passed into broader circulation among Latin scholars in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and from that point on Arminius, generally known as Hermann (‘the German’) – the delatinized version of his name – became a symbol of German nationhood. Between 1676 and 1910 an extraordinary seventy-six operas were composed to celebrate his exploits, and in the nineteenth century a huge monument was constructed in his honour near the small city of Detmold in the middle of what is today called the Teutoburger Wald. The foundation stone was laid in 1841, and the monument was finally dedicated in 1875, four years after Bismarck’s defeat of France had united much of the German-speaking world of north-central Europe behind the Prussian monarchy. The 28-metre copper statue of Hermann is mounted on top of a stone base of similar height, which itself sits on top of a 400-metre hill. The edifice was a reminder that the triumph of modern German unification had its counterpart in the Roman era.

  The Hermann monument is actually in the wrong place. The name Teutoburger Wald was first coined for the forested area around Detmold in the seventeenth century, as people began to conjecture where the ancient battle might have taken place. Thanks to some extraordinary finds, part of the actual battlefield has now been identified about 70 kilometres to the north. Just outside Osnabrück, the north German coastal plain is fringed by uplands known as the Wiehengebirge. Since 1987, a large number of Roman coins and various items of military equipment have been recovered from an area about 6 by 4.5 kilometres on the northern fringes of this range, known as the Kalkriese-Niewedde depression. The southern boundary is marked by the Kalkriese Berg, a 100-metre hill, which was heavily wooded in antiquity. At the foot of its northern slope was a strip of sandy soil, part of it so narrow that only four men could have marched abreast. On the other side was a huge peat bog. In AD 9, the Roman army had been moving east–west along the narrow strip led by native guides provided by Arminius – he had convinced Varus that he had Rome’s interests at heart – when it was caught in an ambush between the wooded slopes to its south and the peat bog to the north. As told by our best source, a four-day running battle ensued, during the first part of which the Romans, despite substantial losses, held formation and continued to advance towards safety. By the fourth day, however, it had become clear that the army was cornered and doomed. At this point Varus,
having given permission to his surviving troops to do whatever seemed best in the circumstances, committed suicide rather than fall into the hands of his attackers. Few survived to tell the tale.2

  The catastrophe reads like a larger-scale version of that suffered by Cotta and his men, betrayed on to similarly impossible ground sixty-three years earlier. The long-term outcome, however, was different. Whereas the Eburones and the Treveri were eventually conquered, and propelled towards learning Latin, wearing togas and building self-governing towns, Arminius’ Cherusci were not. In the late Roman period, the area between the Rhine and the Elbe still remained beyond the imperial frontier, its material culture betraying none of the characteristic marks of Roman civilization. This ancient line in the European sand is still discernible in the modern divide between Romance languages descended from Latin, and Germanic languages. On the face of it, this would explain why the western Roman Empire was to give way, in the fifth century, to a series of successor kingdoms with, at their core, groups of armed Germanic-speakers. Germania east of the Rhine was not swallowed up by Rome’s legions in the conquest period because its inhabitants fought tooth and nail against them, and eventually had their full revenge more than four centuries later in the destruction of the Empire. This was certainly the explanation given by nineteenth-century German nationalists; argued in scholarly circles, it was also brought home to a much wider audience. Felix Dahn, whose great work on Germanic kingship remains a classic, also wrote a famous novel, Ein Kampf um Rom (War against Rome), which went through multiple editions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.3

  The odd thing about all this, though, is that if you had asked any fourth-century Roman where the main threat to imperial security lay, he would undoubtedly have said with Persia in the east. This was only sensible, because in about AD 300 Persia posed an incomparably greater threat to Roman order than did Germania, and no other frontier offered any real threat whatsoever.4 A closer reading of the sources, especially in the light of archaeological evidence that was unavailable to Dahn, suggests a rather different reason for the halting of the legions on the Rhine and Danube in the early first century from stirrings of German nationalism. It also explains why late Romans were much more concerned about Persia than about Germanic tribesmen.

  Germania and the Limits of Roman Expansion

  IN THE FIRST CENTURY AD, Germanic-speaking groups dominated most of central and northern Europe beyond Rome’s riverine frontiers. The Germani, as the Romans called them, spread all the way from the Rhine in the west (which, before the Roman conquest, had marked an approximate boundary between Europe’s Germanic and Celtic speakers) to beyond the River Vistula in the east, and from the Danube in the south to the North and Baltic Seas. Apart from some Iranian-speaking Sarmatian nomads on the Great Hungarian Plain, and Dacian-speakers in and around the arc of the Carpathians, Rome’s immediate neighbours were all Germanic-speakers: from Arminius’ Cherusci and their allies at the mouth of the Rhine, to the Bastarnae who dominated substantial tracts of territory at the mouth of the Danube (map 2). First-century Germania was thus much bigger than modern Germany.

  Trying to reconstruct the way of life and social institutions, not to mention the political and ideological structures of this vast territory, is a hugely difficult task. The main problem is that the societies of Germanic Europe, in the Roman period, were essentially illiterate. There is a fair amount of information of various kinds to be gleaned from Greek and Latin authors, but this has two major drawbacks. First, Roman writers were chiefly interested in Germanic societies for the threat – potential or actual – that they might pose to frontier security. What you find for the most part, therefore, are isolated pieces of narrative information concerning relations between the Empire and one or more of its immediate Germanic neighbours. Groups living away from the frontier hardly ever figure, and the inner workings of Germanic society are never explored. Second, what information there is is deeply coloured by the fact that, to Roman eyes, all Germani were barbarians. Barbarians were expected to behave in certain ways and embody a particular range of negative characteristics, and Roman commentators went out of their way to prove that this was so.

  Little survives from inside the Germanic world to correct the misapprehensions, omissions and slanted perspectives of our Roman authors. The Germani did use runes for divinatory purposes for much of the Roman period, and there are other, limited, exceptions to the illiteracy rule, but no detailed first-hand account of life has come down to us from inside Germania. So there is much that we do not know, and cannot ever know, and for most areas of life we have to fall back on information from Roman sources and on more or less informed guesswork. The best that can often be done when attempting to reconstruct social institutions, for instance, is to look at literary sources – especially legal ones – from Germanic-dominated kingdoms of the later fifth and sixth centuries, then try to extrapolate what might also be relevant to earlier eras. Stretching from the Rhine to the Crimea, Germania encompassed many different geographical and economic landscapes, and it is always necessary to consider whether something reported of one group might also be true of another. The literary evidence thus offers us a not entirely palatable choice between the biased testimony of Roman sources and material of a later date. Both can be revealing, but they must be handled honestly and with explicit acknowledgement of their inherent limitations.

  To some extent, the lack of first-hand contemporary Germanic sources has been filled by archaeological investigation. This has the priceless advantage of bringing us face to face with contemporary and genuinely Germanic artefacts and contexts, but Germanic archaeology is a subject with a difficult past. As a scientific discipline, it emerged in the late nineteenth century when the Hermann monument was under construction and when nationalism was sweeping through most of Europe. It was generally assumed at this date that the ‘nation’, or ‘people’, was the fundamental unit in which large groupings of human beings had operated in the distant past, and should operate now. Most nationalisms were also fuelled by a strong sense of their own innate superiority. The German nation may have been split up over time into lots of small political entities, but the efforts of Bismarck and others were now, through German unification, successfully restoring the natural and ancient order of things. In this cultural context, Germanic archaeology could have only one agenda: to research the historical origins and homeland of the German people. The first great proponent of such studies, Gustav Kossinna, noticed that the increasing quantities of artefacts then coming to light from excavated cemeteries could be grouped together by similarity of design and burial custom. He built his reputation on the argument that the geographical spread of particular groupings of artefacts and customs represented the territories of particular ancient peoples.5

  Such was the quasi-religious fervour surrounding the concept of the nation that politicians were ready to use identifications of the ancient spread of ‘peoples’ as evidence for claims about the present. At Versailles in 1919, Kossinna and one of his Polish disciples, Vladimir Kostrewszki, made rival cases for the positioning of the new German-Polish border on the basis of different identifications of the same set of ancient remains. Things got nastier still in the Nazi period, when high-flown claims about ancient Germania became a basis-cum-justification for territorial demands in Poland and the Ukraine, and an associated sense of ancient Germanic racial superiority led directly to the atrocious treatment of Slavic prisoners-of-war. In the last two generations, however, Germanic archaeology has successfully reinvented itself, and from this have resulted huge advances in our understanding of the long-term social and economic development of the Germani. With the excision of nationalistic assumptions from the interpretation of literary sources, the history of Germanic-speaking Europe in the Roman period can be rewritten in new and exciting ways.

  A first gain stems directly from new understandings of the patterns of similar remains which Kossinna was sure could identify the territories of ancient ‘peopl
es’. While the territory of ancient Germania was clearly dominated in a political sense by Germanic-speaking groups, it has emerged that the population of this vast territory was far from entirely Germanic. In the great era of nationalism, anywhere that threw up plausibly ancient Germanic remains was claimed as part of an ancient and greater German homeland. Analysis of river names has shown, however, that there was once in northern Europe a third population group with its own Indo-European language, located between the Celts and the Germani. These people were under the domination of the other two long before Roman commentators reached the area, and we know nothing about them. Much of ancient Germania was also the product of periodic Germanic expansion, west, south and east from a first, traceable, heartland beside the Baltic. Some early land-grabbing episodes made enough of a stir to register in ancient Greek sources, while others occurred after the rise of Rome and are better known. But this kind of expansion did not annihilate the indigenous, non-Germanic population of the areas concerned, so it is important to perceive Germania as meaning Germanic-dominated Europe. The more one moved south and east through the region during the Roman period, the more likely it is that Germanic-speakers constituted a politically dominant force in very mixed societies.

  The other salient fact about Germania in the Roman period was its complete lack of political unity. As map 2 (based on Tacitus’ gazetteer) makes clear, it was a highly fragmented world, comprising over fifty small sociopolitical units. There was a variety of ways in which, for brief periods, some of them might be brought together for particular purposes. As we have seen, Arminius mobilized a mixed force of tribesmen in AD 9 to defeat Varus. Half a century earlier, Julius Caesar had encountered another Germanic leader of extraordinary and slightly longer-lived power: Ariovistus, King of the Suebi, who by 71 BC had built up a substantial power-base on the eastern fringes of Gaul and for a time was even recognized as ‘friend’ by the Romans. Caesar eventually picked a fight with him in 58 BC, routing his army in Alsace. One major defeat was enough to break up the coalition. In Arminius’ day there was one other pre-eminent Germanic leader, Maroboduus, who ruled a coalition of various groupings based in Bohemia. Tacitus also records that some Germanic tribes belonged to cult leagues, and pinpoints a moment when one particular prophetess, Veleda, acquired huge influence. But neither cult leagues, nor prophetesses, nor temporarily pre-eminent leaders represented major steps towards Germanic unification.6