The Ruin of the Roman Empire

James Joseph O'Donnell

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780061982460
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Italienische Geschichte

"An exotic and instructive tale, told with life, learning and just the right measure of laughter on every page. O'Donnell combines a historian's mastery of substance with a born storyteller's sense of style to create a magnificent work of art." —Madeleine K. Albright, former U.S. Secretary of State

The dream Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar shared of uniting Europe, the Medi-terranean, and the Middle East in a single community shuddered and then collapsed in the wars and disasters of the sixth century. Historian and classicist James J. O'Donnell—who last brought readers his masterful, disturbing, and revelatory biography of Saint Augustine—revisits this old story in a fresh way, bringing home its sometimes painful relevance to today's issues.

With unexpected detail and in his hauntingly vivid style, O'Donnell begins at a time of apparent Roman revival and brings readers to the moment of imminent collapse that just preceded the rise of Islam. Illegal migrations of peoples, religious wars, global pandemics, and the temptations of empire: Rome's end foreshadows today's crises and offers hints how to navigate them—if present leaders will heed this story.

PART I

THEODERIC’S WORLD

The Empire That Hadn’t Fallen (476–527 CE)

Our story unfolds in three acts. First, here, an account of the empire that hadn’t fallen; then the empire that thought it was at risk of falling and partly already had; then what was left in the rubble after good intentions, bad planning, and bad luck had their way. Each act has its protagonist. The curtain rises on Theoderic, who saw that innovation is the best path to stewardship of tradition.

1

Rome in 500: Looking Backward

ROME DIDN’T SEE many emperors in the fifth century. Nero’s death let fall a diadem, and in the year 69 CE, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and finally Vespasian grasped at it. Tacitus drily observed that the success of such provincial generals revealed the “secret of empire”—that emperors could be created somewhere other than at Rome. From Augustus to Nero, Rome had been the only obvious dwelling for an imperator, and Tiberius’s self-exile to Capri brought scorn and salacious gossip about what he was up to while swimming with slave boys. After 69, emperors spent more and more time with their armies and on the frontiers. Hadrian in the early second century and the Severan emperors around 200 were away almost as much as they were home. The succession of disasters during the third century had kept emperors far from the capital, fighting each other and managing the frontiers. After Diocletian imposed his military order, he and his successors established a string of imperial cities that followed the frontier: Trier to survey the Rhine; Milan, Aquileia, and Sirmium (modern Sremska Mitrovica on the Save River in Serbia) to watch the Danube without abandoning the Rhine; Constantinople between the Balkans and the eastern provinces; and Antioch in Syria.

Rome was a nice place to visit, but a military backwater. Even many successful emperors never saw it during their reigns. Constantinople, on the other hand, was a palace town, almost constantly aware of the presence of an emperor after Theodosius’s death in 395. The military cities in the west lost their prestige when in 402 the emperor Honorius retreated to the swamp-protected Italian city of Ravenna, with its Adriatic port offering ready sea communication to Constantinople. He and his brother Arcadius in Constantinople stood at the head of a long line of emperors who were mostly figureheads, dwelling in the capital and delegating military leadership to the able.

Through all this, Rome’s emperors cosseted and cared for the city when they had time enough to pay it attention, but dramatic losses befell the city as well. The senate still met, traditional offices were filled, and the old families clung to wealth and position, but their numbers were greatly diminished. By the sixth century, there may have been only a very few dozen active senators, linked together in fewer than a dozen families. The pedigrees by which these people claimed “ancient nobility” were often sketchy as well, for Constantine’s revolution and the army he built two centuries earlier produced many rough-bred military husbands willing to marry into distinguished but impoverished families grateful for the protection and sometimes ill-gotten wealth of their new sons.¹ As long as these old families were certain of their prerogatives, they were content to surrender their power to the new men. The city needed the subsidies rich families could provide and clung as well to its ancient self-esteem, but power was another matter.

And Rome’s numbers dwindled. The city achieved a population of 1 million or so in the second century, but an estimate by Richard Krautheimer, a scholar who knew that late antique city as no other, brought it down to 800,000 by 400, when Constantinople and Ravenna eclipsed Rome’s real function as a capital. Rome lost half of that in the next fifty years, marked by Alaric’s brief sack of the city in 410, and it lost another half or three-quarters by the late 400s, when the Vandal raid of 455 was only the worst of a half century of indignities. There may have been only 100,000 or so people left by 500. The fortunate followed power to other capitals, while others died, failed to reproduce, or fled to the countryside.

Emperors had lived from time to time in Rome as late as the 470s, when Romulus was briefly on the throne, but in 500 there came a grand visit like nothing seen since Theodosius more than a century before. Only twice after that date would empire revisit its cradle, for consular games in 519 and for a brief stopover in 663. When Charlemagne arrived to have himself crowned emperor in 800, his business was inventing the new while pretending to cherish the old, and the medieval emperors who followed knew they were foreigners and usurpers in the city of Romulus and Augustus.

To the naked eye, Rome was Rome as it had always been; to the historical eye, change was everywhere, and continual. The Rome of Augustus had acquired, in the third and fourth centuries, sturdy new perimeter defense walls towering forty or fifty feet over everyone from imperial dignitaries seeking a grand entrance to farmers bringing produce to market. Fourth-century sources let us count the visible monuments of the city: twenty-eight libraries, six obelisks, eight bridges, eleven forums, ten basilicas, eleven public baths, eighteen aqueducts, nine circuses and theaters, two triumphal columns, fifteen fountains, twenty-two equestrian statues, eighty golden statues, twenty-four ivory statues, thirty-six triumphal arches, and the more pedestrian necessities as well: 290 granaries and warehouses, 856 private baths, 254 bakeries, and 46 brothels.

Even when Constantine took to Christianity after 312 CE, Christians and traditionalists alike were reluctant to introduce church architecture into the city’s historic core. Traditionalists feared the intrusion, Christians the contamination of proximity to the ancient gods. So the great early Christian basilicas stood guard around the core: for example, Saint Peter’s shrine on the Vatican hill across the Tiber from the walled city proper; or the church of the Holy Cross, just inside city gates on the east side of town; or the basilica of Saint Paul, some little way outside the walls to the south. In 391, Theodosius had solidified seventy-five years of increasing suppression of the old religious rites by banning sacrifice and public performance of religious cult activities. With that, the great temples in the forums and on the Capitoline and Palatine hills fell silent, protected only by the superstitions of new and old believers alike who prudently feared offending the old gods gratuitously. Churches began to edge closer to the center of the city during the fifth century. The basilica of Santa Sabina took high ground on the Aventine to the south, where Juno, Isis, and Diana had once prevailed; and Great Saint Mary’s (Santa Maria Maggiore) stood on the Esquiline north of the forums. Closer to the center the churching of Rome would come, with Pope Felix IV in the 520s transforming the city prefect’s great audience hall on the Via Sacra, a few dozen yards from the original forum, into a church honoring saints Cosmas and Damian. Eventually, in the 630s, Pope Honorius consecrated the senate house itself as a church in honor of a martyr who bore an emperor’s name—Saint Hadrian, of the early fourth century. By 500, the bishop of Rome had his own church of Saint John Lateran, inside the city but nearly against the walls, at the end of the Caelian on the southeast side. By the time of Pope Gregory’s reign in the 590s, at least half a dozen smaller churches had been erected.

Rome.

Just what condition the city was in around 500 is harder to say. We have, from the early years of the sixth century, a small spate of texts deploring dilapidation at Rome and elsewhere, and directing renovations and repairs. Rome’s most imperial symbol, the imperial palace on the Palatine hill, was restored; the senate house and, as we will see, the theater of Pompey were repaired; and walls, aqueducts, and granaries were all variously attended to. Within the city, the population’s decline probably revealed itself in the way people contracted together to live in some areas, leaving others to become the so-called disabitato of the middle ages, those tracts of the ancient city that became cattle pastures. Maintaining the aqueducts that brought fresh water from the hills was expensive and difficult, especially as demand fell. When we hear a sixth-century ruler’s outrage that farmers were diverting some of the aqueduct water for mills and irrigation, the outrage is mainly for show; the water was more useful in the fields by now.

Similarly, Rome could no longer count on the grain supply that had traditionally flooded the city at the tax collector’s command every year. No more was there the anxiety of old, when the wary eyes of citizens would watch the weather and the seas, hoping that the grain freighters would arrive before the onset of winter rains closed the Mediterranean until spring. Now there were fewer mouths to feed and they had to rely on local supplies or a freer market. The government in Africa, no longer acknowledging the emperor’s authority, kept its grain in Africa, or sold it at market prices. People got by, somehow. The city was by turns both gloomy and grand, still a marvel to the eye of any traveler, but a sad shadow of its former self.

One great monument tells a bit of its own story in this period: the Colosseum, the great amphitheater built at the center of the city in the late first century by the emperors Vespasian and Titus.² Holding, at a conservative estimate, 50,000 spectators, it dominated the cityscape and made possible many assorted and often gruesome entertainments. Situated at the crossroads of empire, it witnessed every spectacle and every visitor. A nineteenth-century investigation team found more than 400 species of plant life in the ruins, many of them entirely alien to the Tiber valley and the surrounding country; their seeds had been carried on the feet of animals, gladiators, and soldiers from all over the world. Gladiatorial contests had ended under mainly Christian emperors, though probably not for any puritanical reason—they may simply have lost popularity. Other forms of spectacle, particularly wild beast hunts, lasted into the sixth century.

Inscriptions demonstrate that in the 470s, while Odoacer held power at Rome and made and unmade emperors, the old amphitheater had undergone at least some renovation and upgrades. Where once the seating was rigidly defined by class (senators here, knights there, vestal virgins over there, etc.), now individual senators and families would have their names carved on their own particular seats. Not skyboxes in the modern fashion, but rather down low, more like courtside seats—designed to provide the best views, the richest smells, and even the thrill of an occasional spatter of sweat or blood. So an official letter of around 510 orders the city prefect to make certain that the two sons of a deceased senator should be assured that particular places at the circus and the amphitheater were theirs alone.

As late as the year 522, the incoming consul for 523 was granted permission to stage the great hunting games known as the venationes, forerunners of the modern bullfight. An official letter from that occasion captures the flavor of the events and the excitement that surrounded them, while fairly wallowing in anticipated blood. The hunter earns special praise, because he of all performers puts his life on the line to dazzle the audience. When victory eludes him he forfeits even the chance of a proper burial, for he is devoured by his would-be prey. Diana the huntress of Scythia is named as the goddess in whose honor the Romans organized this cult. She reigned first in the sky in the guise of the moon, then in the forests as the huntress, and at last under the earth as Proserpina, but then in Christian disdain the letter writer quickly acknowledges that only Proserpina captures her true character as a demon luring men to hell. Self-satisfied virtue regrets the miserable enthusiasm that would seek pleasure in the destruction of human beings and pronounces this all a cruel game, a bloody pleasure, an impious religion, human beastliness.

But then the event still has to be described: performers bait the creature by charging and taunting it, then the hunter circles his prey as his prey circles him, and at last the hunter leaps in the air as the beast charges, suspending himself almost miraculously in midair as it passes beneath. Various skilled hunters then taunt and divert the animal in different ways. Sometimes one hunter hid inside a reed basket for protection, while another astonishingly was strapped to a wheel and spun before the creature to put the hunter in reach and then snatch him out of harm’s way in a moment. This last stunt was considered the most comically dangerous; the audience enjoyed and accepted such risks because all hunters were expendable, even in an empire that had now called itself Christian for more than 200 years. The official letter from court that tells us all this ends on a primly moral note by comparing it (in the language of Vergil’s poetry rather than that of the Bible) to the torments of the underworld, but then it also grants full permission in the name of the ruler to carry on the ancient tradition.

This blood-infused letter is the last surviving document to tell us of traditional uses for the Colosseum, and the last venatio at Constantinople occurred in 537. The edifice stood empty till the eleventh century, when it fell into the possession of the Frangipani family, who turned it into a fort.

Why did the spectacles end and the amphitheater fall silent? A disdainful ruler may have been one reason, but competition from the chariot racing at the nearby circus is more likely; that was now Rome’s true great passion. And Constantinople, we will see later, had the circus bug even worse than Rome. Chariots may seem proverbially Roman to us as a means of travel, but they were long obsolete as anything but public toys used for racing, which was nearly a blood sport.

Pompous architecture, thrilling spectacles, and ancient prestige: all offered strong enough reasons for a ruler to visit the city. After the death in 498 of Pope Anastasius II, a man who had tried to mediate the religious quarrels between Rome and Constantinople, there was political opportunity as well.

For the church of Rome soon found itself with two popes, Symmachus and Laurentius, elected by different factions on the same day. Symmachus won his title in the official church of Saint John Lateran. A countervote a few hours later, not far away at Great Saint Mary’s, gave Laurentius the nod. Symmachus was arguably the hard-liner, Laurentius the compromiser, but it’s not clear how far large issues of policy went in dictating these choices, and how much was the result of more mundane local squabbles, such as control of church property. Quite reasonably, the two claimants submitted their dispute in short order to the throne in Ravenna to settle, and Symmachus prevailed. (Ravenna had already shown itself careful in dealing with popes not many years before, when Gelasius I complained that clergy from Nola had wrongly taken a case to the court at Ravenna, and Ravenna rightly and promptly waived jurisdiction, sending the clergymen right back to the pope.)

A few months after the contested papal election, on March 1, 499, Symmachus presided over a grand synod of his clergy and granted Laurentius the bishopric of Nocera, south of Rome between Naples and Salerno, a healthy distance from the city and its troubles. Peace was restored, for a while.

Then came the grand celebrations. King Theoderic came to Rome and went to visit Blessed Peter as devoutly as if he were Catholic—that’s how a historian of the next generation described it,³ when there were many alive who remembered that day of spectacle. Odd things are going on. Theoderic is not “emperor” (imperator or Augustus) but “king” (rex), and his name sounds oddly un-Latinate. He gets to have his churchly cake and eat it too—as somehow not a member of the Catholic community at Rome, yet permitted and quite willing to participate in it. Everything important about the sixth century is in that one sentence, and this visit is worth watching closely for that reason.

Let us start from the moment of Theoderic’s grand arrival from Ravenna. What crowds the diminished city could muster were there to greet him. The old phrase SPQR (senatus populusque romanus, “senate and people of Rome”) still described the city’s unity, however paltry and factional the crowd actually was. Pope Symmachus waited with the crowd to meet Theoderic outside the walls. Peter’s tomb was on the northwest side of the walled city on the Vatican hill and the procession from Ravenna could well have visited there before it made its way down the Via Cornelia, past Hadrian’s tomb and across the Aelian bridge into the city proper. Crossing that bridge, the procession would recall Christian emperors of old, as it passed the arch of those late-fourth-century colleagues Valentinian and Theodosius, and then the arch of the sons of Theodosius: Honorius and Arcadius. Swelling now, the procession entered the campus Martius, the “field of Mars,” formerly an open expanse that had seemed almost suburban in earlier Roman times, but that was now the clotted heart of the remaining city. The most reasonable route from there wound past the Pantheon, the monument to “all the gods” built originally by Augustus’s son-in-law Agrippa in the earliest days of the principate, then destroyed in a fire 100 years later, and finally rebuilt in the form that survives today by Hadrian around 125 CE, with various later repairs.

We would love to know how the Pantheon appeared at this moment. The astonishing dome had protected an imperial audience hall that honored traditional planetary gods such as Mercury and Venus, while offering a literal microcosm of the spherical universe, with earth at the center. After official neglect and then suppression of the old religious rites, this building once full of gods had probably already suffered depredations and neglect, but surely at the same time its magnificence would draw to it some of that past respect. I imagine it as a slightly spooky place back then, quieter than it had ever been, unsure of its future. Not until fully a century later did an emperor deed it over to a pope and have it turned into the church it still is.

A little farther along, the procession passed the porticoed courtyard and theater of Pompey, the great building that initiated urban development on this side of the city and demonstrated the power and presence of its builder. (Pompey indeed might have been Rome’s savior if a Gaulish ax had found Julius Caesar’s skull before the two great men fell into the ruinous civil war of 49 BCE.) Finally, Theoderic would have enjoyed his first view of the Roman forum coming from the riverside, up between the Capitoline and Palatine hills, by just the route that Vergil said the old Greek colonist Evander used to show the rustic future site of Rome to Aeneas long before in legendary memory. From there, after a brief visit to the senate house, Theoderic made a public address to the people in which the king promised that he would unfailingly preserve what all the principes of Rome before him had ordained.

Wha...