Fall of Rome: And The End of Civilization, The
Bryan Ward-Perkins
Number of quotes: 58
Book ID: 222 Page: 1
Section: 1A,4B
In Gibbon’s day, and until very recently, few people questioned age-old certainties about the passing of the ancient world—namely, that a high point of human achievement, the civilization of Greece and Rome, was destroyed in the West by hostile invasions during the fifth century.
Quote ID: 5467
Time Periods: 156
Book ID: 222 Page: 3/4
Section: 1A,4B
It has therefore come as a surprise to me to find a much more comfortable vision of the end of empire spreading in recent years through the English-speaking world. {3} The intellectual guru of this movement is a brilliant historian and stylist, Peter Brown, who published in 1971 The World of Late Antiquity. In it he defined a new period, ‘Late Antiquity’, beginning in around AD 200 and lasting right up to the eighth century, characterized, not by the dissolution of half the Roman empire, but by vibrant religious and cultural debate. {4}As Brown himself subsequently wrote, he was able in his book to narrate the history of these centuries ‘without invoking an intervening catastrophe and without pausing, for a moment, to pay lip service to the widespread notion of decay’. ‘Decay’ was banished, and replaced by a ‘religious and cultural revolution’, beginning under the late empire and continuing long after it. {5} This view has had a remarkable effect, particularly in the United States, where Brown now lives and works.
3D2
Pastor John’s note: but the decay is obvious. This author disagrees with this assessment, that nothing happened at all.
Quote ID: 5468
Time Periods: 3456
Book ID: 222 Page: 4
Section: 1A,4B
There has been a sea change in the language used to describe post-Roman times. Words like ‘decline’ and ‘crisis’, which suggest problems at the end of the empire and which were quite usual into the 1970s, have largely disappeared from historians’ vocabularies, to be replaced by neutral terms, like ‘transition’, ‘change’, and ‘transformation’. {8} For instance, a massive European-funded project of research into the period 300-800 chose as its title ‘The Transformation of the Roman World’. {9} There is no hint here of ‘decline’, ‘fall’, or ‘crisis’, nor even of any kind of ‘end’ to the Roman world. ‘Transformation’ suggests that Rome lived on, though gradually metamorphosed into a different, but not necessarily inferior, form.3D2
Quote ID: 5469
Time Periods: 346
Book ID: 222 Page: 9
Section: 1A
Goffart was very well aware that sometimes Romans and Germanic newcomers were straightforwardly at war, but he argues that ‘the fifth century was less momentous for invasions than for the incorporation of barbarian protectors into the fabric of the West’. In a memorable sound bite, he summed up his argument: ‘what we call the Fall of the Western Roman empire was an imaginative experiment that got a little out of hand’. {18} Rome did fall, but only because it had voluntarily delegated away its own power, not because it had been successfully invaded.PJ note: If we define “fall” as “to become something it was not before”, then yes, Rome fell.
Quote ID: 5470
Time Periods: 156
Book ID: 222 Page: 9
Section: 1A,3D2
For instance, a recent European volume about the first post-Roman states is entitled Kingdoms of the Empire: The Integration of Barbarians in Late Antiquity. {19}There is no hint here of invasion or force, nor even that the Roman empire came to an end; instead there is a strong suggestion that the incomers fitted easily into a continuing and evolving Roman world.
Quote ID: 5471
Time Periods: 156
Book ID: 222 Page: 10
Section: 3D2
As someone who is convinced that the coming of the Germanic peoples was very unpleasant for the Roman population, and that the long-term effects of the dissolution of the empire were dramatic, I feel obliged to challenge such views.
Quote ID: 5472
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 222 Page: 13
Section: 3D2
In 446 LEO, bishop of Rome, wrote to his colleagues in the North African province of Mauretania Caesariensis. In this letter Leo grabbled with the problem of how the Church should treat nuns raped by the Vandals some fifteen years earlier, ….. . . .
Leo advised the raped women that ‘they will be more praiseworthy in their humility and sense of shame, if they do not dare to compare themselves to uncontaminated virgins’. {1} These unfortunate nuns and Bishop Leo would be very surprised, and not a little shocked, to learn that it is now fashionable to play down the violence and unpleasantness of the invasions that brought down the empire in the West.
Quote ID: 5473
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 222 Page: 13
Section: 3D2
The Germanic invaders of the western empire seized or extorted through the threat of force the vast majority of the territories in which they settled, without any formal agreement on how to share resources with their new Roman subjects. The impression given by some recent historians that most Roman territory was formally ceded to them as part of treaty arrangements is quite simply wrong.
Quote ID: 5474
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 222 Page: 21
Section: 3D2
The Christian apologist Orosius, for instance, wrote a History against the Pagans in 417-18, in which he set himself the unenviable task of proving that, despite the disasters of the early fifth century, the pagan past had actually been worse than the troubled Christian present. In describing the Gothic sack of Rome in 410, Orosius did not wholly deny its unpleasantness (which he attributed to the wrath of God on Rome’s sinful inhabitants). But he also dwelt at length on the respect shown by the Goths for the Christian shrines and saints of the city; …
Quote ID: 5475
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 222 Page: 23
Section: 3D2
Fortunately for the Romans, invading Germanic peoples did not despise them, and had entered the empire in the hope of enjoying the fruits of Roman material comfort—but, equally, the invaders were not angels who have simply been badly maligned (or ‘problematized’, to use modern jargon) by prejudiced Roman observers.
Quote ID: 5476
Time Periods: 156
Book ID: 222 Page: 25
Section: 3D2
Salvian’s true feelings towards barbarians are revealed in a passage where he writes of Romans driven by oppression to join them—despite sharing neither their religious beliefs, nor their language, ‘nor indeed . . . the stench that barbarian bodies and clothes give off’. {27}These dismissive and hostile sentiments were not kept quietly under wraps, for discussion only amongst Romans. The monuments of the empire were covered in representations of barbarians being brutally killed (Fig. 2.3); and one of the commonest designs of copper coin of the fourth century shows Rome’s view of the correct ordering of things—a barbarian being speared to death by a victorious Roman soldier (Fig. 2.4).
Quote ID: 5477
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 222 Page: 27
Section: 3D2
When news of Stilicho’s death spread, a murderous pogrom was launched in the cities of northern Italy against the defenceless wives and children of Germanic soldiers serving in the Roman army. Unsurprisingly, on hearing of this atrocity, the husbands immediately deserted the Roman army and joined the invading Goths. Later in the same year, as the Goths were camped outside Rome, they were joined by more recruits with no cause to love the Romans, a host of slaves who had escaped from the city. {30}
Quote ID: 5478
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 222 Page: 28
Section: 1B
….Ezekiel..The brightest light of the whole world is extinguished; indeed the head has been cut from the Roman empire. To put it more truthfully, the whole world has died with one City.
Who would have believed that Rome, which was built up from victories over the whole world, would fall; so that it would be both the mother and the tomb to all peoples. {32}
Rome’s fall, however, did not bring down the empire (indeed its impact on eastern provinces like Palestine was minimal).
Quote ID: 5479
Time Periods: 1
Book ID: 222 Page: 29
Section: 1B,3A1
The most sophisticated, radical, and influential answer to this problem was that offered by Augustine, who in 413 (initially in direct response to the sack of Rome) began his monumental City of God. {33} Here he successfully sidestepped the entire problem of the failure of the Christian empire by arguing that all human affairs are flawed, and that a true Christian is really a citizen of Heaven. Abandoning centuries of Roman pride in their divinely ordained state (including Christian pride during the fourth century), Augustine argued that, in the grand perspective of Eternity, a minor event like the sack of Rome paled into insignificance.
Quote ID: 5480
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 222 Page: 31
Section: 2D1
….Chronicles of 452….….’The Roman state has been reduced to a miserable condition by these troubles, since not one province exists without barbarian settlers; and throughout the world the unspeakable heresy of the Arians, that has become so embedded amongst the barbarian peoples, displaces the name of the Catholic church.’ {38}
Quote ID: 5481
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 222 Page: 40
Section: 2E2
Famously, Edward Gibbon, inspired by the secularist thinking of the Enlightenment, blamed Rome’s fall in part on the fourth-century triumph of Christianity and the spread of monasticism: ‘a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes, who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity.’ {14}
Quote ID: 5482
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 222 Page: 40/41
Section: 2E2
But in 1964 the pernicious influence of the Church was given a new lease of life by the then doyen of late Roman studies, A. H. M. Jones. Under the wonderful heading ‘Idle Mouths’, Jones lambasted the economically unproductive citizens of the late empire—aristocrats, civil servants, and churchmen: ‘the Christian church imposed a new class of idle mouths on the resources of the empire . . . a large number lived on the alms of the peasantry, and as time went on more and more monasteries acquired landed endowments which enabled their inmates to devote themselves entirely to their spiritual duties.’ These are Gibbon’s ‘specious demands of charity and devotion’ expressed in measured twentieth-century prose.
Quote ID: 5483
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 222 Page: 47
Section: 3D
Photo: 3.4 The emperor Honorius trying to look like a military leader, on an ivory plaque of AD 406. In elaborate armour, he holds an orb surmounted by a Victory, and a standard with the words ‘In the name of Christ, may you always be victorious’. Reality was less glorious—Honorius himself never took the field; and his armies triumphed over very few enemies other than usurpers.
Quote ID: 5484
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 222 Page: 66
Section: 3D2
….the foundation of the new kingdoms certainly restored a degree of stability to the West, allowing normal life to resume its course, though under new masters. The Ostrogoths in Italy very explicitly presented their rule in this light: ‘While the army of Goths wages war, let the Roman live in peace.’ {7}
Quote ID: 5485
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 222 Page: 68/69
Section: 3D2
When they did brutal things to their subjects, as they sometimes did, Germanic kings often chose to do them in a very Roman way and for very Roman reasons. The Vandal king Huneric (477-84)—an Arian Christian, like the rest of his people—was, according to one’s point of view, either a heretic and a savage persecutor of the native Catholic majority of Africa, or a caring and orthodox ruler who wished to lift his subjects from the appalling doctrinal errors in which they wallowed. He instituted his attacks on Catholicism in a purely Roman style, issuing edicts in Latin, which spelled out his own titles to rule, the errors of the ‘homo-ousian’ heretics (as he termed the Catholics), and the divine justice of his own position: ‘In this matter our Clemency has followed the will of divine judgement…’.. . . .
The king was apparently particularly concerned to stamp out any possibility of Vandal conversions to Catholicism; to this end he ordered that no one in Vandal dress should be allowed to enter a Catholic church, and posted men to enforce the rule with considerable brutality.
Quote ID: 5486
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 222 Page: 70
Section: 3D2
On the Continent, the examples of cooperation between local Roman aristocrats and Germanic kings are myriad.. . . .
The disintegration of the unified empire, and its replacement by a scatter of Germanic courts, indeed gave provincial Romans readier access to influence and power than they had held in the fourth century, when there was only one imperial court, often at a great distance.
Quote ID: 5487
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 222 Page: 72
Section: 3D2
Eventually, of course, the distinction between Germanic rulers and Roman subjects became blurred, and finally disappeared altogether.
Quote ID: 5488
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 222 Page: 74
Section: 4B
Photo 4.3: A philosopher-king with a Gothic moustache. Copper coin of the Ostrogothic king Theodahad (534-6). The design on the reverse is closely modelled on coins of the first century AD, down to the claim that this was issued ‘by decree of the Senate’ (Senatus consultu, the ‘SC’ that appears on either side of the Victory).
Quote ID: 5489
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 222 Page: 74
Section: 3D2
The Goths are presented in most contemporary texts as upholders of Roman culture, and as a force for spreading it to other, less civilized peoples. For instance, Theoderic, in a letter penned by Cassiodorus, hoped that a lyre-player sent to Clovis, king of the Franks, would ‘perform a feat like that of Orpheus, when his sweet sound tames the savage hearts of the barbarians’. Sentiments like these, of course, implied that the Goths themselves were not barbarians.
Quote ID: 5490
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 222 Page: 74
Section: 3D2
Ostrogothic propaganda even extended this patronizing treatment of other Germanic peoples to their own ‘cousins’, the Visigoths of Gaul and Spain. In about 510, soon after he had taken over control of a large part of southern Gaul from the Visigoths, Theoderic wrote to his new Gallic subjects, describing his own rule as ‘Roman’ and regulated by law, and contrasting it explicitly with the unregulated ‘barbarian’ rule of the Visigoths: ‘You who have been restored to it after many years should gladly obey Roman custom . . . And therefore, as men by God’s favour recalled to ancient liberty, clothe yourself in the morals of the toga, cast off barbarism, throw aside savagery of mind, for it is wrong for you, in my just times, to live by alien ways.’ Only very rarely, as with Theoderic’s moustache, does a different reality show through—one that reveals the survival of a Gothic identity, which, of course, the Romans would have had no hesitation in branding as ‘barbarian’. {21}
Quote ID: 5491
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 222 Page: 75
Section: 3D2
By the start of the sixth century, the Visigoths had ruled parts of Gaul for over eighty years. As far as we can tell, after an initial seizure of resources, they had not been particularly oppressive masters; certainly they had not attempted to encourage the spread of their own Arian Christian beliefs in the brutal manner that the Vandals had occasionally used in Africa. There is also evidence of a degree of integration between Goths and natives.
Quote ID: 5492
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 222 Page: 76
Section: 3A1,3D2
However, in the very early sixth century, probably in the face of an ever-increasing threat from the Franks, the Visigothic king did two interesting things. First, he issued a solemn compendium of Roman law (known as the Breviarium of Alaric), to be used in the judging of Romans living under Visigothic rule. This, we are told in its preamble, was produced after extensive consultation, with all departures in wording from original imperial texts being approved by a group of bishops and ‘selected men amongst our provincials’.
Quote ID: 5493
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 222 Page: 76
Section: 3D2
The Breviarium and the Council of Agde show Visigothic rule in Gaul at its most benign; but they also show that, right up to its final defeat in 507, it was still alien rule, over Roman subject who were readily identifiable as different from the Visigoths through their adherence to Roman law and to Catholic Christianity. {24} Indeed, it was not until 587, over 200 years after their first arrival in the empire in 376, that the Visigoths finally abandoned their Arianism and converted to Catholic Christianity.
Quote ID: 5494
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 222 Page: 78/79
Section: 3D2
People in Frankish Gaul, whatever their ancestry, were apparently slowly adopting a common identity; indeed, by the end of the seventh century there were no ‘Romans’ left in northern Gaul, only people who considered themselves ‘Franks’. {28}
Quote ID: 5495
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 222 Page: 79
Section: 3D2
However, there were problems for Romans who wanted to adopt Germanic culture—in particular, a centuries-old, deeply ingrained certainty that their own ways were immeasurably superior to those of the barbarians. In Ostrogothic Italy, the learned Ennodius mocked Jovinianus, a Roman who sported both a Roman cloak and a ‘Gothic beard’ (very possibly a moustache in the style of Theoderic and Theodahad). Jovinianus’ Roman dress and Gothic facial hair are to us a fascinating example of two ethnic groups beginning to fuse into one; but, for Ennodius, Jovinianus was ‘mixing discordant offspring in a hostile alliance’, and his beard gave him a ‘barbarian appearance’. Ennodius’ scorn illustrates the barriers that still defended Roman ways.
Quote ID: 5496
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 222 Page: 80
Section: 1A,3D2
Faith in the superiority of Roman culture was, to some extent, shared by the Germanic peoples themselves. Their presentation of their rule in a very Roman guise was partly aimed at their Roman subjects, but it almost certainly also pleased the rulers themselves. In Ostrogothic Italy, as we have seen, Theoderic and his successors were happy to present themselves as the upholders of Roman culture, and to see this as a vital difference between themselves and the true barbarians beyond.
Quote ID: 5497
Time Periods: 156
Book ID: 222 Page: 80
Section: 1A,3D2
If we look at the two large Germanic kingdoms that survived to the end of the sixth century, those of the Visigoths and of the Franks, what seems to have happened is that the indigenous Roman population eventually adopted the identity of their masters, and became ‘Visigoths’ or ‘Franks’ (from which ‘Français’ and ‘French’ derive); but at the same time these masters adopted the culture of their subjects—in particular dropping their native language and religion in favour of those of their subjects. The explanation, I think, is that both groups moved ‘upwards’: the Romans into the political identity of their Germanic masters; the Germanic peoples into the more sophisticated cultural framework of their Roman subjects. {32}
Quote ID: 5498
Time Periods: 156
Book ID: 222 Page: 81
Section: 4B,3D2
….in the 480s the bishop of Reims, Remigius, wrote to Clovis, the new Frankish king of the region in which his see lay. Remigius, of course, also wrote in Latin, the language of high culture and history, and he congratulated Clovis on taking over ‘the governance of Belgica Secunda’. This was not strictly true: the Roman province of Belgica Secunda had long ceased to exist. {34} But Remigius was not only flattering Clovis; by presenting him in a Roman light, he was also gently steering him towards a particular view of his command—later in the same letter he encouraged the king (at this date a pagan) to heed the advice of his bishops. The tactic worked; later in his reign Clovis was baptized into the Catholic faith by Remigius himself.
Quote ID: 5499
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 222 Page: 87
Section: 4B
It is currently deeply unfashionable to state that anything like a ‘crisis’ or a ‘decline’ occurred at the end of the Roman empire, let alone that a ‘civilization’ collapsed and a ‘dark age’ ensued. The new orthodoxy is that the Roman world, in both East and West, was slowly, and essentially painlessly, ‘transformed’ into a medieval form. However, there is an insuperable problem with this new view: it does not fit the mass of archaeological evidence now available, which shows a startling decline in western standards of living during the fifth to seventh centuries. {1} This was a change that affected everyone, from peasants to kings, even the bodies of saints resting in their churches. It was no mere transformation—it was decline on a scale that can reasonably be described as ‘the end of a civilization’.
Quote ID: 5500
Time Periods: 567
Book ID: 222 Page: 88
Section: 4B
In the areas of the Roman world that I know best, central and northern Italy, after the end of the Roman world, this level of sophistication is not seen again until perhaps the fourteenth century, some 800 years later.
Quote ID: 5501
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 222 Page: 95
Section: 4B
This research has shown that lead and copper pollution—produced by the smelting of lead, copper, and silver—were both very high during the Roman period, falling back in the post-Roman centuries to levels that are much closer to those of prehistoric times. Only in around the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did levels of pollution again attain those of Roman times. {13}
Quote ID: 5502
Time Periods: 17
Book ID: 222 Page: 100
Section: 4B
I am keen to emphasize that in Roman times good-quality articles were available even to humble consumers, and that production and distribution were complex and sophisticated.
Quote ID: 5503
Time Periods: 01234
Book ID: 222 Page: 104
Section: 4B
In the post-Roman West, almost all this material sophistication disappeared. Specialized production and all but the most local distribution became rare, unless for luxury goods; and the impressive range and quantity of high-quality functional goods, which had characterized the Roman period, vanished, or, at the very least, were drastically reduced. The middle and lower markets, which under the Romans had absorbed huge quantities of basic, but good-quality, items, seem to have almost entirely disappeared.Pottery, again, provides us with the fullest picture. {27} In some regions, like the whole of Britain and parts of coastal Spain, all sophistication in the production and trading of pottery seems to have disappeared altogether: only vessels shaped without the use of the wheel were available, without any functional or aesthetic refinement. In Britain, most pottery was not only very basic, but also lamentably friable and impractical (Fig. 5.7). In other areas, such as the north of Italy, some solid wheel-turned pots continued to be made and some soapstone vessels imported, but decorated tablewares entirely, or almost entirely, disappeared; ….
Quote ID: 5504
Time Periods: 17
Book ID: 222 Page: 109
Section: 4B
Domestic housing in post-Roman Italy, whether in town or countryside, seems to have been almost exclusively of perishable materials. Houses, which in the Roman period had been primarily of stone and brick, disappeared, to be replaced by settlements constructed almost entirely of wood.. . . .
At present it seems that in Italy only kings and bishops continued to live in such Roman-style comfort. {33}
. . . .
Furthermore, as far as we can tell, even when stone and brick were used, the vast majority of it was not newly quarried or fired, but was second-hand material, only very superficially reshaped to fit its new purpose.
. . . .
It may have been as much as a thousand years later, perhaps in the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, that roof tiles again became as readily available and as widely diffused in Italy as they had been in Roman times.
Quote ID: 5505
Time Periods: 567
Book ID: 222 Page: 110
Section: 4B
The almost total disappearance of coinage from daily use in the post-Roman West is further powerful evidence of a remarkable change in levels of economic sophistication.
Quote ID: 5506
Time Periods: 567
Book ID: 222 Page: 117
Section: 4B
What we observe at the end of the Roman world is not a ‘recession’ or—to use a term that has recently been suggested—an ‘abatement’, with an essentially similar economy continuing to work at a reduced pace. Instead what we see is a remarkable qualitative change, with the disappearance of entire industries and commercial networks. The economy of the post-Roman West is not that of the fourth century reduced in scale, but a very different and far less sophisticated entity. {43}This is at its starkest and most obvious in Britain. A number of basic skills disappeared entirely during the fifth century, to be reintroduced only centuries later.
. . . .
All over Britain the art of making pottery on a wheel disappeared in the early fifth century, and was not reintroduced for almost 300 years.
. . . .
Sophistication in production and exchange did survive in post-Roman Britain, but only at the very highest levels of society and the highest level of artefacts.
Quote ID: 5507
Time Periods: 567
Book ID: 222 Page: 118
Section: 4B
It may initially be hard to believe, but post-Roman Britain in fact sank to a level of economic complexity well below that of the pre-Roman Iron Age.
Quote ID: 5508
Time Periods: 567
Book ID: 222 Page: 120/121
Section: 4B
The case of central and southern Italy raises a very important point. The complex system of production and distribution, whose disappearance we have been considering, was an older and more deeply rooted phenomenon than an exclusively ‘Roman’ economy. Rather, it was an ‘ancient’ economy that in the eastern and southern Mediterranean was flourishing long before Rome became at all significant, and that even in the northwestern Mediterranean was developing steadily before the centuries of Roman domination.. . . .
What was destroyed in the post-Roman centuries, and then only very slowly re-created, was a sophisticated world with very deep roots indeed.
Quote ID: 5509
Time Periods: 567
Book ID: 222 Page: 123
Section: 4B
We will never know precisely why the sophisticated economy that had developed under the Romans unravelled. The archaeological evidence, which is all we really have, can tell us what happened, and when; but on its own cannot provide explanations as to why change occurred.
Quote ID: 5510
Time Periods: 567
Book ID: 222 Page: 124
Section: 4B
In the early fifth century all this disappeared, and, as we have seen in the previous chapter, Britain reverted to a level of economic simplicity similar to that of the Bronze Age, with no coinage, and only hand-shaped pots and wooden buildings. {2}
Quote ID: 5511
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 222 Page: 124
Section: 4B
If we measure ‘Golden Ages’ in terms of material remains, the fifth and sixth centuries were certainly golden for most of the eastern Mediterranean, in many areas leaving archaeological traces that are more numerous and more impressive than those of the earlier Roman empire. {4}
Quote ID: 5512
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 222 Page: 126
Section: 4B
By AD 700 there was only one area of the former Roman world that had not experienced overwhelming economic decline—the provinces of the Levant, and neighbouring Egypt, conquered by the Arabs in the 630s and 640s.
Quote ID: 5513
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 222 Page: 133
Section: 4B
. . .in Roman times, for instances, there had been a continuous process of upgrading and repairing the road network, commemorated by the erection of dated milestone; there is no evidence that this continued in any systematic way beyond the early sixth century. {19}
Quote ID: 5514
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 222 Page: 133
Section: 4B
Security was undoubtedly the greatest boon provided by Rome. Peace was not constant through the Roman period, being occasionally shattered by civil wars, and in the third century by a serious and prolonged period of Persian and Germanic invasion. However, the 500 years between Pompey’s defeat of the pirates in 67 BC and the Vandal seizure of Carthage and its fleet in AD 439 comprise the longest period of peace the Mediterranean sea has ever enjoyed. On land, meanwhile, it is a remarkable fact that few cities of the early empire were walled—a state of affairs not repeated in most of Europe and the Mediterranean until the late nineteenth century, and then only because high explosives had rendered walls ineffective as a form of defence. The security of Roman times provided the ideal conditions for economic growth.
Quote ID: 5515
Time Periods: 134
Book ID: 222 Page: 136/137
Section: 4B
Economic complexity made mass-produced goods available, but it also made people dependent on specialists or semi-specialists—sometimes working hundreds of miles away—for many of their material needs. This worked very well in stable times, but it rendered consumers extremely vulnerable if for any reason the networks of production and distribution were disrupted, or if they themselves could no longer afford to purchase from a specialist. If specialized production failed, it was not possible to fall back immediately on effective self-help.
Quote ID: 5517
Time Periods: 567
Book ID: 222 Page: 145
Section: 4B
(Cattle Photo) 7.3 The rise and fall of the Roman cow. The approximate size of cattle, from the Iron Age, through Roman times, to the early Middle Ages. The information is based on finds from 21 iron-age, 67 Roman, and 49 early medieval sites.
Quote ID: 5518
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 222 Page: 146
Section: 4B
I would also seriously question the romantic assumption that economic simplicity necessarily meant a freer and more equal society. There is no reason to believe that because post-Roman Britain had no coinage, nor wheel-turned pottery, and mortared buildings, it was an egalitarian haven, spared the oppression of landlords and political masters. Tax, admittedly, could no longer be collected in coin; but its less sophisticated equivalent, ‘tribute’, could perfectly well be extorted in the form of sheaves of corn, pigs, and indeed slaves.
Quote ID: 5519
Time Periods: 567
Book ID: 222 Page: 148
Section: 4B
In Italy and elsewhere in the Mediterranean, there was an unbroken tradition of some building in mortared brick and stone throughout the post-Roman centuries, as we have seen, and many impressive earlier buildings were also kept in repair. Late sixth-century Anglo-Saxon visitors to Rome, for instance, would have seen things undreamed of in their native Britain, where the Roman buildings had been allowed to decay and all new building was in timber. They would have found a few newly built brick churches, freshly decorated with mosaics and frescos, and, above all, a large number of immensely impressive fourth- and fifth-century basilicas, kept in repair and in continuous use. Old St Peter’s, for instance, the fourth-century predecessor of the present basilica, stood proud throughout the Middle Ages—a huge building, around 100 meters long and with five aisles separated by a forest of marble columns.But, if we look at the new churches of post-Roman Italy, what is most immediately striking about them is how small they are (Fig. 7.4). Buildings of the late sixth, seventh, and early eighth centuries are very rarely over 20 meters long; a modern viewer might well describe them as ‘chapels’ rather than ‘churches’.
Quote ID: 5520
Time Periods: 4567
Book ID: 222 Page: 153
Section: 4B
However, what is striking about the Roman period, and to my mind unparalleled until quite recent times, is the evidence of writing being casually used, in an entirely ephemeral and everyday manner, which was none the less sophisticated. The best evidence for this comes, unsurprisingly, from Pompeii, because the eruption of AD 79 ensured a uniquely good level of preservation of the city’s buildings and he various forms of writing that they bore. Over 11,000 inscriptions, of many different kinds, have been recorded within Pompeii, carved, painted, or scratched into its walls.
Quote ID: 5521
Time Periods: 1
Book ID: 222 Page: 164
Section: 4B
Reading and writing, and the importance of the written word, certainly did not disappear in the post-Roman West. Only in some remote provinces did the use of writing vanish completely, as it did in Anglo-Saxon Britain during the fifth century, to be reintroduced by Christian missionaries only around AD 600.
Quote ID: 5522
Time Periods: 567
Book ID: 222 Page: 172
Section: 4B,2E2
For instance, the opinion of the ‘Dark Ages’ expressed in 1932 by the English Catholic writer Christopher Dawson has close echoes in recent scholarship, although his religious enthusiasm and affiliation are much more transparent than those of most present-day historians:To the secular historian, the early Middle Ages must inevitably still appear as the Dark Ages, as ages of barbarism, without secular culture or literature, given up to unintelligible disputes on incomprehensible dogmas . . . But to the Catholic they are not dark as much as ages of dawn, for they witnessed the conversion of the West, the foundation of Christian civilisation, and the creation of Christian art and Catholic liturgy. Above all, they were the Age of the Monks… {7}
Quote ID: 5523
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 222 Page: 179
Section: 4B
The transition from Roman to post-Roman times was a dramatic move away from sophistication towards much greater simplicity.
Quote ID: 5524
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 222 Page: 183
Section: 4B
The end of the Roman West witnessed horrors and dislocation of a kind I sincerely hope never to have to live through; and it destroyed a complex civilization, throwing the inhabitants of the West back to a standard of living typical of prehistoric times. Romans before the fall were as certain as we are today that their world would continue for ever substantially unchanged. They were wrong. We would be wise not to repeat their complacency.
Quote ID: 5525
Time Periods: 67
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