His great-uncle, Julius Caesar, had encouraged him to gain the military experience required for a political career, but Octavian was slow to heed his advice. Even his parents seem to have assumed — and hoped, for his sake — that he would turn down his inheritance when he was named as the late dictator’s adopted son and primary heir. The fact that Octavian accepted it without hesitation was the first sign that there was more to him than met the eye.

There is nothing hagiographical about the late Jochen Bleicken’s monumental and highly readable biography of Rome’s first emperor, now published in an elegant translation by Anthea Bell from the 1998 German original.

Through his early years, Octavian is presented as incredibly lacklustre, not to say spoiled. His father, a politician, came from an upper-class family from Velletri, south-east of Rome. His mother was the daughter of one of Julius Caesar’s sisters, and married handsomely, first Octavian’s father, then a distinguished senator. Perhaps the young Augustus had it too easy. In 45 BC, the year before Caesar died, the 18-year-old future heir had no political or administrative experience to speak of, and no military experience in the field. Mark Antony, who was one of Caesar’s reserve heirs, had all three.

Bleicken has dedicated the first few hundred pages of his 620-page book (excluding the extensive endnotes) to untangling the crisis that arose after the assassination of Caesar. Brutus and Cassius and the other so-called Liberators believed that they had freed Rome from tyranny, but as Cicero realised, their act “was carried out with the courage of men but the understanding of boys . . . The tree was felled, but the roots were not torn out.”

There was always going to be chaos in the wake of Caesar’s death, but things might have been marginally less chaotic had Octavian taken his parents’ advice and rejected the role as heir. Mark Antony would still have faced a considerable struggle to put Rome back on an even keel, but who knows how quickly the situation might have been resolved without the conflict that resulted in the casualty-heavy Battle of Actium between Antony and Octavian.

Although Octavian’s late leap to military prowess was significant in his rise, Bleicken also emphasises the way in which his beneficence presaged his victory. Whereas Antony kept hold of what he had acquired of Caesar’s goods after his death, Octavian handed over much of his inheritance to the citizens of Rome, who were always grateful for gifts.

Then, at the age of 27, he charmingly asked them for their pardon for the chaos of the civil war, before providing the veteran soldiers with new settlements. The loyalty of the military was a sound investment for a man whose life would often be under threat.

Since neither Antony nor Octavian, nor indeed an alliance between them, was about to do the impossible and reestablish the defunct republic, Octavian’s prevailing challenge after his victory at Actium in 31 BC was to shape, almost imperceptibly, a one-man rule that would be acceptable to a population that had grown up innately fearful of monarchy.

As Octavian consolidated his position in this way, he emerges from Bleichen’s bold but detailed biography as rather a remote figure. Tellingly, he ceases to be elusive to us principally when he is unpleasant: “Octavian’s ethical standards were a good deal lower in affairs of the heart than those of most of his contemporaries and equals, and all his life he ruthlessly exploited his position of power to satisfy his sexual needs. He did not stop short at other men’s wives.”

After impregnating his wife Scribonia, Octavian fell passionately in love with the married Livia Drusilla, who was descended from the illustrious Claudii Pulchri family, and herself pregnant at the time with her husband’s child. Surprising though it may be, their marriage proved to be a strong one. Livia’s virtuous reputation to some degree made up for Augustus’ deficiencies, which was important because he liked to present himself as the redeemer of national morality.

Before he died, he wrote the Res Gestae, an immodest account of his own achievements, which included the reconstruction of many of Rome’s temples, and the introduction of laws to reinvigorate family life. One of these laws required the Roman people to marry and have children. Another — which remained in force until the third century AD — rendered adultery illegal.

While it is easy to point to Augustus’s hypocrisy, not least in his failure to have children by Livia, we are discouraged from doing so. The majority of Rome’s senators supported his legislation, Bleichen reminds us, as it professed to revive good old-fashioned morals. In its very willingness to agree to it, however, “society gave up a part of its freedom”. The people led themselves into the principate that Augustus was subtly establishing by combining the flavour of the old with the new.

Bleichen has acknowledged a debt here to the 19th-century historian Theodor Mommsen, whom he gushingly called “the foremost historian of the ancient world, and not only in his own time”. While Mommsen attracted criticism from fellow scholars for appearing to play down the monarchical nature of the principate by emphasising its continuity with the early republic, Bleichen has breathed new life into his argument. Augustus’s preoccupation with moral legislation helped him to make radical changes beneath a veil of tradition.

Look at almost any portrait bust of Augustus (there are no plates in this volume so one must look elsewhere) and you will be struck by his serenity. The smooth appearance of the man who believed in his own divinity and championed the Pax Romana, one starts to realise, isn’t mere whitewash.

The first emperor of Rome was perfectly capable, and certainly fixed in his ideas, but by comparison with Julius Caesar he was just a bit bland. Fortunately for Augustus, a bit of blandness wasn’t entirely uncalled for in Rome after the turmoil of the previous decades.

Augustus will always be remembered as the architect of empire, and it is no failure on Bleichen’s part that the architecture is more interesting than its draughtsman.

The post From Octavian To Augustus appeared first on Standpoint.

Born in Bordeaux, Ausonius was a grammarian and teacher of rhetoric. He was made the tutor of Gratian, the son of the Emperor Valentinian, and held a number of court offices, finally becoming consul in 379 when his pupil became emperor. After Gratian’s assassination in 383 Ausonius retired to his estates and amused himself with poetry until his own death some ten years later.

Ausonius’s gift was for centos, a poetic form defined perhaps too pithily by Dr Johnson as a “composition formed by joining scraps from other authors”. A cento is a form of poetic composition in which individual phrases or lines from some great and respected poet of the past are excerpted and stitched together to form a new piece of poetry (the term, which derives ultimately from the Greek verb meaning to plant slips or cuttings of trees, came in time to refer to a patchwork quilt or garment). This “new” poem tended to be on an un-epic or otherwise undignified or common subject; and the most usual source of material for centos was the work of the most respected poets — Homer and Virgil in Greek and Latin respectively.

It was a form which generated its own aesthetic, as Ausonius explained in the dedicatory epistle to his own most notorious cento, the “Cento Nuptialis”, a work commissioned by no less a patron than the Emperor Valentinian himself:

I’ll try to tell you what a cento is. It is a poem neatly constructed out of a variety of passages and diverse meanings, in such a way so that either two half lines are joined together to form one single line, or one line and the following half of the next line. To place two entire lines side by side is poorly done, and three in a row is really disgraceful. . . . And so this little work, the cento, is handled in much the same way as a geometrical puzzle, so as to bring together different meanings, to make pieces which are in fact arbitrarily connected seem to fit in naturally with one another, to let foreign elements let no crack of light slip between them, to prevent the far-fetched from proclaiming the metaphysical force which yokes them together, the densely packed from bursting, the closely knit from gaping.

This sophisticated and demanding poetic form succeeded best, paradoxically, when applied to the most schoolboyish ends. The most notorious part of the “Cento Nuptialis” is the account of the wedding night. In this extract of five lines no fewer than six fragments from different books of the Aeneid and one from the Eclogues have been stitched together:

. . . ramum, qui veste latebat,
sanguineus ebuli bacis minioque rubentem
nudato capite et pedibus per mutua nexis,
monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum,
eripit a femore et trepidanti fervidus instat.

. . . the rod hidden within his clothing
scarlet with elderberries and reddened with dye
its head bare, as their legs entwined,
an horrific monster, huge, shapeless, no sight in its single eye,
he draws forth from his flank and eagerly presses as she quivers.

Prim scholars have responded with outrage to this “desecration” of Virgil, while Gibbon asserted that Ausonius’s poetry “condemns the taste of his age”. It certainly is shallow. But there is real wit and genuine learning in the reapplication of some of the lines. And is it not curiously liberating, once in a while, to see great art treated with something less than reverence? Ausonius himself admitted — perhaps a better word would be “proclaimed” — that the cento was more likely to provoke laughter than praise.

Ausonius, and the cento form in which he excelled, have particularly appealed to young writers who entered their literary majority at a moment when the achievements of their immediate predecessors seemed stifling because unsurpassable. In English poetry one such moment was the decade preceding the death of Pope in 1744, when the possibilities for poetry seemed exhausted. No one could hope to surpass Pope in couplets, and recent attempts to revive a Miltonic grandeur were not encouraging, tending to fall into bathos. At just this moment two young Etonian friends, Horace Walpole and Thomas Gray, went up to Cambridge. A fine copy of Ausonius was one of the few volumes Sir Robert Walpole had allowed Horace to borrow from the library at Houghton and take with him to King’s. This edition highlighted the parodic techniques of the cento by noting the original sources of Ausonius’s fragments in the “Cento Nuptialis”.

The example of Ausonius clearly resonated with the two youths, whose own later work shows its influence. In The Castle of Otranto (1764) Walpole would consciously apply the principles of the cento to the Gothic novel, combining scenic form derived from sentimental drama, characters lifted from Shakespearean tragedy, and décor from the medievalism of the imagination. Gray’s poetry took the technique of classical allusion to a pinnacle of complexity and succeeded in transforming it from a literary game to the expression of a particular kind of moral sensibility.

The cento had this broader application in Ausonius, too. In his “Mosella”, the poem on the river Mosel he wrote after attending the imperial court in Augusta Treverorum (Trier), Ausonius praised the river as “amnis odorifero iuga vitea consite Baccho”, a stream whose banks are overgrown with Bacchus’s fragrant vines. Ausonius depicted nature as itself a kind of cento, in which disparate elements came together to create unexpected new wholes, sometimes beautiful, sometimes bucolic and comic:

laeta operum plebes festinantesque coloni
vertice nunc summo properant, nunc deiuge dorso,
certantes stolidis clamoribus. inde viator
riparum subiecta terens, hinc navita labens,
probra canunt seris cultoribus: adstrepsit ollis
et rupes et silva tremens et concavus amnis.

The people, happy in their work, and the restless husbandman are busy, now on the hilltop, now on the slope, exchanging shouts in boisterous rivalry. Here the wayfarer tramping along the low-lying bank, and there the bargeman floating by, throw their insults at the lazy vine-dressers; and all the hills, and shivering woods, and channelled river, ring with their cries.

Just as the vine has a place in that cento which is a beautiful landscape, so too does wine have its place in the cento of a life well lived.

The post Cento Ground appeared first on Standpoint.

Brutus came from a more eminent family than Caesar: his ancestor Lucius Junius Brutus had deposed Tarquin the Proud, the last king of Rome, and died defending the republic. As an insider, Brutus could afford to cultivate a reputation for virtue by remaining aloof from power struggles. We are told that his temperament was serious, but he never took philosophy or politics seriously, let alone war.

His mother, Servilia, was Caesar’s mistress around the time that Brutus was born, and Caesar treated him like a son. Brutus admired Caesar and was betrothed to his daughter Julia, but reasons of state dictated that she be married to Pompey, Caesar’s greatest rival. During the civil war between them, Brutus fought for Pompey, but after his capture switched sides and helped Caesar to defeat his former commander. Caesar forgave Brutus and promoted him, but never won his loyalty.

Indeed the only person to whom Brutus was unswervingly loyal was his second wife, Porcia (or Portia, as Shakespeare calls her). Echoing Plutarch, Shakespeare depicts her as a woman of such physical courage that she stabs herself in the thigh to prove to her husband that she can be trusted with his secrets. Learning of his suicide after Philippi, Porcia is supposed to have killed herself by swallowing live coals. But how much of this sentimental view of the marriage stands scrutiny? Porcia was Brutus’s first cousin, the daughter of his uncle, Marcius Porcius Cato, who had been Caesar’s most implacable foe. Cato the Younger had fallen on his sword rather than submit to Caesar’s rule; yet, as Christian Meier observes in his biography of Caesar, Brutus thought Cato had been mistaken and repudiated him.

Brutus had divorced his first wife to marry Porcia. She was beautiful and had a famous father; the union could advance his career. Between his mother, who adored Caesar, and his wife, who hated him, Brutus seems to have dithered. Eventually he was shamed into joining the conspiracy by the more zealous figure of Gaius Cassius, his brother-in-law, whose friends accused him of betraying the memory of his republican ancestor. The facts suggest that behind his facade of Roman virtue Brutus was a weak man, easily influenced by stronger characters of both sexes around him.

That there was less to Brutus than met the eye is shown by Plutarch’s observation that even his enemies gave him the credit for whatever was honourable in the assassination of Caesar, while blaming Cassius for “whatever was barbarous or cruel”. Shakespeare, too, contrasts Brutus favorably with Cassius.

Yet according to the great historian Theodor Mommsen, Brutus was much more to blame for the failure of the republican cause than Cassius. He refused to arrest Caesar’s allies and seize the city. He missed his chance to invade Northern Italy, instead fleeing to Greece and Asia Minor. Finally, he overruled Cassius by insisting on a showdown with Antony and Octavian at Philippi. When Cassius, believing that Brutus had been defeated, killed himself, the republicans were doomed. Unlike Cassius, writes Mommsen, “Brutus was no strategist.”

By assassinating Caesar, and discounting the dead dictator’s popularity with the plebeians, Brutus gambled the future of Rome on the strength of his reputation. He lost.

Was Brutus at least “an honourable man”? In Antony’s speech, one of the most celebrated in all Shakespeare, irony is of course deployed to spectacular effect. Antony uses the device of apophasis to contrast himself — “a plain blunt man . . . I only speak right on” — with Brutus — “an orator” — and turns the high esteem in which the latter and his family were held against him. In fact, of course, it is Brutus who has given a plain, brief speech. The ancient historian Eduard Meyer praised Shakespeare for giving us a plausible approximation of what Brutus might have said. The key passage is this: “As Caesar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honour him; but, as he was ambitious, I slew him.”

Brutus had enjoyed an effortless rise, not least thanks to Caesar’s patronage. “Brutus was certainly ambitious,” the classicist Daisy Dunn confirms. If so, how was it honourable for him to use Caesar’s undisguised ambition as a reason for murdering him? “This was the most unkindest cut of all.” Antony was admittedly making mischief when he incited the Romans against Brutus; but his eulogy for Caesar was much more sincere than that for Caesar’s assassin. Antony did not believe for a moment that Brutus was the noblest Roman of them all. No more should we.

The post Overrated: Marcus Brutus appeared first on Standpoint.

On one level, there is no need to be surprised. The disintegration of a huge empire, which had lasted for 400 years, reached from the Euphrates and the Nile to Hadrian’s Wall and turned the Mediterranean for the only time in its history into an inland lake, is always going to be of wide interest. Barbarians and invasions, meanwhile, seem to hold a fascination for boys of all ages — it is surely not a coincidence that all seven books considered here are by male historians. Furthermore, the how and why of the fall of Rome will always be contentious and open to new interpretations, not just because crucial bits of evidence are missing, but also because major historical turning points, however well-documented, are always susceptible to rival explanations. However many archives are opened up and however many documents are made available on the internet, there will, for instance, always be debate over the underlying reasons, and the precise concatenation of events, that brought down the British or Soviet empires — if this were not the case, historians might as well shut up their laptops and retire.

The books we are considering here certainly exemplify the wide range of explanations for the fall of the Western empire which are currently fashionable, and which go far beyond the traditional view that it was overwhelmed by barbarians from beyond the Rhine and Danube, because of internal decline. At one end of the spectrum stands Walter Goffart who, fearful of modern German nationalism, has for decades fought a dogged campaign against any “Germanic” influence in early European history, including any significant role for barbarian invasion in the fifth century. His latest book is entirely true to form. For Goffart, the “Germanic invasions” of the Western empire never really happened, and the barbarian peoples who did settle in Roman territory during the fifth century were largely there at the invitation of the Romans, and then very rapidly adopted Roman ways. Important changes happened, but Germanic settlers played little part in bringing these about — and anyway we should never call these peoples “Germanic”, lest this gives modern Germans dangerous ideas about their importance in history. In the early 21st century, this blanket fear of Germanism is perhaps a little obsessive, and more appropriate for an immediately post-war audience — though Goffart has a large and very loyal following among scholars and students in the US and Canada (where he has taught for many years). But whatever one thinks of his conclusions (and I am not a fan), Goffart’s ideas are certainly radical: the defeat of Rome and the Germanic invasions do not need to be explained, because they never really happened. 

At the other end of the interpretative spectrum, Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire sticks firmly to successful invasion and the settlement of Germanic tribes within the empire as the cause of the collapse of the West, compounded by some bad luck and bad management on the part of the Romans. His is the book to read if you are looking for a detailed but clear narrative of the political and military events of the later-fourth and fifth centuries. For Heather, two key factors in the fall of the West were an increase in the size and strength of the Germanic tribes, as they coalesced during the fourth century in order to respond more effectively to the power and blandishments of their Roman neighbours, and the appearance in the 370s on the south Russian steppes of a terrifying new people, the Huns. Barbarian tribes, prodded in the rear by the Huns, and Roman errors of judgment were what brought down the empire, not underlying, let alone increasing, internal weakness.  This belief in continued Roman power is representative of a broad change in historical fashion: almost none of the authors we are considering here believes that Rome’s strength had declined significantly before it fell, whereas for Gibbon and most authors of the 19th and earlier 20th centuries, this was axiomatic — it was indeed built into Gibbon’s famous title The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  Gibbon blamed Christianity, while later historians often chose whatever was the fashionable crisis of their day (such as racial miscegenation, or class struggle). Rightly or wrongly, belief in grandiose structural weaknesses seems to be frowned on by present-day historians, who instead like to blame historical disasters on human error or simple bad luck.

The other five books sit somewhere in between the two poles of interpretation represented by Goffart and Heather — that Germanic invasion was decisive in the fall of the West (Heather), or that it played little part in provoking the changes of the day (Goffart). Guy Halsall’s Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West 376-568, for instance, is a serious student textbook which accepts that invasion played a very significant part in the dissolution of the empire, but also sees much fourth- and fifth-century change as coming from within Roman society. While very clear, and with the huge advantage of engaging seriously with archaeological evidence, this is not a book aimed at the general reader, since it engages in detail with directions in past and present scholarship. Adrian Goldsworthy’s The Fall of the West, by contrast, is the only work by a professional author, rather than a university-based academic. It is aimed (in the manner of Tom Holland) at a reading public that enjoys ancient history. I was disappointed by it, and I don’t think this is just because I am a supercilious academic anxious to maintain a closed shop. It has a well-researched and readable narrative of events, starting at the end of the second century, and it ends with a “Simple Answer” to why the empire failed, and an “Even Simpler Moral” for our times — Rome fell because Romans lost their sense of purpose and came to hold power for its own sake, rather than for the greater good of the state. But these strong conclusions are only spelled out in any detail in two short final chapters of about ten pages each. 

Christopher Kelly’s Attila the Hun and James O’Donnell’s The Ruin of the Roman Empire both illustrate perfectly how changing one’s perspective can radically change one’s view of this period. Both authors turn the tables on the usual “victims” of the dissolution of the empire, the Romans. Christopher Kelly tells the story of one of the West’s great bogeymen, Attila the Hun, presenting him as a thoughtful and effective political and military leader, quite capable of outmanoeuvring his Roman adversaries — partly because they held a mistaken faith in their innate superiority over barbarians like him. The reputation of Attila is indeed interesting. As with Richard III, for most of us, no amount of scholarly ink can ever wash him and his Huns entirely clean of mythic horror. But there are other points of view. Among the Hungarians, whose language and identity derive from a similar group of nomadic invaders, the Huns are seen (with some justification) as very distant cousins, and Attila is viewed as a great ruler. A student of mine, who spent part of a gap year helping in a Budapest primary school, was amused to find three little boys named Attila among her charges. James O’Donnell’s barbarian perspective is even stronger, though the group he chooses to defend is not the Huns, but one of the best-documented Germanic peoples, the Ostrogoths. In its US edition, his Ruin of the Roman Empire bears the subtitle: “The emperor who brought it down, the barbarians who could have saved it.” For O’Donnell it was a Roman emperor, Justinian, who definitively destroyed the Roman empire. By invading the Ostrogoths’ successor kingdom in Italy, he crushed a potential ally and destroyed the possibility of the world continuing to live in peace and prosperity.  Here the defenders of civilization are the barbarian Ostrogoths and the destructive invaders are Romans — east Romans (from Constantinople) under Justinian. 

Of my own The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization I can hardly provide a dispassionate judgment: its most original and contentious chapters are those that argue for an “end of civilization” (defined as a dramatic drop in living standards) as a result of the disintegration of the empire. Some serious reviewers have liked the book, others have found it (with some cause) over-egged, or (with less cause) over-interested in the material things of life. The only way I believed I could confidently, and objectively, judge my book to have triumphed over the other six we are considering was in its brevity. But closer research leads me to question even this. The next shortest book, Christopher Kelly’s Attila the Hun, is 50 pages longer and is almost twice as thick — but, when one opens it up, the print is generous and the paper bulky. It is one of those books that the publishers have decided to pad out, to make it look more substantial than it really is. Why they think we appreciate this unnecessary overloading of our bookcases, I do not know. 

The influence of publishers, seeking to attract the market, is certainly present in the dramatic titles and lurid covers of almost all these books — Guy Halsall’s Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West 376-568 is the only honourable exception, with its descriptive title and a low-key cover, presumably because, as a textbook, it is actually meant to look serious. I am definitely guilty of allowing my publisher (the highly reputable Oxford University Press) to influence the packaging of my book. I had intended the second half of my title to read “and the End of a Civilization”, but somehow, somewhere along the line, the “a” dropped out when the book was being edited, and the all-engulfing “The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization” was proposed. I was all too easily persuaded that this was more striking (rather than less honest), and at the same time my own suggestion for a cover illustration for the hard-back edition, a mournful and lyrical Fuseli drawing of the artist despairing over the ruin of the Roman past, was replaced by an apocalyptic 19th-century image of the sack of a city, with large-scale massacre under way and a strong suggestion of rape to come. Publishers know their trade and, I presume, are right in thinking that potential readers need to be hit firmly in the eye, but it is striking how easily sober academics can be seduced down a populist path. 

A wish to court the wider public also manifests itself in other ways. The five authors (myself included) who aspire to be bought and read by the intelligent, and all-too-elusive, “wider reading public”, all open their books with intriguing, and supposedly well-written, little stories, designed to tempt the reader into the heart of the book. Some (and again I am guilty) even open individual chapters in the same way.  Has this become an over-used cliché of “popular” history (though I have to admit I can’t think of a better way of hooking a reader)? Some of these authors also have a fondness, even a weakness, for throwing in allusions and parallels from contemporary history and from literature. James O’Donnell particularly likes this style: on one single page (227), in discussing the emperor Justinian, he works in references to Huck Finn, Hollywood, Hamlet, Gertrude and Ophelia, and Kurt Vonnegut. Does this shed revealing light on Justinian, or is it primarily meant to tell us how cultured and aware the author is? Christopher Kelly has a similar propensity to display his knowledge of the modern world and modern culture, this time through his chapter titles: “Axis of Evil”, “Shock and Awe”, “Mission Impossible” and “Close Encounters”, as well as one dreadful pun, “A Backward Steppe” (which discusses Hunnic society north of the Black and Caspian Seas). I find all this a bit cheap, but am I just being curmudgeonly?

“Axis of Evil” and “Shock and Awe” (which O’Donnell also uses, in a subtitle) are of course meant to make us consider parallels with contemporary events, and raise the question of whether these books are intended to transmit lessons from the past to us in the present.  In the case of three of these books — Adrian Goldsworthy’s, James O’Donnell’s and my own — a moral for the present is explicit. In my case it is a very general one — that material well-being (and with it high culture) are dependent on economic complexity, which is fragile; when an economy collapses (as I believe happened at the end of the Roman empire), the consequences are dire. 

I don’t advocate any solutions, but I do suggest a degree of caution and humility. (In the case of Goldsworthy’s book, the moral is much more precise: that great powers which lose a sense of common purpose and cease to value public service are in severe danger of decline, and that the present-day United States should look to this lesson. O’Donnell is worried by the recent propensity of the US to impose its military will with very little regard to the long-term consequences, and seeks to steer opinion towards a much more cautious and irenic strategy. 

The aggressive Justinian is roundly condemned, and presented, implicitly but unambiguously, as a sixth-century George W. Bush: “He [Justinian] was a man of limited talents from the provinces, surrounded by gifted men who knew only too well how to reshape their world in the image of delusion about the position of the city [Constantinople] and its emperors in this world…We may choose to call them Justinian’s best and brightest or, if you prefer, his neoconservatives” (p.216). 

Explicit and implicit comparisons between old and new Romes have a long and very distinguished history, reaching back to Gibbon and beyond, though learning lessons from Rome’s past, as with all lessons from history, has proved problematic — lessons are easy to see with the advantage of hindsight, much less easy to spot in the heat of the moment. The genre of explicit comparison is most thoroughly represented in another recent work, Cullen Murphy’s Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America (Houghton Mifflin 2007), which I have only excluded from consideration alongside our seven books because it is very different in style and approach. It is not a conventional history book and does not focus specifically on the late empire; rather it is a detailed (and intelligent) exploration of different aspects of ancient Roman and modern American society, drawing out the contrasts between the two as much as, if not more than, the parallels. 

Murphy, Goldsworthy, O’Donnell and I are very obviously and openly worried that things could go terribly wrong for the modern West, and explicitly explore comparisons with the history of Rome.  In the case of Goffart, Heather and Halsall this is not so, though Goffart does reveal some modern anxieties of his own (over German nationalism). But it is hard not to conclude that a widespread anxiety over a modern “decline of the West” underlies the presence of all these books on the disintegration of the Roman empire, and of a reading public prepared to buy them. It is certainly very striking that so many books have recently appeared on the dissolution of Rome’s power, and so very few chart its rise and apogee. Europeans, and their descendents the North Americans, have had it very good for four or five centuries, thanks to their dominance (military, political, economic, cultural, even religious) over the globe. Romans had it very good for about the same number of centuries. Then things got a lot more “complicated” for the Romans. Are we in the modern West headed in the same direction? 

It is interesting to explore a notable absence from these books.  They are primarily, for the most part exclusively, about the fall of Roman power in the Western half of the empire — they do not explore in any detail the survival of the empire based in Constantinople, which considered itself “Roman” throughout its existence and which only disappeared in 1453. In the English-speaking world (in Greece and the Balkans, obviously, things are different) this empire is essentially viewed as part of the oriental “other”, and given a suitably exotic name, “Byzantine” — full of Ys and Zs, difficult to pronounce with confidence, and redolent of incense and mosaics. We do not identify with the Romans of Constantinople in the same way as we identify with the Romans of Rome. This also means that we, and all these books, can largely ignore the great crisis that faced the East Roman empire two centuries after the fall of the West — the rise of the Arabs and of Islam. This was something that happened not to “our” Roman empire, but to an alien “Byzantine” empire. This is very convenient, because it means we Europeans, and peoples of European descent, while getting deeply preoccupied by our own barbarians and their role in history (as all these books testify), can ignore the much more important, but also much more sensitive, issue of the role of Arab and Muslim invasions in overturning the world order during the seventh century.

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