The Ruin of the Roman Empire – James J. O’Donnell

The Ruin of the Roman Empire
James J. O’Donnell
436 pages including index and notes
published in 2008

A few years ago I became interested in Roman history, especially with the later Roman Empire, what historians now call Late Antiquity, the period during which Rome supposedly fell. Supposedly fell, as the simple history we’ve been taught in school of barbarian invasions from the fringes of the Empire finally overrunning its heartlands, looting Rome and deposing the last true Roman Emperor in 476 CE, is of course wrong. That story is an invention, largely created by, as James J. O’Donnell put it, “a short, fat man”, Edward Gibbon, in his famous Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which codified this standard history of the fall of the Roman Empire. It was challenged in the early seventies, most famously by Peter Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity, as new research and new generations of historians started to question this old story. They found a Roman Empire and world that was severely challenged in the fifth century CE, but much more continuity between the old classical world and the new dark ages than there had been room for in the standard model.

Fast forward a few decades and the revisionists themselves are being corrected by later generations of scholars, e.g. in the books of Peter Heather and Bryan Ward-Perkins I’ve reviewed before. James O’Donnell’s entry on the subject, The Ruin of the Roman Empire is the most idiosyncratic so far I’ve read, aptly summed up by its subtitle: “The emperor who brought it down. The Barbarians who could’ve saved it.” The emperor is Justinian I, who wanted to make the empire whole again, the barbarians the supposed invaders who had taken over its western provinces. O’Donnell argues that if Justinian I had not tried to reconquer Italy and North Africa, but had concentrated his energies on his Eastern provinces and the border with Persia, something like the Roman Empire could’ve survived for longer than it did, if not an united Roman Empire. The fall of Rome in 476 CE was not the end of the Roman Empire.

For O’Donnell, the “barbarian” rulers like Odoacer and Theoderic who between them managed to rule Italy for roughly half a century almost as if the Roman Empire still existed, acknowledging the emperor in Constantinople but ruling largely independently were the realists. They and the Vandals in Africa, the Visigoths in Spain and Franks in France (well, were else) kept a Roman existence going on a much smaller, more realistic scale. Justinian on the other hand wanted to regain Rome’s old glory, tried to recapture the western provinces that had been lost, wasting the wealth of his own empire in the process. Furthermore, he was also a religious idealist, wanting to enforce his form of Christianity throughout the Empire, unlike his more cautious barbarian rivals in the west. Since his own creed was a minority one in the Byzantine Empire, it alienated him from his subjects in e.g Egypt and the Near East, making these provinces vulnerable for the Arab invasions of the early seventh century.

Again, according to O’Donnell, the barbarians who had taken over the western empire and whom Justinian wanted to dethrone were not so barbaric as the official histories a few centuries would make them out to be. They were the product of the old empire’s frontier regions along the Rhine and the Donau and the Balkan hinterlands. Even those who came from beyond the empire had been influenced by Roman civilisation for decades or even centuries. What’s more, groups like the Vandals or Visigoths were not ethnic groups, but changed during their journeys, as smaller groups split off or joined, some people settling down, others joining looking for a new future elsewhere. By the time groups like these had reached their final settlement area, they had been inside the empire for a generation or longer and had been romanised. As O’Donnell puts it, the frontiers were the places were the reality of the Late Roman Empire were most visible and such invasions tracked this reality into the heart of it.

I’m not sure I’m completely convinced by O’Donnell’s thesis, but the book he has written to support it is worthwhile in its own right. For a start, he brings a whole new persective to the question of the Fall of Rome and all that entails. It may be right, it may be wrong, but it gives you an entire new look at an old subject. What’s more, he does his best to imagine how the people actually living would’ve thought about what was happening to their empire, rather than see everything in the light of the inevitable Fall.