The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization

by Bryan Ward-Perkins

  Gradually, attitudes to twentieth-century Germans mellowed and softened, and with them the image of the fifth-century Germanic invaders. Already in the 1960s and 1970s the Germanic peoples had been rehabilitated from murderous and destructive thugs to become an essential element in the making of modern Europe, in book titles like ‘The Formation of Europe and the Barbarian Invasions’.12 When Goffart launched his theory of peaceful ‘accommodation’ in 1980 it therefore fell on fertile ground. Goffart himself seems to have intended his book to play down the role of the Germanic peoples in European history. He hoped to show that the settlements were in reality more ‘Roman’ than ‘barbarian’, since they had been decided by Roman policy and carried out within a Roman administrative structure: ‘The more or less orderly garrisoning of Gaul, Spain, Africa, and Italy by alien troops gives us no compelling reason to speak of a “barbarian West”.’13 But ironically his theory has been used by scholars in a very different spirit: to elevate the Germanic peoples to the status of peaceful collaborators with the native Romans.

  The European Union needs to forge a spirit of cooperation between the once warring nations of the Continent, and it is no coincidence that the European Science Foundation’s research project into this period was entitled ‘The Transformation of the Roman World’—implying a seamless and peaceful transition from Roman times to the ‘Middle Ages’ and beyond. In this new vision of the end of the ancient world, the Roman empire is not ‘assassinated’ by Germanic invaders; rather, Romans and Germans together carry forward much that was Roman, into a new Romano-Germanic world.14 ‘Latin’ and ‘Germanic’ Europe is at peace.

  Europeans have always had to work hard to find common roots and the origins of unity in their troubled past. A shared Christian heritage has good historical credentials as the basis for a common culture and identity, but is awkward for present-day reasons: Christianity, with its many sectarian squabbles, is now as divisive as it was once unifying; and adopting it as a badge of ‘Europeanness’ would, of course, definitely exclude all non-Christians from the club. Furthermore, linking Europe with Christianity might give the Pope ideas above his station, would be disturbingly ‘American’, and would certainly clash with liberal and left-wing European traditions of secularist politics.

  The Roman empire on its own, although in some ways a wonderful precedent for much that modern Europe aspires to (with its free-trade zone, its common currency, and the undoubted loyalty that it inspired), has also never been entirely satisfactory as an ancestor for the European Union. Roman power was used too recently (by Mussolini) as part of a specifically Italian national and imperial agenda, and too much of northern and north-eastern Europe was never in Roman hands (whereas the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean were central to the Roman world). An entirely ‘Roman’ EU would marginalize northern Europe, and might be centred in Rome, Athens, and Istanbul, not in Strasbourg, Frankfurt, and Brussels. An interpretation of history that keeps the Roman past, but ‘transforms’ it into a post-Roman Europe dominated by the Franks, is therefore much more satisfactory. The centre of the present-day European Union, the Strasbourg-Frankfurt-Brussels triangle, and the centre of the eighth- and ninth-century Frankish empire coincide very closely: Brussels, for instance, is little more than 100 kilometres from Charlemagne’s favoured residence and burial place at Aachen.

  North of the Alps, the Franks have occasionally been wheeled out to support Europe in a more populist and explicit way, particularly because they are acknowledged as common ancestors by both the French and the Germans. Already in 1949 a ‘Prix Charlemagne’ was instituted, which is awarded annually to figures who have made a remarkable contribution towards European unity; and Charlemagne was also commemorated in an exhibition at Aachen in 1965, where he was presented as ‘the first emperor who sought to unite Europe’.15 Whether the Lombards who lost their Italian kingdom to him, or the Saxons who were massacred by him in their thousands, would have viewed this as a positive achievement is a moot point. In 1996 a second exhibition, the fruit of Franco-German collaboration, honoured the Franks of an earlier period, by commemorating the fifteen-hundredth anniversary of the baptism of Clovis (which supposedly took place in 496). The title chosen for the project was ‘Les Francs, Précurseurs de l’Europe’, ‘Die Franken, Wegbereiter Europas’—‘The Franks, Precursors (or Path-Finders) of Europe’.16 Again it is doubtful whether the historical Franks can really live up to the projection upon them of such high ideals, though the baptism of Clovis, a powerful Germanic warrior accepted into the Catholic faith by the Gallo-Roman bishop of Reims, does fit rather well with a French vision of the respective roles of France and Germany within the European Union: German might, tamed and channelled to positive ends, by Gallic culture and civility (Fig. 8.1).

  A ‘Late Antiquity’ for a New Age

  The vision of Late Antiquity as full of positive cultural achievements also has obvious roots in modern attitudes to the world. It is, for instance, no great surprise that the Roman empire is not particularly in favour at the moment, and therefore that its demise is not deeply regretted. In Europe, empires and imperialism went firmly out of fashion in the decades following the Second World War, while in the United States, which traces its origins to a struggle for freedom from British imperial control, they have seldom enjoyed explicit favour. The ‘Empire’ in Hollywood’s Star Wars is the force of evil, its storm troopers modelled partly on Roman praetorian guards.

  I am no advocate of twenty-first-century imperialism—empires, it seems to me, have had their day—but it is a mistake to treat all empires of the past as universally bad in an undifferentiated way. The imposition of Roman power had certainly been brutal, and it was fiercely resisted by many. But in time the Roman empire evolved into something rather remarkable, very different from any modern empire. By the fourth century, the provincial aristocracies of the Roman world had largely forgotten their tribal ancestors and had settled down to be ‘Roman’. Quite unlike any modern empire, Rome did not fall because its provincial subjects struggled to be ‘free’. Amongst all the possible causes of Rome’s fall canvassed by historians, popular uprisings to throw off the shackles of imperial rule come a very long way down any list. This is hardly surprising, since, as I have argued at length in this book, Roman rule, and above all Roman peace, brought levels of comfort and sophistication to the West that had not been seen before and that were not to be seen again for many centuries.

  Connected with Rome’s lessened prestige in the modern age, but extending beyond it, there has also been a marked decline over the last century in the status of ‘Classics’, the study of Graeco-Roman culture. In the nineteenth century all educated Europeans aspired to some knowledge of classical culture, because they viewed it as the product of a great civilization. I was very struck recently to see, in Times editorials of the 1880s, short tags quoted in ancient Greek (without translation), while quotations in Latin are commonplace. For a Times reader of that period, it was self-evident that Homer and Virgil (despite their misfortune in not being born English) were superior even to outstanding representatives of Dark Age culture like the Beowulf-poet and Bede. A long Late Antiquity of equal status to classical times was quite simply unthinkable.

  8.1 Forging the Franco-German alliance—the baptism of Clovis by the Gallo-Roman bishop of Reims. As depicted in 1877 in the Panthéon of Paris.

  Much has changed since those days. The ancient Egyptians now feature in the British national curriculum for schoolchildren on an equal footing with the Romans, and, thanks to mummies and pyramids, are rather more popular. In northern Europe, at least, very few people now know any Latin or Greek: it is, for instance, rapidly becoming pedantic in Britain to insist that ‘data’, and even ‘phenomena’, are plural forms in modern English—new and highly unclassical phenomenas are entering our culture. When, recently, a possible tenth planet in the solar system was identified, it did not join the other planets in their Roman pantheon, but was named Sedna, after an Inuit goddess. Even in
Oxford University, a bastion of traditional learning, the study of the classics has been steadily scaled down and is under threat of further restriction. Because Graeco-Roman culture has lost most of its privileged status, the post-Roman centuries are no longer automatically viewed as the ‘Dark Age’ that followed the demise of a great civilization.

  Indeed, in the modern post-colonial world, the very concept of ‘a civilization’, be it ancient or modern, is now uncomfortable, because it is seen as demeaning to those societies that are excluded from the label. Nowadays, instead of ‘civilizations’, we apply universally the neutral word ‘cultures’; all cultures are equal, and no cultures are more equal than others. This change has definitely been an important liberating force behind the rise of Late Antiquity. Authors of the post-Roman period no longer have to dwell in the long shadow cast by an earlier ‘civilization’; and writers in local languages, such as Armenian, Syriac, and Coptic, can take their place in the sun alongside the established writers in Greek and Latin. In the new post-colonial world, local culture is indeed often felt to be more genuine and organic than the products of the dominant centre.

  I have no objection to the main thrust of this change, and I am certainly delighted to see the demise of ‘civilization’ as a badge of moral superiority. But abandoning altogether the concept of ‘a civilization’ risks imposing too flat a view on the world’s cultures. For better or worse (and often it is for the worse), some cultures are much more sophisticated than others. Societies with large cities, complex production- and distribution-networks, and the widespread use of writing, are markedly different from societies of villages, with essentially household production and an oral culture. The transition from Roman to post-Roman times was a dramatic move away from sophistication towards much greater simplicity.

  My conception of Roman civilization, and its demise, is a very material one, which in itself probably renders it unfashionable. The capacity to mass-produce high-quality goods and spread comfort makes the Roman world rather too similar to our own society, with its rampant and rapacious materialism. Instead of studying the complex economic systems that sustained another sophisticated world, and their eventual demise, we seem to prefer to read about things that are wholly different from our own experience, like the ascetic saints of the late and post-Roman worlds, who are very fashionable in late-antique studies. In their lifetimes, the attraction of these saints was their rejection of the material values of their own societies, and our world, which is yet more materialistic and ‘corrupt’, seems to find them equally compelling. We have no wish to emulate the asceticism of a saint like Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, who spent solitary nights immersed in the North Sea praising God. But, viewed from a suitable distance, he is deeply attractive, in touch with both God and nature: after his vigils a pair of otters would come out of the sea to dry him with their fur and warm his feet with their breath.17 This is a much more beguiling vision of the past than mine, with its distribution maps of peasant settlements, and its discussion of good- and bad-quality pottery.

  A move away from economic history is not exclusive to Late Antiquity. Nowadays it is very difficult to persuade the average history student that it is worth spending even a few days researching an economic-history topic. In Oxford at least, the word ‘economy’ in its title is the kiss of death to an undergraduate history course, and I am also painfully aware that my repeated use of the word in this book may have prompted many a reader to set it down (so I am grateful if you have read this far). In the 1960s, economic history was highly fashionable, because it played an integral part in Marxist interpretations of the past. When the attraction of Marxist theory declined, as it did with the demise of Communism, most historians, and the reading public, seem to have withdrawn from economic history altogether, rather than seek out different ways of studying it and of understanding its importance.

  The new Late Antiquity is fascinated with the history of religion. As a secularist myself, I am bewildered by this development, and do not hold myself up as a confident commentator on the phenomenon. I have sometimes wondered whether it has found particular favour in the United States because religion plays a much more central role in modern life there than it does in most of Europe. It is certainly true that one has to look to Europe to find a community of historians like me, with an active interest in secular aspects of the end of the Roman world, such as its political, economic, and military history. On the other hand, the scholars who uphold the new Late Antiquity in the United States are from the west- and east-coast intelligentsia, so we are certainly not looking at a close link with the Bible Belt. Indeed, the emphasis in modern research is definitely not on the more intransigent and fundamentalist aspects of late-antique religion (of which there were many), but rather on its syncretism and flexibility.

  It may be that our modern age has helped shape the particular way in which the religion of Late Antiquity is now studied, above all in the USA. The approach that is currently fashionable is not the traditional one, still practised, for instance, in parts of Catholic Europe, and characterized by the painstaking reconstruction of authoritative texts, and by the study of religious institutions (like the papacy) and of orthodox structures and beliefs. The religious figures who characterize the new Late Antiquity are not popes and bishops in council, determining doctrine or developing the liturgy, but charismatic ascetics and intellectuals, in isolation or in small communities, finding their path to God in a highly individualistic, rather than an institutional and formalized, way. Modern ‘new-age’ spirituality has perhaps had a profound impact on the way that late-antique religion is studied and presented.

  Pluses …

  Although I believe the new attitudes to the barbarian invasions, and to the ‘transformation’ of the ancient world, are flawed, there are undoubtedly positive aspects to them both. The theory that accommodates the Germanic peoples peaceably into the empire does correct the myth that the fall of the West was a titanic and ideological struggle between two great united forces, Rome and ‘the barbarians’. In truth, there was plenty of room for alliances and for a degree of accommodation between the Germanic tribes and the native Romans, and both were as often at war amongst themselves as they were between each other. But to stop at this point is almost as short-sighted as focusing on the degree of collaboration and accommodation that took place in occupied France or the Channel Islands during the Second World War, and arguing from this that the German presence was painless and uncontroversial. There is plenty of evidence from the fifth and sixth centuries that invasion was traumatic, and that living with the conquerors required very difficult adjustments.

  The new conception of a long ‘Late Antiquity’ has, in my opinion, more in its favour than the theory of a peaceful barbarian takeover. There have definitely been gains from studying the fifth to eighth centuries as part of Antiquity rather than as part of the ‘Middle Ages’, even in the West, where I have argued that the model of a continuous and thriving period fits very badly. In particular, it is helpful that ‘Late Antiquity’ and ‘late antique’ are relatively new coinages, which have not yet entered into popular usage, and have therefore been spared the rich accretion of misleading connotations that the ‘Middle Ages’ and ‘medieval’ (not to mention the ‘Dark Ages’) carry with them. Popular images of the Middle Ages tend to be either highly romanticized (peopled by knights, ladies, and the odd unicorn) or exceptionally grim—there is little or no middle ground. Images of the kind are very much alive in the modern world—‘to get medieval’ has recently appeared in American English, meaning to get violent in an extremely unpleasant way. The new online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary illustrates its usage with a quotation from Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction: ‘I ain’t through with you by a damn sight. I’m gonna git Medieval on your ass.’18 ‘Late Antiquity’ and ‘late antique’ are a welcome relief, because they are terms that do not yet carry with them similar baggage.

  ‘Late Antiquity’ has other advantages too. The ancient world tends to be view
ed as a whole, and historians who study it are often well informed about trends that affected the whole empire, and use comparisons and contrasts to point out what is specific about a particular region. However, this broad and inclusive vision narrows once we enter the ‘Middle Ages’—I have several times been startled to realize quite how little some distinguished scholars of post-Roman Britain and Italy know about the neighbouring Frankish kingdom, despite the richness of its sources. ‘Medieval’ studies have tended to move backwards from the present, in search of the origins of the nation states of Europe, and, in doing this, they have frequently become rather parochial in focus.19 ‘Late Antiquity’, which moves forward from the Roman world, offers a much broader and more cosmopolitan canvas.

  … and Minuses

  I have defended the right of historians to use difficult words like ‘civilization’ and ‘crisis’, though they have to be wielded with care and precision, because some of them are clearly contentious. I have indeed become increasingly puzzled that the word ‘decline’ should be so contested in historical writing, when ‘rise’ is used all the time, without anyone ever batting an eyelid.20 Perhaps the difficulty lies in modern psychology. ‘Decline’, as well as its strongly negative connotations, perhaps also has moral ones. We tend to use it with a sense that somebody can and should be blamed for the change—as with a ‘decline in educational standards’. I have used ‘decline’ in this book in its negative sense, very explicitly, because I believe a great deal was lost with the end of ancient sophistication; but I hope that I am not blaming anyone for deliberately causing the decline that I have charted. I like the post-Roman period, and feel a deep sympathy for the people who coped with the headlong changes of the fifth and sixth centuries.