02-15-2009, 12:30 PM
Reviewed in todays Sunday Times (UK)
February 15, 2009
The Fall of the West: The Slow Death of the Roman Superpower by Adrian Goldsworthy
The Sunday Times review by Mary Beard: the persistent question of when and why the Roman empire fell lies at the heart of these two books. Their answers are surprisingly different
In AD476 the last emperor of Rome was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by a German general. The deposed emperor was little more than a child, the last and weakest of a series of puppet rulers on the Roman throne. It was a nice irony that his name was Romulus, the same as the legendary founder of the city.
There could be no better symbol of the decline and fall of an ancient superpower. More than a millennium after the foundation of the city, this second Romulus was no charismatic hero like the first - but such a juvenile nonentity that (as Adrian Goldsworthy puts it in The Fall of the West) he was not even “worth the trouble of killing”. He spent the rest of his life in subsidised retirement in south Italy.
It was a neat symmetry. But for most modern historians it has seemed rather too neat. From Gibbon on, they have questioned how significant the coup of AD476 was in marking the end of the ancient Roman empire. For one thing, since the 4th century that empire had been split in two. Although the city of Rome itself may have fallen in the 5th century, the eastern half of the empire, based in Constantinople, survived until 1453. We call this the “Byzantine empire”, but the “Byzantines” would have been horrified by this demeaning title. They called themselves Romans and traced their descent directly back to the first Romulus.
Besides, even in Italy, AD476 did not mark a clear break between classical antiquity and the Middle Ages. All kinds of “Roman” features remained long after the departure of the second Romulus. The Colosseum, that most visible symbol of Roman civilisation, was richly restored by Odoacer himself, the German general who ousted Romulus. And animal hunts (although not gladiatorial shows) were performed there well into the 6th century. On a more intellectual level, Boethius, one of the greatest philosophers of antiquity, in the tradition of Plato and Aristotle, was funded by the German rulers of Rome - although he was later (in time-honoured tradition) executed by them. As late as AD800, more than 300 years after the German coup, Charlemagne was taken seriously when he was crowned “Roman Emperor” in St Peter's at Rome.
The persistent question of when and why the Roman empire ended lies behind both Goldsworthy's book and James J O'Donnell's The Ruin of the Roman Empire. The latter, who offers an engagingly personal narrative of the 5th and 6th centuries, is a tremendous supporter of the German kings of Italy. The hero of his story is Theodoric, the successor of Odoacer, who ruled Italy between AD493 and AD526.
No “barbarian” in the traditional sense, despite his name and his ethnic origin, O'Donnell's Theodoric is a man whose hallmarks were “civility and toleration”. He was, in other words, “every bit the Roman ruler” and the Roman-style patron of literature and the arts. True, he had the great Boethius executed, but that was at the end of his reign - and there was some reason to suspect that Boethius was aiming to make himself a Platonic “philosopher-king” of Rome. The idea that Theodoric was illiterate - and had a specially made stamp saying legi (“I have read it”) which he used to mark documents he had “processed” - is briskly dismissed by O'Donnell as the report of a “hostile source”.
For O'Donnell, the villain in the story of Rome's fall is Justinian, the 6th-century emperor of the eastern Roman empire, based in Constantinople. A renowned codifier of the whole of Roman law, the builder of the church of St Sophia (still one of the main attractions in Istanbul), and often seen as the powerhouse behind a Roman “renaissance” in the East, Justinian is here written off as a short-sighted strategist, whose military errors were ultimately responsible for the final, slow decline of Roman power. He is also cast by the author as a religious hardliner, who tried to induce all the varied Christian communities of his empire to sign up to exactly the same doctrine. Now that paganism was no longer a problem, Justinian proceeded to force his fellow Christians into his own sectarian line.
There is much to be said for this analysis. But it is hard not to spot some double standards at work. O'Donnell, for example, condemns Justinian's church of St Sophia in Istanbul as a “heavy, graceless pile”, so big and out of scale that it “never charmed anyone”; an implausible view, perhaps, of one of the most admired buildings of the Mediterranean. Theodoric's vast tomb in Ravenna, on the other hand, is praised as “a relic that stands second only to Hadrian's mighty tomb in Rome as a statement of imperial grandeur”. The contrast depends on your point of view. For Theodoric's enemies, his vulgar mausoleum no doubt seemed a “graceless pile”, too.
Goldsworthy, who concentrates on Italy rather than the eastern empire, takes a more robust attitude to Theodoric's achievements. Some cultural continuity there may have been, but the German rule in Italy marked a distinctive change from the world of the Roman empire: Italy was now only a subordinate kingdom within an empire more or less controlled from Constantinople. And, for him, Theodoric's legi stamp is not the tendentious allegation of a hostile source but a dark hint of post-Roman ignorance.
Whatever their different views, both authors see a message for our own times in the later Roman empire. Goldsworthy ponders why Rome eventually fell, and points to the increasing and obsessive bureaucratisation of the government, the selfinterest of the political leaders and the “target-oriented” culture of the state. The madness of our own health-and-safety legislation, it appears, is not so far from the mindset of the average later Roman emperor. Indeed, the implication of Goldsworthy's book is that we are now living in a modern version of a late-Roman world - and one about to collapse.
O'Donnell is slightly more oblique in his contemporary analogies. But his critique of Justinian's policies is clearly intended to have a resonance for modern superpowers, whether political or religious. Justinian's big mistakes, he argues, included an unwillingness to negotiate with Persia (that is, modern Iran), an inability to secure peace in the Balkans and a reluctance to tolerate religious diversity in his empire (“mistaking faith for destiny”, as he puts it).
Of course, we are a long way from the poor little puppet emperor Romulus. But there is a moral for the 21st century here, as Madeleine Albright (the former American secretary of state) hints when - in a puff on the dust jacket - she calls O'Donnell's story “an instructive tale”. Whether our new political leaders will actually turn back to reflect on the end of Roman empire, and listen to the message, is another question.
The Fall of the West by Adrian Goldsworthy
weidenfeld £25 pp560
The Ruin of the Roman Empire by James J O'Donnell
Profile £25 pp448
February 15, 2009
The Fall of the West: The Slow Death of the Roman Superpower by Adrian Goldsworthy
The Sunday Times review by Mary Beard: the persistent question of when and why the Roman empire fell lies at the heart of these two books. Their answers are surprisingly different
In AD476 the last emperor of Rome was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by a German general. The deposed emperor was little more than a child, the last and weakest of a series of puppet rulers on the Roman throne. It was a nice irony that his name was Romulus, the same as the legendary founder of the city.
There could be no better symbol of the decline and fall of an ancient superpower. More than a millennium after the foundation of the city, this second Romulus was no charismatic hero like the first - but such a juvenile nonentity that (as Adrian Goldsworthy puts it in The Fall of the West) he was not even “worth the trouble of killing”. He spent the rest of his life in subsidised retirement in south Italy.
It was a neat symmetry. But for most modern historians it has seemed rather too neat. From Gibbon on, they have questioned how significant the coup of AD476 was in marking the end of the ancient Roman empire. For one thing, since the 4th century that empire had been split in two. Although the city of Rome itself may have fallen in the 5th century, the eastern half of the empire, based in Constantinople, survived until 1453. We call this the “Byzantine empire”, but the “Byzantines” would have been horrified by this demeaning title. They called themselves Romans and traced their descent directly back to the first Romulus.
Besides, even in Italy, AD476 did not mark a clear break between classical antiquity and the Middle Ages. All kinds of “Roman” features remained long after the departure of the second Romulus. The Colosseum, that most visible symbol of Roman civilisation, was richly restored by Odoacer himself, the German general who ousted Romulus. And animal hunts (although not gladiatorial shows) were performed there well into the 6th century. On a more intellectual level, Boethius, one of the greatest philosophers of antiquity, in the tradition of Plato and Aristotle, was funded by the German rulers of Rome - although he was later (in time-honoured tradition) executed by them. As late as AD800, more than 300 years after the German coup, Charlemagne was taken seriously when he was crowned “Roman Emperor” in St Peter's at Rome.
The persistent question of when and why the Roman empire ended lies behind both Goldsworthy's book and James J O'Donnell's The Ruin of the Roman Empire. The latter, who offers an engagingly personal narrative of the 5th and 6th centuries, is a tremendous supporter of the German kings of Italy. The hero of his story is Theodoric, the successor of Odoacer, who ruled Italy between AD493 and AD526.
No “barbarian” in the traditional sense, despite his name and his ethnic origin, O'Donnell's Theodoric is a man whose hallmarks were “civility and toleration”. He was, in other words, “every bit the Roman ruler” and the Roman-style patron of literature and the arts. True, he had the great Boethius executed, but that was at the end of his reign - and there was some reason to suspect that Boethius was aiming to make himself a Platonic “philosopher-king” of Rome. The idea that Theodoric was illiterate - and had a specially made stamp saying legi (“I have read it”) which he used to mark documents he had “processed” - is briskly dismissed by O'Donnell as the report of a “hostile source”.
For O'Donnell, the villain in the story of Rome's fall is Justinian, the 6th-century emperor of the eastern Roman empire, based in Constantinople. A renowned codifier of the whole of Roman law, the builder of the church of St Sophia (still one of the main attractions in Istanbul), and often seen as the powerhouse behind a Roman “renaissance” in the East, Justinian is here written off as a short-sighted strategist, whose military errors were ultimately responsible for the final, slow decline of Roman power. He is also cast by the author as a religious hardliner, who tried to induce all the varied Christian communities of his empire to sign up to exactly the same doctrine. Now that paganism was no longer a problem, Justinian proceeded to force his fellow Christians into his own sectarian line.
There is much to be said for this analysis. But it is hard not to spot some double standards at work. O'Donnell, for example, condemns Justinian's church of St Sophia in Istanbul as a “heavy, graceless pile”, so big and out of scale that it “never charmed anyone”; an implausible view, perhaps, of one of the most admired buildings of the Mediterranean. Theodoric's vast tomb in Ravenna, on the other hand, is praised as “a relic that stands second only to Hadrian's mighty tomb in Rome as a statement of imperial grandeur”. The contrast depends on your point of view. For Theodoric's enemies, his vulgar mausoleum no doubt seemed a “graceless pile”, too.
Goldsworthy, who concentrates on Italy rather than the eastern empire, takes a more robust attitude to Theodoric's achievements. Some cultural continuity there may have been, but the German rule in Italy marked a distinctive change from the world of the Roman empire: Italy was now only a subordinate kingdom within an empire more or less controlled from Constantinople. And, for him, Theodoric's legi stamp is not the tendentious allegation of a hostile source but a dark hint of post-Roman ignorance.
Whatever their different views, both authors see a message for our own times in the later Roman empire. Goldsworthy ponders why Rome eventually fell, and points to the increasing and obsessive bureaucratisation of the government, the selfinterest of the political leaders and the “target-oriented” culture of the state. The madness of our own health-and-safety legislation, it appears, is not so far from the mindset of the average later Roman emperor. Indeed, the implication of Goldsworthy's book is that we are now living in a modern version of a late-Roman world - and one about to collapse.
O'Donnell is slightly more oblique in his contemporary analogies. But his critique of Justinian's policies is clearly intended to have a resonance for modern superpowers, whether political or religious. Justinian's big mistakes, he argues, included an unwillingness to negotiate with Persia (that is, modern Iran), an inability to secure peace in the Balkans and a reluctance to tolerate religious diversity in his empire (“mistaking faith for destiny”, as he puts it).
Of course, we are a long way from the poor little puppet emperor Romulus. But there is a moral for the 21st century here, as Madeleine Albright (the former American secretary of state) hints when - in a puff on the dust jacket - she calls O'Donnell's story “an instructive tale”. Whether our new political leaders will actually turn back to reflect on the end of Roman empire, and listen to the message, is another question.
The Fall of the West by Adrian Goldsworthy
weidenfeld £25 pp560
The Ruin of the Roman Empire by James J O'Donnell
Profile £25 pp448
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