Faith in the superiority of Roman culture was, to some extent, shared by the Germanic peoples themselves. Their presentation of their rule in a very Roman guise was partly aimed at their local Roman subjects, but it almost certainly also pleased the rulers themselves. In Ostrogothic Italy, as we have seen, Theoderic and his successors were happy to present themselves as the upholders of Roman culture, and to see this as a vital difference between themselves and the true barbarians beyond. Indeed, even when we get a glimpse of underlying ‘Gothicness’ (as with Theoderic’s moustache, or Cyprianus’ wish to teach his children the Gothic language), it is always presented in a very ‘Roman’ way. The praise that Cyprianus received for bringing up his children to speak Gothic was penned in the elegant Latin of Cassiodorus, and Theoderic’s hair and moustache were carefully crimped for presentation on an otherwise entirely ‘Roman’ object (Fig.4.2, at p. 73). It was inevitable that Roman ways, honed and perfected by hundreds of years of effortless superiority, would be very beguiling to the new Germanic masters of the West, and would emerge even in unlikely contexts. In the Frankish kingdom of the 570s, Chilperic is recorded to have built circuses for chariot-racing at Soissons and Paris in clear emulation of Roman practice. At this late date and in this northern clime, he was almost certainly satisfying his own vanity far more than the expectations of his subjects.31
If we look at the two large Germanic kingdoms that survived to the end of the sixth century, those of the Visigoths and of the Franks, what seems to have happened is that the indigenous Roman population eventually adopted the identity of their masters, and became ‘Visigoths’ or ‘Franks’ (from which ‘Français’ and ‘French’ derive); but at the same time these masters adopted the culture of their subjects—in particular dropping their native language and religion in favour of those of their subjects. The explanation, I think, is that both groups moved ‘upwards’: the Romans into the political identity of their Germanic masters; the Germanic peoples into the more sophisticated cultural framework of their Roman subjects.32
Romans were indeed skilled in encouraging barbarians to adopt their ways. In about 477, the same Sidonius Apollinaris who laughed at Syagrius for his excellent grasp of Burgundian wrote to a Frankish count of Trier, Arbogastes. Arbogastes had written a polished letter in Latin to Sidonius, requesting a theological work from his pen. Sidonius politely and humbly declined the request, but he complimented Arbogastes fulsomely on his excellent Latin:
You plead that you only trifle with refinement, when you have drunk deep at the spring of Roman eloquence; and, though the waters you now drink are those of the Moselle, the words you pour forth are those of the Tiber. You are the companion of barbarians, but ignorant of barbarisms. In words and deeds, you are equal to our leaders of old, who wielded the pen as often as they did the sword.33
Arbogastes governed a city of the Rhineland, where the survival of Roman culture was under serious threat. Sidonius was writing, not just to praise him, but also to strengthen his literary resolve. Similarly, in the 480s the bishop of Reims, Remigius, wrote to Clovis, the new Frankish king of the region in which his see lay. Remigius, of course, also wrote in Latin, the language of high culture and history, and he congratulated Clovis on taking over ‘the governance of Belgica Secunda’. This was not strictly true: the Roman province of Belgica Secunda had long ceased to exist.34 But Remigius was not only flattering Clovis; by presenting him in a Roman light, he was also gently steering him towards a particular view of his command—later in the same letter he encouraged the king (at this date a pagan) to heed the advice of his bishops. The tactic worked; later in his reign Clovis was baptized into the Catholic faith by Remigius himself.
What happened to Germanic culture in the post-Roman West is significantly and radically different from what happened to the culture of the Arabs, after their successful invasion of the Near East and North Africa in the seventh century, and this difference is worth exploring. In many respects the Arab and Germanic conquests look similar—both were carried out predominantly by fierce tribesmen, and both took over the territory of ancient and sophisticated empires. At first Arab rule also resembled that of the post-Roman Germanic states in the West—with a small military elite lording it over a large population that continued to live very much as before.
However, the long-term cultural impact of the Arab invasions was much more radical than that of the Germanic conquerors in the West. As in Gaul, where the conquered indigenous population eventually assumed the identity of ‘Franks’, so in the Near East and North Africa almost everyone eventually became an ‘Arab’. But, in so doing, they also adopted both the religion and the language of the conquerors, Islam and Arabic. It is as though the people of Gaul, the ancestors of the French, had adopted the paganism and the Germanic language of the Franks. One reason for this difference must lie in the fact that the Arab conquerors, though few in number, entered the empire under the banner of a new religion whose sacred text was in Arabic. This religion then proved itself both right and powerful, by giving the Arabs stunning victories over both the Persians and the East Romans. In these circumstances, the Arabs were not going to convert to Christianity, nor were they going to abandon their language, although they were very happy to adopt other sophisticated features of east-Roman life, such as the habit of living in mosaiced and marbled palaces. Islam and Arabic remained at the core of the conquerors’ identity, so it was those amongst the conquered native population who wished to become ‘Arabs’ who had to change their religion and their language.
Unlike the Arabs, the Germanic invaders entered the empire with a highly flexible cultural identity. It was possible for a Frank to be very much a Frank, while speaking a Latin-based language and worshipping at the shrine of a Gallo-Roman saint like St Martin of Tours. Culturally, the Germanic invaders were very accommodating in the long term. But it is also worth remembering that, when it came to their political identity, it was the Gallo-Romans who eventually had to adjust to becoming ‘Franks’. The fusion of peoples that emerged out of the Germanic settlements took centuries to develop, and was something of a compromise—it was not a simple question of the Germanic peoples sinking rapidly and without trace into the Roman subsoil.
Some of the recent literature on the Germanic settlements reads like an account of a tea party at the Roman vicarage. A shy newcomer to the village, who is a useful prospect for the cricket team, is invited in. There is a brief moment of awkwardness, while the host finds an empty chair and pours a fresh cup of tea; but the conversation, and village life, soon flow on. The accommodation that was reached between invaders and invaded in the fifth- and sixth-century West was very much more difficult, and more interesting, than this. The new arrival had not been invited, and he brought with him a large family; they ignored the bread and butter, and headed straight for the cake stand. Invader and invaded did eventually settle down together, and did adjust to each other’s ways—but the process of mutual accommodation was painful for the natives, was to take a very long time, and, as we shall see in Part Two, left the vicarage in very poor shape.
PART TWO
THE END OF A CIVILIZATION
V
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF COMFORT
IT IS CURRENTLY deeply unfashionable to state that anything like a ‘crisis’ or a ‘decline’ occurred at the end of the Roman empire, let alone that a ‘civilization’ collapsed and a ‘dark age’ ensued. The new orthodoxy is that the Roman world, in both East and West, was slowly, and essentially painlessly, ‘transformed’ into a medieval form. However, there is an insuperable problem with this new view: it does not fit the mass of archaeological evidence now available, which shows a startling decline in western standards of living during the fifth to seventh centuries.1 This was a change that affected everyone, from peasants to kings, even the bodies of saints resting in their churches. It was no mere transformation—it was decline on a scale that can reasonably be described as ‘the end of a civilization’.
The Fruits of the Roman E
conomy
The Romans produced goods, including mundane items, to a very high quality, and in huge quantities; and then spread them widely, through all levels of society. Because so little detailed written evidence survives for these humble aspects of daily life, it used to be assumed that few goods moved far from home, and that economic complexity in the Roman period was essentially there to satisfy the needs of the state and the whims of the elite, with little impact on the broad mass of society.2 However, painstaking work by archaeologists has slowly transformed this picture, through the excavation of hundreds of sites, and the systematic documentation and study of the artefacts found on them. This research has revealed a sophisticated world, in which a north-Italian peasant of the Roman period might eat off tableware from the area near Naples, store liquids in an amphora from North Africa, and sleep under a tiled roof. Almost all archaeologists, and most historians, now believe that the Roman economy was characterized, not only by an impressive luxury market, but also by a very substantial middle and lower market for high-quality functional products.3
By far the fullest and most telling evidence comes from the study of the different types of pottery found in such abundance on Roman sites: functional kitchenwares, used in the preparation of food; fine tablewares, for its presentation and consumption; and amphorae, the large jars used throughout the Mediterranean for the transport and storage of liquids, such as wine and oil.4 Pottery reports make for dry reading, but they contain a mass of data that we can readily exploit to shed light on the Roman economy and its impact on daily life. We can tell when and where pots were made, from their shape and fabric, and assess the levels of expertise that went into their manufacture; and we can tell how far they travelled and the status of the consumers who used them, by charting their presence on domestic sites.5 Furthermore, the picture we can build up for pottery also provides an insight into the production and exchange of other goods, for which much less archaeological evidence survives. Pots, although not normally the heroes of history books, deserve our attention.
Three features of Roman pottery are remarkable, and not to be found again for many centuries in the West: its excellent quality and considerable standardization; the massive quantities in which it was produced; and its widespread diffusion, not only geographically (sometimes being transported over many hundreds of miles), but also socially (so that it reached, not just the rich, but also the poor). In the areas of the Roman world that I know best, central and northern Italy, after the end of the Roman world, this level of sophistication is not seen again until perhaps the fourteenth century, some 800 years later.
The high quality of Roman pottery is very easy to illustrate with pieces of tableware, or indeed kitchenware and amphora, in the hand, but impossible to do justice to on the page, even when words can be backed up by photographs and drawings. Most Roman pottery is light and smooth to the touch, and very tough, although, like all pottery, it shatters if dropped on a hard surface. It is generally made with carefully selected and purified clay, worked to thin-walled and standardized shapes on a fast wheel, and fired in kilns capable of ensuring a consistent finish. With handmade pottery, inevitably there are slight differences between individual vessels of the same design, and occasional minor blemishes. But what strikes the eye and the touch most immediately and most powerfully with Roman pottery is its consistently high quality.
This is not just an aesthetic consideration, but also a practical one. These vessels are solid (brittle, but not friable), they are pleasant and easy to handle (being light and smooth), and, with their hard and sometimes glossy surfaces, they hold liquids well and are easy to wash. Furthermore, their regular and standardized shapes will have made them simple to stack and store. When people today are shown a very ordinary Roman pot, and, in particular, are allowed to handle it, they often comment on how ‘modern’ it looks and feels, and need to be convinced of its true age.
An impression of modernity is achieved not only by a sophisticated quality and finish, but also by a remarkable consistency between different vessels of the same design. Like many people, I find Roman pottery predictable to the point of being rather dull; but this consistency does have its advantages. A fragment of a Roman pot can very often be matched, with the help of the right manual, to a specific production site at a particular moment in time. This is because thousands of potsherds of identical colour and appearance (down to tiny details) have already been excavated on other sites, some of them in datable contexts. For example, a fragment of pottery discovered on the island of Iona off the Scottish mainland can, despite the apparent implausibility of the link, be attributed with confidence to a sixth-century date and a production site, thousands of miles away by sea, in modern Tunisia.6 Later, we shall see how such uniformity was achieved.
When considering quantities, we would ideally like to have some estimates for overall production from particular potteries, and for overall consumption at specific settlements. Unfortunately, it is in the nature of the archaeological evidence, which is almost invariably only a sample of what once existed, that such figures will always be elusive. However, no one who has ever worked in the field would question the abundance of Roman pottery, particularly in the Mediterranean region (Fig. 5.1). On Roman settlements (above all urban sites), the labour that archaeologists have to put into the washing, sorting, and storing of potsherds constitutes a high proportion of the total man-hours involved in the initial process of excavation. At the moment of study and publication, the amount of time (and pages) colonized by the pottery rises yet higher. Even the storage of such an abundance can be a major headache. I well remember as a child, sometime around 1960, helping to dump into a river (so that the current would scatter and lose them) boxes and boxes of Roman pottery recovered in field survey north of Rome, which had simply outgrown the available storage space.7 Archaeologists collect, wash, mark, sort, store, study, draw, and publish the thousands upon thousands of Roman potsherds discovered in excavation and field survey, and thereby develop a healthy respect for the impressive quantity (and quality) of pottery in circulation in ancient times. Sadly, it is very difficult to translate this experience satisfactorily into the words (let alone numbers) that will convince all others.
5.1 The scale of Roman production and consumption. The industrial container in the corner of this excavation trench at Caesarea (in modern Israel) is full of Roman potsherds.
Only rarely can we derive any ‘real’ quantities from deposits of broken pots.8 However, there is one exceptional dump, which does represent a very large part of a site’s total history of consumption, and for which an estimate of quantity has been produced. On the left bank of the Tiber in Rome, by one of the river ports of the ancient city, is a substantial hill some 50 metres high, Monte Testaccio—‘Pottery Mountain’ is a reasonable translation into English (Fig. 5.2). It is made up entirely of broken oil amphorae, mainly of the second and third centuries AD and primarily from the province of Baetica in south-western Spain. It has been estimated that Monte Testaccio contains the remains of some 53 million amphorae, in which around six thousand million (6,000,000,000) litres of oil were imported into the city from overseas.9 Imports into imperial Rome were supported by the full might of the state and were therefore quite exceptional—but the size of operations at Monte Testaccio, and the productivity and complexity that lay behind them, none the less cannot fail to impress. This was a society with similarities to our own—moving goods on a gigantic scale, manufacturing high-quality containers to do so, and occasionally, as here, even discarding them on delivery. Like us, the Romans enjoy the dubious distinction of creating a mountain of good-quality rubbish.10
5.2 The hill near the Tiber, known as Monte Testaccio, which is made up entirely of broken amphorae (some 53 million in all), imported from southern Spain. It is shown here in a view of the city of 1625.
Roman pottery was transported not only in large quantities, but often also over substantial distances. Many Roman pots, in particular amphorae and the fine-wares d
esigned for use at table, could travel hundreds of miles—all over the Mediterranean, and also, as we have seen in the case of a find from Iona, further afield (Fig. 5.4 at p. 98).11 Other regional products have more limited, but still impressive, distributions (Fig. 5.3). But maps that show the myriad find spots of a particular type of pottery tell only part of the story. For our purposes, when trying to measure the scale and reach of the ancient economy, and the impact of its disappearance, what is more significant than any geographical spread is the access that different levels of society had to good-quality products.
In all but the remotest regions of the empire, Roman pottery of a high standard is common on the sites of humble villages and isolated farmsteads. For example, excavation of a tiny farmstead, in the hills behind the Roman city of Luna in Italy, which was occupied between the second century BC and the first century AD, produced the following range of pottery vessels: the huge storage jars (dolia), characteristic of the ancient world; coarse kitchenwares that were probably locally made (for the most part fast-wheel turned, but including some vessels that were hand-shaped); other kitchenwares imported from potteries along the West coast of Italy; amphorae from this same coastal area (with a few sherds also from southern Italy and Africa); and, finally, the fine glossy tablewares of Campania near Naples and of Arezzo in the Arno valley.12 The amphorae need not have been holding their original contents when they reached this farmstead, so they are not necessarily evidence of the consumption of south-Italian and African wine or oil at this site; but the table- and kitchen-wares must have been here in their primary function. The list is not unimpressive for a peasant household.
The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization Page 10
