Articles with the Tag Rome

The Goths – Peter Heather

History, Rome
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Cover of The Goths


The Goths
Peter Heather
358 pages including index
published in 1996

Most of Peter Heather’s professional output has, in one way or another, featured the Goths. Usually this has been in the context of their contribution to the fall of the Roman Empire in the west, which Heather has long argued they played a central role in. In The Goths his focus is slightly different, more concerned with the Goths themselves than with how they interacted with the Roman Empire, though that still of course is an important part of their story. The Goths is an entry in the Blackwell series The Peoples of Europe and is meant as a one volume overview of their entire history, for people largely unfamiliar with them. As Heather mentions in his introduction, the last book to attempt this was published in 1888, so it was high time for an update.

Heather’s divides his book in three main parts, preceded by an introductionary chapter. In this he discusses why the Goths were important and the problem of social identities, where the old assumptions of unchanging peoples recognisable by some checklist of unique features had been challenged in the 1950ties and 60ties by new research showing how individuals could change their identity when advantageous. Heather applies a synthesis of these approaches to the Goths, arguing that while there was such a thing as a Gothic group identity, it was fluid enough for non-Goths to join into and for the group as a whole to adapt to changing circumstances. He then goes on to first explore the origins of the Goths, thentheir invasion and defeat of the East Roman Empire and further wanderings through the Balkans into Italy and Gaul and finally looks at the history of the two Gothish kingdoms established on parts of the Western Empire. In all three parts Heather puts the search for Gothish identity central.

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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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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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The Later Roman Empire — Averil Cameron

History, Rome
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The Later Roman Empire
Averil Cameron
238 pages including index
published in 1993

As you may have noticed if you’re a regular reader of my booklog, is that I’ve developed a mild obsession with Late Antiquity and the Roman Empire, fueled by the two excellent books I got out of the library last year, Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire and Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome. Before that I’d only read about Rome in a few history lessons at school, a couple of popular history books for kids and a shedload of Asterix comics, all of which emphasised the early days of Rome, up until Caesar and Augustus, with perhaps a bit of Nero thrown in. Everything after the first century CE was largely ignored or at best only mentioned briefly; the later centuries of the Roman Empire are seen as an afterthought, a long slide into barbarism ala Edward Gibbon.

Yet if you start reading more academic treatments of Roman history, you soon discover that this view has long been abandonded, ever since the publication of Peter Brown’s The World of Late antiquity in 1971. That was the first popular book to do away with the idea of the dark ages, re-emphasising the continuity between the Christianised empire of the third century CE and the Early Middle Ages, as well as the continuing survival of the Eastern Empire centered around Byzantium, as opposed to the Western Empire’s breakup. Averil Cameron’s The Later Roman Empire is one product of this re-emphasis. Published in 1993 as a volume in the Fontana History of the Ancient World, it shows that the view put forth by Peter Brown has won mainstream acceptance. It is meant as a standard textbook on the late Roman Empire, because none such was yet written in English, as the preface explains.

As a textbook The Later Roman Empire gives a largely chronological overview of the late Roman Empire, starting with the rule of Diocletian in 284 CE and ending with Theodosius, the last emperor to rule both the Western and the Easterns halves of the Roman Empire. This is largely a political and military history, with the emphasis on how the Roman state survived the turmoils of the third century and consolidated itself in the early fourth century and subsequent rise of Byzantium as alternative power centre to Rome. One important aspect of this evolution is the relationship between the Roman state and Christianity, which from the time of Constantine became the official state religion. This had of course an incredible impact on the further development of the empire, both strenghten it, giving it more cohesion, but also leading to dangerous rifts due to the differences in doctrine between the various streams of Christianity in existence then. The last few chapters abandon the chronological approach for a look at the late empire in general, examining its economy, society, culture and the way the army was changing in coming to terms with the threat of barbarian invasion. Again, the role of Christianity is given special attention in these chapters.

What Averil Cameron attempts to show in this book is the continuity of the Roman Empire, both in the problems engulfing it in the third century, as in the ways it survived into the fourth and fifth century CE, and even after it had officially fallen. In sketching her view of the fourth century, Cameron shows both, as she puts it, “the resilience of the Roman imperial systems and the inertia of pre-modern society. If she shows that many of the supposedly unique problems of the late Roman Empire had been present much earlier, she also shows the failure of the Empire to deal with them: it manages to survive and consilidate, but it’s a precarious survival and it only takes a bad run of luck for the western empire to largely be destroyed at the end of the fourth century. At the same time, she continues to emphasise the ways in which major portions of the empire did survive and indeed thrive in the east.

The Later Roman Empire gives a good overview of a period of history I until recently knew little about, but I have to admit it was a little bit too dry for me. This is partially due to the attention paid to Christianity and its response to the changes in the world surrounding it, it’s adaptation to becoming a state religion and the various crisises it underwent during this adaptation. It’s not a subject that interests me greatly to be honest, but it is central to this book. It made for some difficult reading at times, but on the whole this was another interesting look at the late Roman Empire.