Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, The
Peter Heather
Number of quotes: 98
Book ID: 223 Page: 8
Section: 4B
If the Roman legion in combat was a professional killing-machine, it was also much more. Its building capacity could turn immediate military victory into the long-term domination of territories and regions: a strategic weapon on which an empire could be built {3}
Quote ID: 5527
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 223 Page: 14
Section: 4B
The Empire’s longevity leads us to another point of crucial importance. When you stop to think about it, it becomes immediately obvious that over so many centuries the Empire could not have remained unchanged. England has been a kingdom more or less continuously since the time of Elizabeth I, but has changed out of all recognition. So too the Roman Empire: 400-plus years of history turned the later Roman Empire of the fourth century AD into an animal that Julius Caesar would scarcely have recognized.
Quote ID: 5528
Time Periods: 04
Book ID: 223 Page: 17/18
Section: 3A1B,4B
The bedrock of the system was the intense study of a small number of literary texts under the guidance of an expert in language and literary interpretation, the grammarian.--------------------
Essentially, these texts were held to contain within them a canon of ‘correct’ language, and children were to learn that language - both the particular vocabulary and a complex grammar within which to employ it. One thing this did was to hold educated Latin in a kind of cultural vice, preventing or at least significantly slowing down the normal processes of linguistic change. It also had the effect of allowing instant identification. As soon as a member of the Roman elite opened his mouth, it was obvious that he learned ‘correct’ Latin.
--------------------
To indicate how different, by the fourth century, elite Latin may have been from popular speech, the graffiti found at Pompeii - buried in the eruption of AD 79 - suggest that in everyday usage Latin was already evolving into less grammatically structured Romance.
--------------------
Grammar, in other words, was an introduction to formal logic. They also saw their literacy texts as a kind of accumulated moral database of human behaviour - both good and bad - from which, with guidance, one could learn what to do and what not to do.
--------------------
Still more profoundly - and here they were echoing an educational philosophy developed originally in classical Greece - Symmachus and his peers argued that it was only by pondering on a wide recorded range of men behaving well and badly that it was possible to develop a full intellectual and emotional range in oneself, to bring one to the highest state achievable.
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Not only did educated Romans speak a superior language, but, in the view of Symmachus and his fellows, they had things to discuss in that language which were inaccessible to the uneducated.
Quote ID: 5529
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 223 Page: 25/26
Section: 4B
In a speech to Valentinian’s brother Valens in 364, the philosopher and orator Themistius implies, to devastating effect, a comparison between Constantinople and Rome that highlights the latter’s drawbacks as an imperial capital
Quote ID: 5530
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 223 Page: 32
Section: 1A
Rome Is Where the Heart Is
Quote ID: 5531
Time Periods: 156
Book ID: 223 Page: 36
Section: 4B
Two points of particular interest emerge. First, a perceived superiority in Latin could override social inferiority. Ausonius, though numbered among the educated Roman elite, came from nothing like so distinguished a background as Symmachus. Second, and for present purposes much more important, Ausonius had made his name as a self-employed teacher of Latin rhetoric operating under the auspices of the university of Bordeaux, near the Atlantic coast of Gaul. By the fourth century, Bordeaux had emerged as one of the major centures of Latin excellence in the Empire. Not only does this show us expertise in Latin flourishing well beyond the confines of Italy, but Ausonius himself was not from Rome, nor even from Italy, but of Gallic background. {43} Yet here we have one of the blue-blooded Romans of Rome approaching him with deference, and seeking his good graces in matters to do with Latin literature.
Quote ID: 5532
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 223 Page: 37
Section: 4B
Latin language and literature spread across the Roman world because people who had originally been conquered by Caesar’s legions came to buy into the Roman ethos and adopt it as their own.-------------------
Accepting the grammarian and the kind of education he offered meant accepting the whole value system which, as we have seen, reckoned that only this kind of education could create properly developed - and therefore superior - human beings.
Quote ID: 5533
Time Periods: 012
Book ID: 223 Page: 37/39/40
Section: 4B
The transformation of life in the conquered provinces thus led provincials everywhere to remake their lives after Roman patterns and value systems. Within a century or two of conquest, the whole of the Empire had become properly Roman. The old Ladybird Book of British History had a vivid picture of Roman Britain coming to an abrupt end in the fifth century with the legions marching off and the Roman names for places being superseded (a composite image of departing soldiers and broken signposts, as I recall it). But this is a mistaken view of what happened. By the late Empire, the Romans of Rome Britain were not immigrants from Italy but locals who had adopted the Roman lifestyle and everything that came with it. A bunch of legionaries departing the island would not bring Roman life to an end. Britain, as everywhere else between Hadrian’s Wall and the Euphrates, was no longer Roman merely by ‘occupation’.
Quote ID: 8466
Time Periods: 015
Book ID: 223 Page: 44
Section: 4B
Everywhere, the enthusiastic adoption of Roman values had made proper Romans of provincials. This was the true genius of the Empire as a historical phenomenon. Originally conquered and subdued by the legions, the indigenous people had gone on to build Roman towns and villas and to live Roman lives in their own communities.
Quote ID: 5535
Time Periods: 015
Book ID: 223 Page: 44
Section: 4B
Eventually, the teachers there became so expert that, as in the case of Ausonius, the provincials were able to instruct the metropolitans.These astonishing developments changed what it meant to be Roman. Once the same political culture, lifestyle and value system had established themselves more or less evenly from Hadrian’s Wall to the Euphrates, then all inhabitants of this huge area were legitimately Roman. ‘Roman’, no longer a geographic epithet, was now an entirely cultural identity accessible, potentially, to all. From this followed the most significant consequence of imperial success: having acquired Romanness, the new Romans were bound to assert their right to participate in the political process.
Quote ID: 5536
Time Periods: 567
Book ID: 223 Page: 45
Section: 3A1B,4B
...by the fourth century the balance of power had changed. Symmachus, in Trier, was compromised not just the Senate of Rome, but civilized Romans throughout the Roman world.
Quote ID: 5537
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 223 Page: 46
Section: 5D
The ancient Roman sources describing the defeat were rediscovered and passed into broader circulation among Latin scholars in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and from that point on Arminius, generally known as Hermann (‘the German’) – the delatinized version of his name – became a symbol of German nationhood.
Quote ID: 5538
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 223 Page: 47
Section: 5D
Between 1676 and 1910 an extraordinary seventy-six operas were composed to celebrate his exploits, and in the nineteenth century a huge monument was constructed in his honour....
Quote ID: 5539
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 223 Page: 55
Section: 5D
An early imperial Roman legion of about 5,000 men required about 7,500 kilos of grain and 450 kilos of fodder per day, or 225 and 13.5 tonnes, respectively, per month. {9}
Quote ID: 5540
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 223 Page: 58
Section: 3D2,4B
As a result, the defended Roman frontier came by the mid-first century AD to be established broadly along a line marked by the Rivers Rhine and Danube. Some minor adjustments apart, it was still there three hundred years later. The consequences were profound. West and south of these riverine frontiers, European populations, whether Jastorf or La Tene, found themselves sucked into a trajectory towards Latin, togas, towns and, eventually, Christianity.
Quote ID: 5541
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 223 Page: 68
Section: 4B
A staggering 200,000 people, it has been calculated, met a violent death in the Colosseum alone, and there were similar, smaller, arenas in every major city of the Empire.
Quote ID: 5542
Time Periods: 04
Book ID: 223 Page: 68
Section: 3C
In 306, to celebrate his pacification of the Rhine frontier, the emperor Constantine had two captured Germanic Frankish kings, Ascaricus and Merogaisus, fed to wild beasts in the arena at Trier.
Quote ID: 5543
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 223 Page: 76
Section: 3C1
This commentary includes a letter written by Auxentius of Durostorum, which, together with the Codex Argenteus, illuminates the extraordinary achievements of one of Athanaric’s humblest subjects: Ulfilas, the Little Wolf of the Goths. {33}Born at the beginning of the fourth century, Ulfilas was the offspring of Roman prisoners living among the Tervingi.
Quote ID: 5544
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 223 Page: 78
Section: 3C1
Constantius went to the Danube and greeted Ulfilas ‘as if he were Moses himself’. {34}
Quote ID: 5545
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 223 Page: 79
Section: 3C1
Into this arena, sometime after 348, strode Ulfilas. Auxentius’ letter contains the statement of belief that Ulfilas left as his last will and testament, and succinctly explains the reasoning behind it.
Quote ID: 5546
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 223 Page: 79
Section: 3C1
Ulfilas was one of the more traditional Christians: he found the Nicene definition unacceptable because it contradicted the scriptural evidence and seemed to leave little room for distinguishing God the Father from God the Son. In Auxentius’ account:In accordance with tradition and the authority of the Divine Scriptures, [Ulfilas] never concealed that this God [the Son] is in second place and the originator of all things from the Father and after the Father and on account of the Father and for the glory of the Father ...holding as greater [than himself] God his own Father [John 14:28] - this he always made clear according to the Holy Gospel.
Quote ID: 5547
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 223 Page: 79
Section: 3C1
Unfortunately, the tractates and commentaries haven’t survived. Ulfilas ended up on the losing side of doctrinal debate and his works, like those of so many of his party, were not preserved.
Quote ID: 5548
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 223 Page: 80
Section: 4B
Barbarians weren’t what they used to be. Even if cast firmly as junior members, the Goths were part of the Roman world.
Quote ID: 5549
Time Periods: 567
Book ID: 223 Page: 94
Section: 3D2
Germanic successor states to the western Roman Empire produced large numbers of legal texts. These consistently portray Germanic (and Germanic-dominated) societies at this late date as comprising essentially three castes: freemen, freedmen, and slaves. Unlike its Roman counterpart, where the offspring of freedmen were completely free – and thus freemen – freedmen status in the Germanic was hereditary.
Quote ID: 5550
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 223 Page: 100
Section: 4B
Lying to the Emperor was treason. Rather than face interrogation, which in such cases routinely involved torture, Palladius committed suicide en route [PJ: 375]. The full story slowly emerged.
Quote ID: 5551
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 223 Page: 103
Section: 4B
...it is important to be realistic about the way human beings use political power, and not to attach too much importance to particular instances of corruption. Since the power-profit factor had not impeded the rise of the Empire in the first place, there is no reason to suppose that it contributed fundamentally to its collapse.
Quote ID: 5553
Time Periods: 567
Book ID: 223 Page: 105
Section: 4B
We know that in emergencies, galloping messengers, with many changes of horse, might manage as much as 250 kilometres a day. But Theophanes’ [PJ: born c. 752–c. 818] average on that journey of three and a half weeks was the norm: in other words, about 40, the speed of the oxcart. This was true of military as well as civilian operations, since all the army’s heavy equipment and baggage moved by this means too.
Quote ID: 5554
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 223 Page: 107
Section: 4B
Looking at the map with modern eyes, we perceive the Roman Empire as impressive enough; looked at in fourth-century terms, it is staggering. Furthermore, measuring it in the real currency of how long it took human beings to cover the distances involved, you could say it was five times larger than it appears on the map.
Quote ID: 5555
Time Periods: 47
Book ID: 223 Page: 108
Section: 1A
Keep Roman central government happy, and life could often be lived as the locals wanted. This is a key to understanding much of the internal history of the Roman Empire.
Quote ID: 5556
Time Periods: 1
Book ID: 223 Page: 110
Section: 4B
On the military side, the enlarged army may have done its job in the short term: but manpower shortages within the Empire forced fourth-century emperors to draw increasingly on ‘barbarian’ recruits from across the frontier. As a result, the Roman army declined in both loyalty and efficiency.
Quote ID: 5557
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 223 Page: 115
Section: 4B
The private funding of public building in one’s hometown belonged to the very early imperial period, when this constituted the prime route to self-promotion. Putting up the right kinds of public building was part of persuading some high official to recommend your hometown to the emperor for the grant of a Roman constitution. Once your town had Latin rights, then financing buildings became a strategy for winning power and influence within it.
Quote ID: 5558
Time Periods: 01
Book ID: 223 Page: 116
Section: 4B
The confiscation by the state of local endowments and taxes in the third century removed most of the fun from local government. By the fourth, there was little point in spending freely to win power in your hometown, if all you then got to do was run errands for central government.
Quote ID: 5559
Time Periods: 034
Book ID: 223 Page: 117
Section: 4B
Because bureaucratic positions were so attractive, emperors were flooded with requests for appointments. Many of these were granted. Emperors always liked to raise their popularity ratings by appearing generous, and these kinds of grants seemed, individually, pretty harmless.
Quote ID: 5560
Time Periods: 014
Book ID: 223 Page: 117
Section: 4B
And, because of the delay involved in getting a post under these conditions, parents were appending their children’s names to waiting lists at birth. Thus, far from showing the power of a newly oppressive central state, the rise of the imperial bureaucracy demonstrates the continuation of the same kind of political relationship between centre and locality that we have already observed. Here again, as in the rescript system and in the whole process of Romanization itself, the state certainly started the ball rolling by setting up a new rule book, as it were. But the process was taken over by locals responding to the rule changes and adapting them to their own interests.
Quote ID: 5561
Time Periods: 145
Book ID: 223 Page: 118
Section: 4B
Written sources and archaeological excavation both confirm that the late Roman landowning elite, like their forebears, would alternate between their urban houses and their country estates.
Quote ID: 8467
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 223 Page: 119
Section: 3C,4B
With the Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in 312, the old ideological structures of the Roman world also began to be dismantled, and for Edward Gibbon this was a key moment in the story of Roman collapse.
Quote ID: 5562
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 223 Page: 119
Section: 4B
The main difference between early and late armies lay not in their numbers, but in the fact that barbarian recruits now sometimes served in the same units as citizens, rather than being segregated into auxiliary forces.
Quote ID: 8468
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 223 Page: 120
Section: 3A2A
...the Roman world was oppressed by a new species of tyranny; and the persecuted sects became the secret enemies of their country. {26}3D
Quote ID: 5563
Time Periods: 345
Book ID: 223 Page: 121
Section: 2A3,4B
On the religious front Constantine’s conversion to Christianity certainly unleashed a cultural revolution. Physically, town landscapes were transformed as the practice of keeping the dead separate from the living, traditional in Graeco-Roman paganism, came to an end, and cemeteries sprang up within town walls.
Quote ID: 5564
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 223 Page: 121
Section: 3C,4B
The Church, as Gibbon claimed, attracted large donations both from the state and from individuals. Constantine himself started the process, the Book of the Popes lovingly recording his gifts of land to the churches of Rome, and, over time, churches throughout the Empire acquired substantial assets.
Quote ID: 5565
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 223 Page: 122
Section: 2E2
...fourth-century Christian intellectuals set up in their writings a deliberately non-classical anti-hero, the uneducated Christian Holy Man, who, despite not having passed through the hands of the grammarian, and despite characteristically abandoning the town for the desert, achieved heights of wisdom and virtue that went far beyond anything that could be learned from Homer or Virgil, or even from participating in self-government. The Holy Man was the best-case product of the monastery....
Quote ID: 5566
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 223 Page: 122
Section: 2E2
The monastic lifestyle was extravagantly praised by highly educated Christians, who saw in its strictures a level of devotion equivalent to that of the Christian martyrs of old.Pastor John notes: John’s note: (in reference above to the highly educated Christians) Such men were no threat to their wealth.
Quote ID: 5567
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 223 Page: 122/123
Section: 4B
But while the rise of Christianity was certainly a cultural revolution, Gibbon and others are much less convincing in claiming that the new religion had seriously deleterious effect upon the functioning of the Empire.
Quote ID: 5568
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 223 Page: 123
Section: 2E2
Similarly, the number of upper-class individuals who renounced their wealth and lifestyles for a life of Christian devotion pales into insignificance beside the 6,000 or so who by AD 400 were actively participating in the state as top bureaucrats. In legislation passed in the 390s, all of these people were required to be Christian. For every Paulinus of Pella, there were many more newly Christianized Roman landowners happy to hold major state office, and no sign of any crisis of conscience among them.
Quote ID: 5569
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 223 Page: 123
Section: 1A
Roman imperialism had claimed, since the time of Augustus, that the presiding divinities had destined Rome to conquer and civilize the world. The gods had supported the Empire in a mission to bring the whole world of humankind to the best achievable state, and had intervened directly to choose and inspire Roman emperors. After Constantine’s public adoption of Christianity, the longstanding claims about the relation of the state to the deity were quickly, and surprisingly easily, reworked. The presiding divinity was recast as the Christian God, and the highest possible state for humankind was declared to be Christian conversion and salvation. Literary education and the focus on self-government were shifted for a while to the back burner, but by no means thrown out. And that was the sum total of the adjustment required. The claim that the Empire was God’s vehicle, enacting His will in the world, changed, little: only the nomenclature was different. Likewise, while emperors could no longer be deified, their divine status was retained in Christian-Roman propaganda’s portrayal of God as hand-picking individual emperors to rule with Him, and partly in His place, over human sphere of His cosmos. Thus, the emperor and everything about him, from his bedchamber to his treasury, could continue to be styled as ‘sacred’. {30}
Quote ID: 5570
Time Periods: 145
Book ID: 223 Page: 125
Section: 1A,4B
By 438, the Senate of Rome was a thoroughly Christian body. At the top end of Roman society, the adoption of Christianity thus made no difference to the age-old contention that the Empire was God’s vehicle in the world.
Quote ID: 5571
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 223 Page: 125
Section: 1A,3C2
Many Christian bishops, as well as secular commentators, were happy to restate the old claim of Roman imperialism in its new clothing. Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea was already arguing, as early as the reign of Constantine, that it was no accident that Christ had been incarnated during the lifetime of Augustus, the first Roman emperor. Despite the earlier history of persecutions, went his argument, this showed that Christianity and the Empire were destined for each other, with God making Rome all-powerful so that, through it, all mankind might eventually be saved.
Quote ID: 5572
Time Periods: 1456
Book ID: 223 Page: 125
Section: 3A1,3D
Even more impressively, emperors helped set the agendas to be discussed, their officials orchestrated the proceedings, and state machinery was used to enforce the decisions reached. More generally, they made religious law for the Church – Book 16 of the Theodosian Code is entirely concerned with such matters – and influenced appointments to top ecclesiastical positions.
Quote ID: 5573
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 223 Page: 126
Section: 3C
Under Constantine’s Christian successors, the previously obscure Bishop of Constantinople was elevated into a Patriarch on a par with the Bishop of Rome – because Constantinople was the ‘new Rome’.
Quote ID: 5574
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 223 Page: 126
Section: 1A,3A1
With the Church now so much a part of the state - bishops had even been given administrative roles within it, such as running small-claims courts – to become a Christian bishop was not to drop out of public life but to find a new avenue into it.
Quote ID: 5575
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 223 Page: 126
Section: 1A
If the Christianization of Roman society is a massively important topic, an equally important, and somewhat less studied one, is the Romanization of Christianity. The adoption of the new religion was no one-way street, but a process of mutual adaptation that reinforced the ideological claims of emperor and state. {34}
Quote ID: 7376
Time Periods: 1456
Book ID: 223 Page: 126
Section: 1A,3A1
But rejection of the Empire was little more than undertone among fourth-century Christian thinkers.
Quote ID: 8469
Time Periods: 14
Book ID: 223 Page: 127
Section: 3A1,3C
Until the end of the fourth century, seventy years after Constantine first declared his new religious allegiance, the perception that emperors might show more favour to Christians in promotions to office was what spread the new religion among the Roman upper classes. All Christian emperors faced intense lobbying from the bishops, and all made highly Christian noises from time to time.
Quote ID: 5576
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 223 Page: 127/128
Section: 4B
As with the expansion of the bureaucracy, the imperial centre had successfully deployed new mechanisms for keeping the energies and attentions of the landowning classes focused upon itself.Taxes were paid, elites participated in public life, and the new religion was effectively enough subsumed into the structures of the late Empire. Far from being the harbingers of disaster, both Christianization and bureaucratic expansion show imperial centre still able to exert a powerful pull on the allegiances and habits of the provinces. That pull had to be persuasive rather than coercive, but so it had always been. Renegotiated, the same kinds of bonds continued to hold centre and locality together.
Pastor John’s note: Wow
Quote ID: 5578
Time Periods: 345
Book ID: 223 Page: 127/128
Section: 3A1,3C
To my mind, a similar dynamic was at work here as in the earlier process of Romanization. The state was unable simply to force its ideology on local elites, but if it was consistent in making conformity a condition for advancement, then landowners would respond. As the fourth century progressed, ‘Christian and Roman’ – rather than ‘villa and town dwelling’ – were increasingly the prerequisites of success, and the movers and shakers of Roman society, both local and central, gradually adapted themselves to the new reality. As with the expansion of the bureaucracy, the imperial centre had successfully deployed new mechanisms for keeping the energies and attention of the landowning classes focused upon itself.Taxes were paid, elites participated in public life, and the new religion was effectively enough subsumed into the structures of the late Empire. Far from being the harbingers of disaster, both Christianization and bureaucratic expansion show the imperial centre still able to exert a powerful pull on the allegiances and habits of the provinces. That pull had to be persuasive rather than coercive, but so it had always been. Renegotiated, the same kinds of bonds continued to hold centre and locality together.
Quote ID: 8470
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 223 Page: 129
Section: 4B
Above all, written law freed men from the fear of arbitrary action on the part of the powerful (the Latin word for freedom – libertas – carried the technical meaning ‘freedom under the law’). Legal disputes were treated on their merits; the powerful could not override the rest. And Christianization merely strengthened the ideological importance ascribed to written law. For whereas Christian intellectuals could criticize as elitist the moral education offered by the grammarian, and hold up the uneducated Holy Man from the desert as an alternative figure of virtue, the law was not open to the same kind of criticism. It protected everyone in their designated social positions.-----------------------
... it became easy to portray all-encompassing written Roman law – as opposed to elite literary culture – as the key ingredient of the newly Christian Empire’s claim to uphold a divinely ordained social order. {39}
Quote ID: 5579
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 223 Page: 132
Section: 1A,3C
Its unchallenged ideological monopoly made the Empire enormously successful at extracting conformity from its subjects, but it was hardly a process engaged involuntarily. The spread of Roman culture and the adoption of Roman citizenship in its conquered lands resulted from the fact that the Empire was the only avenue open to individuals of ambition. You had to play by its rules, and acquire its citizenship, if you were to get anywhere.3A
Quote ID: 5580
Time Periods: 1456
Book ID: 223 Page: 133
Section: 4B
By the third quarter of the fourth century, as Christianity spread and attracted imperial patronage, the landowning classes likewise began to move, as we have seen, into the Church and soon came to dominate the episcopate. The first grammarian-trained bishops I know of are Ambrose in the west and the Cappadocian Fathers (Basil of Caesarea, Gregory Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa) in the east, all ordained in about 370. {43}
Quote ID: 5581
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 223 Page: 134
Section: 4B
The Empire had always been run for the benefit of an elite. And while this made for an exploited peasantry and certain level of largely unfocused opposition, there is no sign in the fourth century that the situation had worsened. {45}
Quote ID: 5582
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 223 Page: 135
Section: 4B
But landowning was the supreme expression of wealth, and, as in pre-industrial England, those who made money elsewhere were quick to invest it in estates – because, above all, land was the only honourable form of wealth for a gentleman.
Quote ID: 5583
Time Periods: 147
Book ID: 223 Page: 136/137
Section: 4B
There are no known examples of landowners, even with excellent connections, being let off tax entirely, but many won reductions. All reductions were, however, precarious in that if your patron lost power, then the benefits that accrued to you might also be lost.
Quote ID: 5584
Time Periods: 147
Book ID: 223 Page: 138
Section: 3A1B,4B
The lifestyle of Symmachus and his friends provides a blueprint for that of the European gentry and nobility over much of the next sixteen hundred years.
Quote ID: 5585
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 223 Page: 141
Section: 1A,4B
It has been a long journey of discovery, but the evolution of the Roman Empire up to about AD 300 is finally coming into focus. On the one hand, we are dealing with an historical phenomenon of extraordinary power. Built originally on military might, the Empire deployed, across the vastness separating Hadrian’s Wall from the Euphrates, an all-encompassing ideology of superiority. By the fourth century, subjected peoples had so internalized the Roman way of life that the original conquest state had evolved into a commonwealth of thoroughly Roman provincial communities.
Quote ID: 5586
Time Periods: 1234
Book ID: 223 Page: 182
Section: 3D2
The Goths faced three overwhelming disadvantages that made it impossible for them to defeat the Roman Empire outright. First, even if, taking the maximum conceivable figure, we reckon that there were 200,000 of them in all, with the capacity to produce an army of 40-50,000 men - although I do think this figure too high - this would still have been rather paltry compared with the grand sum of imperial resources. The Empire’s army totalled, as we’ve seen, 300-600,000, and its population was in excess of 70 million (a minimum figure). In a fight to the death, there could be only one winner.Pastor John notes: John’s note: The empire was just too big
Quote ID: 5588
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 223 Page: 189
Section: 2E2
The war on the Danube had affected only the Empire’s Balkan provinces, a relatively poor and isolated frontier zone, and even here some kind of Romanness survived. The late fourth - and early fifth-century layers of the recently excavated Roman city of Nicopolis ad Istrum are striking for the number of rich houses - 45 per cent of the urban area - that suddenly appeared inside the city walls. {63} It looks as though, since their country villas were now too vulnerable, the rich were running their estates from safe inside the city walls.
Quote ID: 5589
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 223 Page: 191
Section: 3D2
On a hot August day in 410, the unthinkable happened. A large force of Goths entered Rome by the Salarian Gate and for three days helped themselves to the cities wealth. The sources, without being specific, speak clearly of rape and pillage. There was, of course, much loot to be had, and the Goths had a field day. By the time they left, they had cleaned out many of the rich senatorial houses as well as all the temples, and had taken ancient Jewish treasures that had resided in Rome since the destruction of Solomon’s temples in Jerusalem over three hundred years before.-------------
The Roman world was shaken to its foundations. After centuries as mistress of the known world, the great imperial capital had been subjected to a smash-and-grab raid of epic proportions. In the Holy Land, St Jerome, an émigré from Rome, put it succinctly: ‘In one city, the whole world perished.’ Pagan reactions were more pointed: ‘If Rome hasn’t been saved by its guardian deities, it’s because they are no longer there; for as long as they were present, they preserved the City.’ {1} The adoption of Christianity, in other words, had led to this devastation.
Quote ID: 5590
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 223 Page: 213
Section: 3D2
One thing the Goths wanted, in any new deal, was that the Romans recognized their right to a leader by granting him official status as a fully fledged Roman general (magister militum).--------------
The Goths had had enough of their half-baked political autonomy within the Roman state, ground-breaking though it had been when instituted a quarter of a century earlier.
Quote ID: 5591
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 223 Page: 214
Section: 3D2
Frustrated in his desire for a political deal, Alaric set his men loose.
Quote ID: 5592
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 223 Page: 214
Section: 3D2
Theodosius’ older son, the eastern emperor Arcadius, though twenty years older in 397 never actually ruled, but was always surrounded by a swarm of ambitious politicians seeking power through his favour. By 397, currently the most powerful of these courtiers the eunuch Chamberlain Eutropius, was ready to negotiate. He made Alaric a Roman general and granted the Goths the better terms and extra guarantees they required. He allowed them to settle in Dacia and Macedonia, and probably arranged for local produce, levied as tax in kind, to be diverted to their subsistence. Eutropius’ fate is highly instructive. Eunuchs were generally figures of ridicule in the Roman world, portrayed as immoral and greedy: just the sort of go soft on barbarians demanding money and menaces. As both a eunuch and a Goth appeaser, Eutropius’ position was vulnerable, and was brilliantly exploited by his opponents. He was duly toppled in the summer of 399. {49} His successors tore up the agreement with Alaric and refused to negotiate further.
Quote ID: 5593
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 223 Page: 226
Section: 3D2
Alaric stormed out – but then, fascinating, changed his mind. This time he recruited some Roman bishops to serve as his ambassadors. The message they delivered was this:Alaric did not now want office or honour, nor did he now wish to settle in the provinces previously specified, but only the two Noricums, which are on the far reaches of the Danube, are subject to continual incursions, and pay little tax to the treasury. Moreover he would be satisfied with a much corn each year as the emperor thought sufficient, and forget the gold . . .
-----------------
Alaric’s moderation may astonish, but it reveals his vision of the big picture. Currently he had the military power to take pretty much whatever he wanted, but was willing to trade it in for a stable peace agreement with the Roman state.
Quote ID: 5594
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 223 Page: 227/229
Section: 3D2
A meeting was arranged, and Alaric moved to within 60 stadia (about 12 kilometres) of Ravenna. Rogue elements in Honorius’ military, meanwhile, were against all negotiation. As Alaric awaited Honorius, he was attacked by a small Roman force...------------
Alaric was outraged......Giving up on the idea of negotiating with Ravenna, the Goths turned on their heels and returned to Rome a fourth time. There they mounted their third siege. No doubt by this time Rome’s suburban landladies had their old rooms waiting for them. There was a brief halt outside the walls, but then the Salarian Gate opened. {62}
--------------
By all accounts, there followed one of the most civilized sacks of a city ever witnessed. Alaric’s Goths were Christian, and treated many of Rome’s holiest places with great respect. The two main basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul were nominated places of sanctuary. Those who fled there were left in peace, and refugees to Africa later reported with astonishment how the Goths had even conducted certain holy ladies there, particularly one Marcella, before methodically ransacking their houses. Not that everyone, not even all the city’s nuns, fared so well, but the Christian Goths did keep their religious affiliation firmly in view. One huge silver ciborium, 2,025 pounds in weight and the gift of the emperor Constantine, was lifted from the Lateran Palace, but the liturgical vessels of St Peter’s were left in situ. Structural damage, too, was largely limited to the area of the Salarian Gate and the old Senate house. All in all, even after three days of Gothic attentions, the vast majority of the city’s monuments and buildings remained intact, even stripped of their movable valuables.
The contrast with the last time the city had been sacked, by Celtic tribes in 390 BC, could not have been marked.
------------------------
In 390 BC, only the fortress on the Capitol survived the burning of the city; in AD 410 only the Senate house was set on fire. {63}
------------------------
The inescapable conclusion to be drawn from a close exploration of the sequence of events between 408 and 410, however, is that Alaric did not want the sack to happen. His Goths had been outside the city on and off since late autumn 408, and, had they wanted to, could have taken it at any point in the twenty months since their arrival. Alaric could probably not have cared less about possible banner headlines in the historical press and a few dozen wagons‘ worth of booty. His concerns were of a different order altogether. Since 395, he had been struggling to force the Roman state to rewrite its relationship with the Goths as it had been defined in the treaty of 382. His bottom line, as we know, was the grant of recognized status by a legitimate Roman regime.
---------------------
Ultimately, therefore, Honorius could ignore its fate without the Empire suffering major damage. Alaric’s letting his troops loose there for three days was an admission that his whole policy, since entering Italy in the autumn of 408, had been misconceived. It had not delivered the kind of deal with the Roman state that he was looking for. The sack of Rome was not much a symbolic blow to the Roman Empire as an admission of Gothic failure.
Quote ID: 5595
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 223 Page: 234
Section: 1B
Nor has the sack raised in Rutilius’ mind the slightest doubt about the Empire’s destiny, its mission to civilize humankind:Thy gifts thou spreadest wide as the sun’s rays,
As far as earth-encircling ocean heaves.
Phoebus, {70} embracing all things [,] rolls for thee;
His steeds both rise and sink in thy domains . . .
Far as the habitable climes extend
Towards either pole thy valour finds its path.
Thou hast made of alien realms one fatherland;
The lawless found their gain beneath thy sway;
Sharing thy laws with them thou hast subdued,
Thou hast made a city of the once wide world.
---------------------
His faith in the Roman ideal rested on a determination to rebuild what the barbarians had laid waste, not a delusion that the history of the last decade hadn’t happened:
Let thy [Rome’s] dire woe be blotted and forgot;
Let thy contempt for suffering heal thy wounds . . .
Things that refuse to sink, still stronger rise,
And higher from the lowest depths rebound;
And, as the torch reversed new strength attains,
Thou, brighter from thy fall, to heaven aspirest!
Quote ID: 5596
Time Periods: 15
Book ID: 223 Page: 340
Section: 3D2
But, as in Gaul the previous year, Attila’s Italian campaign failed to go entirely to plan. Papal sources and Hollywood scriptwriters love to focus on one incident in particular when, after the capture of Milan, Pope Leo, as part of a peace embassy that included the Perfect Trygetius and ex-consul Avienus, met Attila to try to persuade him not to attack the city of Rome. In the end, the Huns did turn back, retreating to Hungary once again.In some circles this went down as a great personal triumph for the Pope in face-to-face diplomacy. Reality was more prosaic. Other forces apart from God-guided Leo were at work.
Quote ID: 5597
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 223 Page: 379/381
Section: 3D2
Since time immemorial, the traditional education had portrayed barbarians - including Visigoths - as the ‘other’, the irrational, the uneducated; the destructive force constantly threatening the Roman Empire.-------------------
Theoderic II was not your run-of-the-mill barbarian, driven by his senses, addicted to alcohol and the next adrenalin rush. He was, in fact, a ‘Roman’ in the proper sense, one who had learned reason and self-discipline, who ran his court, his life - indeed, himself - in the time-hallowed Roman manner.
Pastor John notes: John’s note: Life of Severinus
Quote ID: 5598
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 223 Page: 379/380/381
Section: 3D2
Since time immemorial, the traditional education had portrayed barbarians—including Visigoths—as the ‘other’, the irrational, the uneducated; the destructive force constantly threatening the Roman Empire.….
Theoderic II was not your run-of-the-mill barbarian, driven by his senses, addicted to alcohol and the next adrenalin rush. He was, in fact, a ‘Roman’ in the proper sense, one who had learned reason and self-discipline, who ran his court, his life—indeed, himself—in the time-hallowed Roman manner.
Quote ID: 8472
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 223 Page: 410/411
Section: 4B
As we saw earlier, villas disappeared equally quickly in much of the Balkans at the time of the Gothic war of 376-82.This doesn’t mean that all their former owners were necessarily killed and the landowning class eliminated. Rural surveys in Noricum have demonstrated, on the contrary, that building in the fifth century switched to the construction of what Germanophone archaeologists call Fliehburgen, ‘refuge centres’. These are substantial walled settlements, sometimes built with permanent occupation in mind, placed in highly defensible positions, usually on hill tops and frequently with a church at their centre.
------------------
Much of the action of the Life of Severinus takes place against a backdrop in which small walled settlements, castella - the contemporary term for archaeologists’ Fliehburgen - provide the basic form of settlement being used to protect Roman life. The Life also makes clear that, by the 460s, the citizens of these small towns had become responsible for their own protection, putting together small forces to defend their walls - citizen militias, in fact.
Quote ID: 5599
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 223 Page: 411/412
Section: 1B,2E6
The Life includes a much quoted but nonetheless fantastic vignette of the last moments of one particular unit of frontier garrison troops.At the time when the Roman Empire was still in existence, the soldiers of many towns were supported by public money for their watch along the wall [the Danube frontier]. When this arrangement ceased, the military formations were dissolved and, at the same time, the wall was allowed to break down. The garrison of Batavis, however, still held out. Some of these had gone to Italy to fetch for their comrades the last payment, but on their way they had been routed by the barbarians, and nobody knew. One day when St. Severinus [PJ: died 482] was reading in his cell, he suddenly closed the book and began to sigh heavily and to shed tears. He told those who were present to go speedily to the river [the Inn], which, as he declared was at that hour red with human blood. And at that moment, the news arrived that the bodies of the said soldiers had been washed ashore by the current of the river.
As with all the episodes in the Life, this is impossible to date precisely. But when central funds began to run out, the surviving garrison troops just disbanded themselves.
Pastor John’s note: But who were these “barbarians”?
Quote ID: 5600
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 223 Page: 412
Section: 4B
In Noricum, it was sometime in the 460s that the troops disbanded, and my best guess would be that it happened shortly after the defeat of the Byzantine armada. But the garrison troops had wives and children living with them, so that even when they disbanded they stayed where they were. Old garrisons didn’t die, but slowly faded away into the citizen militias who, as we’ve already seen, continued to protect their walled settlements once the formal Roman army in the province had ceased to exist. This is the situation that most of the anecdotes in the Life of Severinus presuppose.
Quote ID: 5601
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 223 Page: 413
Section: 4B
With the divine assistance to which the saint had access, says Eugippius, some of the towns of Noricum were able to maintain for some time a lifestyle that preserved much of its old Romanness. The emphasis has to be added. One theme of the Life of St. Severinus is a kind of London-in-the-Blitz determination to carry on being more Roman than usual.
Quote ID: 5602
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 223 Page: 422
Section: 2E2,4B
Landed wealth is by definition immovable. Unless you belonged to the super-rich of the Roman world, owning lands far to the east as well as in Gaul or Spain, then when the Roman state started to fail, you were left with little choice. You either had to mend fences with your nearest incoming barbarian king so as to secure the continuation of your property rights, or give up the elite status into which you had been born. If, as the Empire collapsed around them, Roman landowners perceived the slightest chance of holding on to their lands, they were bound to take it.
Quote ID: 5603
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 223 Page: 429
Section: 3D2
By early autumn 476, most loose ends have been tied up. The changes brought on by Odovacar’s regime were pushing Italy towards a new political stability, even if no land distributions had yet taken place. One anomaly remained. At the moment, Italy still had an emperor in Romulus Augustulus, but Odovacar had no interest in preserving the position of this notional ruler who controlled nothing beyond the Italian peninsula. Consulting friends in the Senate, he came up with the solution. A senatorial embassy was sent to Constantinople, now presided over by Leo’s successor the emperor Zeno, proposing that there was no need of a divided rule and that one, shared Emperor was sufficient for both territories. They said, moreover, that they had chosen Odovacar, a man of military and political experience, to safeguard their own affairs, and that Zeno should confer upon him the rank of Patrician and entrust him with the government of Italy. {76}In the kind of language that accompanied the outbreak of the Falklands war in the 1980s, Zeno was to have sovereignty over Italy as Roman emperor, but Odovacar would control the administration. In practice, this meant merely that by promoting him to the rank of Patrician Zeno should legitimize Odovacar’s seizure of power; it was the title that the effective rulers of Italy such as Stilicho and Aetius had been holding now for the best part of a century.
--------------------
Here was Zeno’s chance [Eastern Emperor] to put the power of the east behind a last attempt to restore the western Empire. He weighed up the situation carefully, then wrote a sympathetic note to Nepos [Western Emperor]. The conclusion he had come to was what everyone else already knew. The western Empire was over.
Quote ID: 5604
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 223 Page: 430
Section: 3D2
Odovacar took the hint. He deposed Romulus, pensioning him off with a charity rare in imperial politics to an estate in Campania. He then sent the western imperial vestments, including, of course the diadem and cloak which only an emperor could wear, back to Constantinople. This momentous act brought half a millennium of empire to a close.
Quote ID: 5605
Time Periods: 05
Book ID: 223 Page: 431
Section: 1A
Even though the rulers of Constantinople continued to call themselves ‘Emperors of the Romans’ long after the year 700, they were actually ruling an entity best understood as another successor state rather than a proper continuation of the Roman Empire. {1}
Quote ID: 5606
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 223 Page: 431
Section: 1A,4B
During the same period there were many living in western Europe and North Africa who continued to think of themselves, and were thought of by others, as Romans.
Quote ID: 5607
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 223 Page: 432
Section: 1A
After 476, then, we have ‘proper’ Romans still in both east and west, so what was it exactly that fell?-----------------------------
Quote ID: 5608
Time Periods: 156
Book ID: 223 Page: 432
Section: 1A,4B
The Destruction of Central Romanness
What did come to an end in 476 was any attempt to maintain the western Roman Empire as an overarching, supra-regional political structure.
------------------------------
After 476, all this came to an end. While substantial numbers of the old Roman landowning class still survived in the west with their distinctive culture more or less intact, the key centralizing structures of Empire had gone.
------------------------------
Provincial Romanness survived in parts of the west after 476, but central Romanness was a thing of the past.
Quote ID: 5609
Time Periods: 156
Book ID: 223 Page: 434/435
Section: 1A
As the Roman state lost power, and was perceived to be doing so, provincial Roman landowning elites, at different times in different places, faced an uncomfortable new reality. The sapping of the state’s vitality threatened everything that made them what they were. Defined by the land they stood on, even the dimmest, or most loyal, could not help but realize eventually that their interests would be best served by making an accommodation with the new dominant force in their locality.
Quote ID: 5610
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 223 Page: 438/439
Section: 3A1,4B
In many places, then, local Romanness survived pretty well. Catholic Christianity, a Latin-literate laity, villas, towns and more complex forms of economic production and exchange all endured to some extent - except in Britain - on the back of the landowning class. Consequently, across most of the old Roman west, the destruction of the forms and structures of the state coexisted with a survival of Roman provincial life. {9}------------------
Was the end of the Roman state a major event in the history of western Eurasia, or merely a surface disturbance, much less important than deeper phenomena such as the rise of Christianity, which worked themselves out essentially unaffected by the processes of imperial collapse?
----------------
As we have seen, there was no sudden, total change, and this fact has laid a new emphasis on the notion of continuity, on the idea that the best way of understanding historical development in the late and post-Roman periods is to consider it in terms of organic evolution rather than cataclysm. {10}
Quote ID: 5611
Time Periods: 147
Book ID: 223 Page: 439
Section: 4B
To participate in the benefits of Empire, provincial elites needed to gain Roman citizenship. The easiest way to do this was to set up your own town with Latin rights, and hold high office within it. A rush towards this kind of urbanization, therefore, followed the establishment of Roman dominance. You also needed to be able to speak ‘proper’ Latin, so that Latin literary education spread too, and to show that you had bought into the values of classical civilization. Public buildings in which such a civilized life might be lived with one’s peers (meeting houses, baths, and so on) and the villa style of domestic architecture were the concrete manifestations of that Roman vision.
Quote ID: 5612
Time Periods: 3456
Book ID: 223 Page: 440
Section: 4B
Most of what has been called Romanization was not a state-directed top-down activity. Rather, it was the outcome of the individual responses of conquered elites to the brute fact of Empire, as they adapted their society to the new conditions that Roman domination imposed upon them.
Quote ID: 5613
Time Periods: 147
Book ID: 223 Page: 440
Section: 4B
An essential part of the deal, however, was that, while they transformed their lifestyles so as to participate in what the state had to offer, the Empire’s armies protected them. Local Romanness was thus inseparable from the existence of Empire.
Quote ID: 5614
Time Periods: 047
Book ID: 223 Page: 441
Section: 4B
When a ‘proper’ Latin poet called Venantius Fortunatus turned up at court from Italy, he delighted equally both Roman- and Frankish-descended grandees present. This individual made a career out of singing for his supper, his party piece being elegant couplets in praise of the dessert. Despite this, neither kind of grandee bothered any more with a full Latin education. They did teach their children to read and write, but their aims were more limited. As a result, by about 600, writing was confined to clerics, while secular elites tended to be content just to be able to read, especially their Bibles; they no longer saw writing as an essential part of their identity.
Quote ID: 5615
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 223 Page: 441
Section: 1A
As we saw in Chapter 3, the Romanization of Christianity was as important an historical phenomenon as the Christianization of the Empire.... Nor did Christian Roman emperors step back one iota from the claim made by their pagan predecessors that they had been appointed by the Divinity – they simply re-identified that Divinity as the Christian God.
Quote ID: 5616
Time Periods: 1456
Book ID: 223 Page: 442
Section: 1A,3A2,3C
Christianity as it evolved within the structures of the Empire was thus very different from what it had been before Constantine’s conversion, and the disappearance of the Roman state profoundly changed it yet again.
Quote ID: 5617
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 223 Page: 442
Section: 4B
....the intellectual world of the early medieval Church became a solidly clerical one. This would not have happened, had laymen remained as educated as clerics.
Quote ID: 5618
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 223 Page: 442
Section: 3F
But with the disappearance of widespread literacy, laymen soon ceased to be able to do so, and the intellectual world of the early medieval Church became a solidly clerical one. This would not have happened, had laymen remained as educated as clerics.
Quote ID: 5619
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 223 Page: 442
Section: 3E
Above all, the rise of the medieval papacy as an overarching authority for the whole of western Christendom is inconceivable without the collapse of the Roman Empire. In the Middle Ages, popes came to play many of the roles within the Church that Christian Roman emperors had appropriated to themselves – making laws, calling councils, making or influencing important appointments. Had western emperors of the Roman type still existed, it is inconceivable that popes would have been able to carve out for themselves a position of such independence. In the east, where emperors still ruled, successive Patriarchs of Constantinople, whose legal and administrative position was modelled on that of the Roman papacy, found it impossible to act other than as imperial yes-men. Appointed by the emperors at will, they tended to be ex-imperial bureaucrats highly receptive to imperial orders. {14}3E
Quote ID: 5620
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 223 Page: xiii
Section: 3D2
...recent trends in historical writing which have sought to challenge the unspoken prejudices which inform the ‘great narratives’ of traditional history. The image of the ‘civilized’ but ever declining Romans implacably at war with ‘barbarian’ outsiders is a prime example of one such narrative at work.
Quote ID: 5526
Time Periods: ?
End of quotes