Rome: An Empire's Story (44 page)

Most of the other groups now entering the empire originated in that broad band of peoples who knew Rome well from long acquaintance.
²²
Some crossed the Rhine —Vandals, Sueves, and others—heading through Gaul to Spain. The Goths moved on to Aquitaine where they were settled as ‘guests’ in 418. From there they expanded their power into Spain, driving other groups ahead of them. The Vandals crossed into Africa in 429 and ten years later captured Carthage, the second greatest city of the Roman west. Meanwhile Franks, Burgundians, and Huns joined a confusing struggle for northern Gaul. As it happens a mass of literature written in late antique Gaul has survived, and through it we can trace the stages by which faith in the emperors was lost, the provinces slipped from Roman control, and local
accommodations were made between the landowning classes and their new rulers. Following Aurelian’s suppression of the separatist Gallic emperors who had ruled the region from
AD
260 to 275, the tetrarchs had paid more attention to this part of the empire. Trier, on the Moselle, became an imperial capital, and was endowed by Constantine with a great palace and basilica, imperial baths (which were never finished), and other monuments, many of them surviving to this day.
²³
A series of panegyrical speeches from this period illustrate the efforts of local aristocrats to draw imperial favour to their cities. From the court at Trier we have the poems of Ausonius, a teacher of grammar and rhetoric from Bordeaux who served both as a governor and as tutor to the boy emperor Gratian in the 370s before rising to the consulship. His poetry describes his relatives and colleagues in Bordeaux, the landscape of the Moselle Valley, but most of all the urbane life of the educated in the last generation of the western empire. During the early fifth century that world changed by stages.
²⁴
It became less and less easy to tell barbarian warlords adopting Roman titles from Roman generals behaving like local dynasts as they struggled to protect their own regions.
²⁵
Everywhere communities sought local protectors. Many aristocrats entered the Church. Some embraced ascetic disciplines, while others continued to exercise social authority in their cities as bishops. The letters of Sidonius Apollinaris offer a finely nuanced picture of the move from Ausonius’ world of educated aristocrats playing sophisticated literary games to a world of churchmen interceding for their people with warrior kings.
²⁶

By the middle of the fifth century, the Roman Empire in the west was limited to Italy and parts of southern France. A Vandal fleet from Africa sacked Rome again in 455.
²⁷
The last western emperor was deposed by his barbarian ‘guests’ in 476, and his place taken by a Gothic king, one of the many barbarian leaders on whom western emperors had come to depend. Eastern emperors were powerless to intervene, and were compelled to use diplomacy in the west to free up resources for defence in the north and east. No single moment of crisis was recognized as the end of what we call the western empire. But it was obvious enough to Zosimus.

West of the Adriatic and north of the Balkans a new world of barbarian kingdoms had replaced the Roman provinces. Their societies were quite unlike those their Iron Age ancestors had lived in in central Europe.
²⁸
During their time on the frontiers, new social structures had emerged. Most ‘barbarian’ rulers were Christian, and their idea of kingship was in many ways modelled on their image of the Roman emperor. Goths, Vandals, and
Burgundians relied at first on tax systems descended from those established by Diocletian.
²⁹
They ruled from Roman cities where they repaired monuments and they created courts at which they patronized Roman scholars and churchmen. Throughout the fifth and sixth centuries their administrations largely depended on an elite who in education and cultural outlook were as Roman as their ancestors had been. Some of these scholars put their scholarship to work reconstructing the ancient traditions of their new masters, combining tribal traditions with Greek mythology to do so.
³⁰
The warbands gradually mutated into armies, the chieftains into landholders. Successive kings issued law codes, just as the Emperor Theodosius had, if on a rather smaller scale.
³¹
Some of those law codes enshrined the principle of multi-ethnic states, each people using their own laws. Like Roman emperors the kings squabbled with bishops and they were drawn into disputes over heresy. Roman civilization continued in some ways very much as before, until the arrival of Franks and Lombards from the north in the sixth century and Arabs in the seventh. But the empire was gone.

Further Reading

Tim Barnes’s
New Empire of Diocletian and Constantine
(Cambridge, Mass., 1982) is the basis for understanding the transformation of Roman government at the end of the third century, and is much more than a companion piece to his
Constantine and Eusebius
(Cambridge, Mass., 1981). The institutions of the empire are described in detail in A. H. M. Jones’s
Later Roman Empire
(Oxford, 1964): how they worked in practice is the subject of Christopher Kelly’s
Ruling the Later Roman Empire
(Cambridge, Mass., 2004). John Matthews’s
Roman Empire of Ammianus
(London, 1989) offers a vivid picture of the empire before the disasters of Adrianople, one that encompasses politics and society. Fergus Millar’s
A Greek Roman Empire
(Berkeley, 2006) offers a new view of the early fifth century. A particularly useful set of essays is included in Simon Swain and Mark Edwards’s
Approaching Late Antiquity
(Oxford, 2004).

Alongside these studies focused on politics and institutions, late antiquity has emerged as a vast field of cultural history. Peter Brown’s
World of Late Antiquity
(London, 1971) was in some ways the manifesto for this approach. His own voluminous writings, and those of his students and associates, have explored with subtlety the rich material offered by Christian writings. His
Augustine of Hippo
(rev. edn. London, 2000) shows just how much can be mined from this seam. Perhaps the best conspectus of late antiquity is offered by
Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Post-Classical World
, edited by Brown, Glen Bowersock, and Oleg Grabar (Cambridge, Mass., 1999).

XVI
A CHRISTIAN EMPIRE

You asked me to write an answer to the lying distortions spouted by those people who are strangers to the City of God. They are called pagans after the rustic crossroads and villages (
pagi
) they inhabit and foreigners (
gentiles
) because all they know about are earthly matters. They have no interest in things to come: as for the past they have either forgotten it or are simply ignorant. Nevertheless they still claim that the present day is unusually beset with disasters for this one reason alone, that men believe in Christ and worship God, while idols received less and less cult.

(Orosius,
History against the Pagans
Preface 9)

The Rise of Religions

Once upon a time, the Romans felt they enjoyed the special favour of their gods. Those gods were in a sense their fellow citizens. Their worship in the public rituals—the
sacra publica
—of Rome was the organizing centre of the religious lives and identities of the Romans. How this cohered with the public cults of the other communities of the empire was, as I have explained already, a little unclear. Yet the many polytheistic religious systems of the classical Mediterranean were not so different, and the worship of the emperors figured in them all, one way or another. Across the empire, the wealthy built temples, took on priesthoods, and celebrated festivals: all seemed to prosper.

Abandoning this pact with heaven was, in the eyes of many, an act of lunacy that had brought about the collapse of Rome’s fortunes. Augustine, writing
The City of God
after the first sack of Rome in 410, felt he had to answer these charges. Roman success owed nothing to the cult of the gods, he argued, since there were disasters even in the period of pagan worship. Religious piety brought rewards in the next world, not this one. Earthly disasters like the sack of Rome were irrelevant. Can Augustine have really thought this? He wrote
The City of God
as Bishop of the African city of Hippo Regius, but in his earlier career he had been a professor at Carthage, had then been head-hunted by the senatorial prefect of Rome for a more prestigious position there, then finally went to the western imperial capital at Milan. Only in Milan had God claimed him, and brought him back via communities of contemplative scholars to lead the Christians of this small town in North Africa, not so far from the even smaller town where he had been brought up. Even so he cannot have failed to be shocked by the events of the early fifth century. Africa was far from the collapsing northern frontier, and the world Augustine had been born into, where he had studied and taught, had been thoroughly Roman. The move to Rome had attracted him because of the reputed quiet of the students compared to those of Carthage. At Milan he must have become more aware of the deteriorating situation, but the fall of Rome shocked everyone. The Vandals were already in Spain as he wrote: before his death they would cross the Straits of Gibraltar and begin the short war that would result in their capture of Carthage. Among the refugees from Spain who fled to Africa was Orosius, who became a pupil of Augustine and in 417 wrote at his suggestion another response, a seven-volume
History against the Pagans
. The preface states that pagans in their ignorance had claimed that there were now more calamities and disasters because men believed in Christ and worshipped God and increasingly neglected the worship of idols. Orosius set out to demonstrate the many disasters of earlier days. The result is a horrible history of the world, six books relating events up to the birth of Christ, the last offering a fascinating narration of Roman history, in which acts of imperial tyranny and military disasters are ameliorated by the power of God as the number of Christians in the empire grows.

The gap between traditional world views and Christian history is obvious enough. But it is symptomatic of a much wider phenomenon. Christians did not only disagree with others about the reason for the current crisis; they also disagreed about the relationship of the cosmological with the
political and social order of things. Traditionally ritual action had been mostly constrained within existing social entities, such as the family, the city, the army unit, or the empire itself. Christian communities were composed of believers who might have little in common except their belief, and who might be separated by that belief from other members of their families, cities, and so on. Nor were Christians alone in this. Manichaeans, Jews, and several other groups had also come to think of their religious identities as something separable from other aspects of society. Augustine expressed this more clearly than most in his distinction between the temporal Earthly City and the City of God, but the idea had become widespread. It is this idea from which has grown our notion of ‘religions’ as separate entities, rather than of religious action as just one dimension of broader social life. The reason the Christians were able to withstand the disaster of the sack of Rome was that this idea of religion had become deeply entrenched. The great history of the Roman Empire, in other words, had been taken over by another even grander narrative, the rise of religions.

The development of religions, in the plural, as bounded entities with their own institutions and membership, as things that can be contrasted to citizenship, class, or kinship, is relatively new in world history. Humans have had ritual much longer: it probably originated with
homo sapiens sapiens
between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago, and is one of the few things that genuinely separates us from all other animal species, some of which use tools, have some kind of language, and live in complex societies. Humans alone bury their dead, make art and music and dance, and perform rituals.
¹
Until recently all this ritual was closely woven into everyday life. It is more or less impossible to separate Athenian or Roman religious identity from their wider senses of belonging. It follows that conversion is more or less meaningless in antiquity, unless as one component of changing one’s citizenship.
²
No Greek or Roman words correspond to our notion of religion. Indeed specialists in the history of religion see that concept as evolving only gradually. Our modern concept of a religion as an organized body with members, norms, specific beliefs and practices, and a sense of exclusive adherence—that one must choose which
one
religion to belong to— perhaps only became generalized in the nineteenth century.
³

The first signs of the separating out of religion as a distinct sphere occur during classical antiquity. Euripides’
Bacchae
, written at the very end of the fifth century
BC
, dramatizes the disruptive power of a religious movement
that challenged the religious authority of leading members of the city and might divide families and communities down the middle. This Dionysiac cult represents one of several origins of religious pluralism. Rome experienced its own panic about Bacchanales in 186
BC
. Rumours circulated, as they later did in the case of Christianity, about strange nocturnal rituals. But it is clear that what really shocked was the lack of respect for social boundaries, and the implicit challenge to existing religious authority, which in most places was concentrated in the hands of the elite.