Rome

The Making of Late Antiquity – Peter Brown

History, Rome
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The Making of Late Antiquity
Peter Brown
135 pages including index
published in 1978

Peter Brown is the historian who popularised the idea of Late Antiquity as a transitional period between classic antiquity and the early Middle Ages, with the emphasis on the continuity between Rome and the Middle Ages, rather than on the collapse of the western Roman Empire. Brown first publicised his theories in The World of Late Antiquity; this isn’t that book, but was the closest to it I could get. The Making of Late Antiquity is based on a series of lectures Brown gave at Harvard University in 1976 and focuses on the transformation of Roman society between the second and fourth centuries CE.

A topic which is of course closely connected to the political and economic turmoil which the Roman Empire was subjected to in that period, with civil wars, “barbarian” invasions and a resurgent Persia, but you wouldn’t know it from this book. Brown concentrates on the inner lives of the Romans and ignores politics. This alone makes it an odd bedfellow with the other histories I’ve reading about this period, but Brown’s writing style makes it even odder. His writing is very oldfashioned, almost nineteenth century like, sometimes hard to come to grips with. The combination of inner focus and his writing style made this book fussy and a bit prissy, at least to me.

That Brown’s focus is on the mental rather than the political transformation of the Roman Empire made for a bit of a change, a different way of looking at Late Antiquity. Personally I find this too contrived to be useful, leaving out too much context and providing a much too rosy view of the late Roman Empire. Despite this I still finished The Making of Late Antiquity, since it was short enough to not waste too much time on.

There are two main arguments being pushed here. The first is the transformation of urban politics, as Roman society in these centuries became more hierarchical and more ambitious. Brown argues that in the second century ambition had been dampened by channeling it into local causes, e.g. through the sponsorship of religious festivals or by financing new buildings. Two centuries later these governors limiting ambition no longer worked; instead political ambition was aimed at the emperor. Political power was no longer to be found locally, but through the imperial bureaucracy and ultimately the favour of the emperor itself. Local elites became smaller and more connected to the centre.

At the same time, there was of course the transformation of the empire from being pagan to a Christian one. This again could be seen as a change in ambition. Religion in the second century was much more of a private affair than it would be in the fourth. The numinous was widespread in both centuries, but in the second it was more capricious, the gods could strike anybody and there were no reliable connections to the supernatural. Even those who called themselves sorcerers were relatively modest in their claims, never claiming universality. By the fourth century this had changed, through the Christian tradition of saints as well as the establishment of bishops and the church hierarchy. This much more controlled channel towards God mirrored the way in which society as a whole became more hierarchical.

Peter Brown’s focus is on the how, not the why of these changes. There’s not much discussion of the root causes for how Roman society evolved in these centuries. In this you can perhaps see the origin of this book in a series of lectures, as a good discussion of these root causes would be difficult to do justice in that format. Their lack in the book made it less than satisfying to me, left out too much context.

Rome’s Gothic Wars – Michael Kulikowski

History, Rome
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Rome’s Gothic Wars
Michael Kulikowski
225 pages including notes and index
published in 2007

Rome’s Gothic Wars, written by new to me American historian Michael Kulikowski is meant as an entry level introduction to the Goths and their conflicts with the Roman Empire. As such it’s quite short, with the main text being only 184 pages long. As a history it only deals with the Goths as they first entered Roman consciousness, in the late third century CE, up until the sack of Rome by Alaric and his Goths in 410 CE. Kulikowski does deal with the Gothic “prehistory” in passing, but does not deal at all with their later history and evolution into separate Visogothic and Ostrogothic kingdoms. For Kulikowski, those first two centuries of Roman-Gothic interactions form a neatly completed story, one that turned “Goths” into the Goths.

As Kulikowski argues, wondering where the Goths came from before they are first mentioned in Roman histories is pointless, nor should too much attention be paid to the “deeply misleading” Getica of Jordanes, the sole Roman source for the supposed origins and migration of the Goths, as other modern historians still do, attempting to separate the wheat from the chaff. Instead, Kulikowski believes that the Goths were a product of the Roman Frontier, like the Franks and Alamanni, who appear at the same time. Roman military, economic and cultural interactions with the barbaric tribes along their frontiers created new political entities and the Goths were one of them. The Gothic origins lie in the exact same parts of the Roman frontier zones that they first appear in Roman history, north of the Danube and west of the Black Sea and he’s quite harsh on any modern historian who thinks otherwise.

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

History, Rome
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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.

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Pompeii – The Life of a Roman Town – Mary Beard

History, Rome
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Pompeii – The Life of a Roman Town
Mary Beard
360 pages including index
published in 2008

We think we know Pompeii. An ordinary Roman town like so many others in 79 CE, made extraordinary because it was overwhelmed without warning by the eruption of the Vesuvius, through its death granting us a rare glimpse of what daily life in the Roman Empire really was like. Under a metres thick layer of volcanic ashes Pompeii laid hidden for centuries, only discovered in the eighteenth century, its secrets kept intact, preserved by the very disaster that caused the death of the city. With the slow and careful excavation of the city those secrets are unlocked, giving up definitive answers to all kind of questions about how the Romans lived. This is the view of Pompeii that countless books, magazine articles and television specials have given us. Unfortunately, as Mary Beard explains in Pompeii – The Life of a Roman Town, it’s wrong.

Or at least, not entirely accurate. As she explains, Pompeii wasn’t overwhelmed by an unforeseen catastrophe, as most likely its inhabitants had had at least several days warning before the actual eruption. Quite a few of them therefore had already left the town when it got buried, while many of the dead found under the lava had been overtaken in their flight, or while having sought shelter nearby or within the city itself. What’s more, the city wasn’t immediately abandonded after the disaster either, as all through the city evidence has been found of people coming back to their houses or businesses to rescue possessions – as well as of plunderers looking for easy riches. What’s more, once Pompeii was rediscovered, obviously things gut dug up, damaged, disappeared or just altered through being exposed to the elements again. All of which means that what we can see in Pompeii now is not entirely the city that the inhabitants would’ve known in 79 CE, that if we dig up a largely empty villa it doesn’t necessarily mean the Romans were great minimalists…

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Byzantium — Judith Herrin

History, Rome
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Byzantium
Judith Herrin
392 pages including index
published in 2008

In her introduction Judith Herrin explains she was inspired to write this book by a conversation she had with two workmen knocking on her office door. They had been doing repairs on the building in King’s College where she worked and noticed the sign on her office: “Professor of Byzantine History” and were interested enough to ask what this meant. As she puts it, she found herself “trying to explain briefly what Byzantine history is to two serious builders in hard hats and heavy boots”. From their suggestion that she should write a book explaining Byzantium to people like (or me, for that matter) who knew little if anything about the subject, this book arose. Byzantium — The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire is an attempt to explain more than a thousand years of Byzantine history, as well as the many facets of this history.

It sounded like the perfect book to read, now that I had temporarily exhausted my library’s stock of interesting looking books on Roman history. Byzantium was after all a clear succesor to Rome, I knew little about it and Herrin’s book easily passed the page 37 test. She isn’t a historian I was aware of before, but with Byzantium she’s become one of the names I’ll pay attention to when looking for new books, no matter the subject. She manages to write a good introduction to a complex subject without talking down to the reader.

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