After the rise and crimes of the Nazis, the Fall
of the Roman Empire has a good claim to being the historical problem most alluded
to in modern political discourse. By
this is meant the fall of the western
half of the Roman Empire, in a series of events beginning in 376 with the
crossing of the Danube by the Goths and ending – neatly enough – one hundred
years later with the deposition of the boy-emperor Romulus ‘Augustulus’
(‘Little Emperor’) by one of his generals.
That general, Odovacar, sent the imperial regalia to the eastern Emperor
Zeno in Constantinople with a message saying there was no longer any need for
an emperor in the west; Zeno could rule the whole empire. Thus, in traditional histories, the western
Roman Empire came to an end, after ruling western Europe for almost exactly half
a millennium (503 years, by normal reckoning, counting from the senate’s award
to Octavian of the titles Augustus
and princeps).
Of course, in the historical significance
stakes the Fall of the Roman Empire has a 1450-year head-start on the Nazis, so
if one looks at European political discourse over the long term the relative
importance of the western Empire’s demise dwarfs that of the Third Reich. The image of the Roman Empire dominated
European history right up to Mussolini’s employment of Roman symbols and his
ideological claims that his regime and expansionist policies in Africa and the
Mediterranean represented a rebirth the Roman Empire. In this, Mussolini was in considerably better
company than he deserved. Rebirths of
Rome pepper the history of the West, from Charlemagne’s coronation as emperor
in 800, through that of Otto I, the claims of the Tsars to have founded a third
Rome in Moscow, to Napoleon. The final
overthrow of the Bonapartes and their eagle-tipped standards was at the hands
of the Hohenzollern kings of Prussia whose own imagery featured a
thunderbolt-wielding eagle of Roman inspiration. The summation of Wilhelm III’s victory, as is
well known, was his proclamation as Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany in the Hall of
Mirrors at Versailles. Kaiser (like Tsar in Russian) simply means Caesar.
How and why the First Rome had fallen was,
then, an issue of more than passing interest.
It was important too because many of the ruling dynasties or
aristocracies of western Europe claimed a descent from barbarian people who
were supposed to have overthrown the Empire.
This produced the somewhat schizophrenic attitude towards the barbarians
and the end of the Roman Empire that existed in western Europe up to and
including the Nazis (whose own imagery borrowed from the Roman symbolic
library). The summit of legitimacy was
to found a new Rome and yet at the same time pride was taken in descent from
the people who had conquered that Empire.
The Romans could be, at one and the same time, miserable degenerate
descendants of a once-great race and the very touch-stone of political
legitimacy. The way to square this
circle was to claim that the mantle of Rome was passed, via the process of translatio imperii (the transfer of
domination), from one people to another; as one people, such as the Romans
themselves, grew unworthy of the power and dignity they had accrued, another
arose to take it from them and the baton of empire was passed on. Ironically
perhaps, this idea had its own roots in Roman thinking, as the Romans had
theorised how world power had come to be passed to them from the Greeks and the
heirs of Alexander. Unsurprisingly,
given the Nazis’ fairly omnivorous attitude when it came to finding ideological
inspiration, the Third Reich bore witness to these trends. Their Roman-inspired eagles coexisted with
ideas of the triumphant destiny of the Germanic Volk, descended from the
barbarians who brought down the Roman Empire.
The two-sided attitude to the Empire and its
demise continues in contemporary politics.
The European far right simultaneously embraces the northern barbarians
and the idea of the civilised empire of Europe, faced with barbarous
aggressors. Far Right groups in England,
for example, love to identify with the ‘Englisc’ (the Old English spelling of
English) people or Folk, adopting Old English (Anglo-Saxon) personal names in
their discussion groups. Popular
demagogues have become fond of likening the influx of immigrants and refugees
into the European Community to the invasion of Rome by the barbarians. Alongside the claim that Muslim immigrants
threaten Europe’s ‘Judaeo-Christian roots’ (made by people whose ideological
forerunners were herding the Jews into gas chambers seventy-five years ago[1]) conservative leaders and journalists have
repeatedly drawn upon the Fall of Rome as a ‘warning’ from history. In this they have been helped by academics
who have written what might, most generously, be termed irresponsible volumes
on the subject or who have given public lectures, in the context of discussions
of the ‘refugee crisis’, about how migration destroyed the Roman Empire. Internet commentators, meanwhile, denigrate
modern books that look more critically at the traditional narrative as driven
by ‘liberal’ ‘political correctness’ or even as perpetrators of some sort of conspiracy
theory.
The end of the Roman Empire has featured in
political dialogue not only in conjunction with the supposed causes and effects
of the barbarian migrations. The causes
for the collapse of this great political structure, the only one in history to
govern most of western Europe and northern Africa (and, in the eastern Empire,
the Balkans, Asia Minor and the Levant too) for any length of time, have at
various times been sought in many other areas, such as a collapse of morality
or the Romans’ interbreeding with other ‘races’. This sort of view is still occasionally propounded,
so I have tried to deal with some of its aspects as well, although at much
lesser length than the issues concerning barbarian migrations or conquest.
The need for a discussion of the role of the
barbarians in the collapse of the western Roman Empire therefore remains as
important as ever. This book takes a
different approach from others on the subject in that it is primarily a book
about questions rather than answers.
Rather than pursuing a particular line of argument in explaining the end
of Rome or the Barbarian Migrations – you can find my interpretation elsewhere
– it seeks to provide more of a tool-kit for people confronted with ideas and
arguments about the period 376-476, or with claims to seek ‘warnings’ or
‘lessons’ in the events of that dramatic century. To this end it principally discusses what I
have called the myths of the migrations.
By myths I have striven to avoid the temptation found in other areas of
historical debate (such as that on the British high command’s conduct of the
First World War) simply to label dissenting or currently unfashionable
interpretations as myths. I have
restricted myself to issues where contemporary evidence for a particular
interpretation or argument is either entirely absent or has been read in a
fashion that is illogical or goes beyond the possibilities of that form of
data. In other words, these are things
which people have chosen to believe in spite of the lack of an empirically
verifiable basis for such a belief, perhaps because it shores up a particular idea
about the way the world is or ought to be.
This seems like a fair definition of a myth.
The nature of archaeological research and the
occasional discovery of new texts (or more usually fragments thereof) means
that it may be that new evidence is unearthed in future that provides empirical
bases for some of the ideas described here as myths. That is a risk that must be run and in such
instances I will accept the egg on my face.
Nonetheless, it must be accepted that in the current state of our
knowledge these ideas only count as myth and, should future discoveries turn
out to confirm them, that will not retrospectively confer methodological rigour
on their proponents up to this point; such confirmation can only have the
logical status of happy coincidence.
The tool-kit aspect of this book comprises not
simply a list of ‘things to watch out for’ – things presented as facts or solid
bases for argument that are no such thing – but attempts to go beyond that to
draw out some key aspects of how we employ evidence from this period. Late antique historical and archaeological
evidence is not easy to use. There are
numerous reasons why the archaeology needs special care in its handling when
pressed into the service of grand narrative history like that involved in broad
sweep discussions of large-scale processes like the movement of people or the
collapse of a complex political organisation; material culture does not (and cannot)
always address the same issues as the contemporary written sources (and vice
versa). At the same time, the
documentary evidence is much more complex than might at first seem to be the
case. The first chapter of this book
therefore provides a brief account of the types of evidence available for the
study of the fourth and fifth centuries and the key points one must bear in
mind when examining it. Setting out some
of the reasons why this is so and the questions one needs to ask before
accepting an interpretation is intended to enhance the reader’s ability to
adopt a critical or sceptical stance when faced with interpretations of this
important period of history and, still more so, its employment in contemporary
political debate.
Those interpretations, naturally, ought to
include my own. By the very nature of
things, the myths set out in this book are ones that I have spotted, either in
my research or thanks to the studies of other scholars. Equally naturally, I have been unable to
identify the blind spots that currently remain in my own work, in terms of
arguments or interpretations too readily accepted without sufficient
scrutiny. This is why I have tried to
discuss general principles as well as actual instances of what I have called
‘myth’. Restricting myself to the latter
would obviously render my own work critically untouched; adding the tools for
critical reading should allow a reader to be properly sceptical before
accepting (if she does) my version of events and to identify my own myths if and
where they occur. Should such things be
revealed, I have to hold my hands up and accept the judgement.
I have gone beyond the cataloguing of myths and
into the provision of a critical ‘tool-kit’ because I firmly believe that the
principal reasons for studying history are not to be sought in the simple
acquisition of knowledge of things that did or did not happen in the past. In my view, they are, first, to learn to be
critically aware and, second, to expose oneself to other experiences and ways
of seeing the world, to embrace a common humanity. There is a slight tension involved in
bringing these two maxims together. On
the one hand, according to the second reason just stated, we are enjoined to
listen to our sources as far as possible on their own terms and to give them a
fair hearing. On the other, though,
according to the first of my reasons to study history, we are instructed to
subject those sources to close and critical attention before believing their
account. This tension is perhaps more
apparent than real. Historians have been
fond of thinking about historical enquiry in terms of forensic investigation,
whether through the medium of the metaphor of the historian as detective or in
that of the courtroom of history. There
are problems with these metaphors but, for present purposes, viewing through
this sort of prism the ideas of giving an account a fair hearing and subjecting
it to thorough scrutiny allows them seem less contradictory. Paying fair attention to other views of the
world does not automatically confer upon them an equal validity; it permits us
to see that our way of seeing and organising the world is not necessarily the
only, let alone the natural, way. In
terms of seeing a purpose for historical study that latter advantage is extremely
important.
It is also my view that that attitude and those principles should be extended from the analysis of source materials, written or excavated, to the discussion of historical interpretation. The debate over interpretations of processes like the barbarian migrations could have been far more productive over recent decades had it been conducted more as a discussion than as a contest. An unwillingness to listen to, or deal with, arguments in a sufficiently sophisticated way, a refusal to modify one’s opinion (let alone change one’s mind), a belief that one’s own theory must be entirely correct in all cases and an overwhelming desire to ‘win’ the argument have been too prevalent on all sides. I confess to some self-interest here. I have been labelled an ‘anti-migrationist’, an interpretation of my work on the subject that can only be held by not properly bothering to read what I have actually written. One thing historians ought to be aware of by now – they trumpet the view often enough even if taking it little into account in their writings – is that it is simply not possible to know the past ‘as it really was’. This makes historical debate, inevitably, an exercise in different shades of approximation and error. We need to stop hammering the sources into a pre-ordained interpretive straightjacket, explaining away the bits that don’t fit or euphemistically labelling the data that agree with our view ‘the better evidence’ (and therefore those that don’t as somehow qualitatively worse). Instead, we need models that can cope with the fuzziness and discordance of the contemporary voices (written and material) and have sufficient complexity and elasticity to evolve in accordance with discussion and further data. In line with that, I have attempted as far as possible to limit my polemic here to ideas which are simply not supported by evidence, as a means of stripping away some deadwood to allow new discussions to bear more fruit.
It is also my view that that attitude and those principles should be extended from the analysis of source materials, written or excavated, to the discussion of historical interpretation. The debate over interpretations of processes like the barbarian migrations could have been far more productive over recent decades had it been conducted more as a discussion than as a contest. An unwillingness to listen to, or deal with, arguments in a sufficiently sophisticated way, a refusal to modify one’s opinion (let alone change one’s mind), a belief that one’s own theory must be entirely correct in all cases and an overwhelming desire to ‘win’ the argument have been too prevalent on all sides. I confess to some self-interest here. I have been labelled an ‘anti-migrationist’, an interpretation of my work on the subject that can only be held by not properly bothering to read what I have actually written. One thing historians ought to be aware of by now – they trumpet the view often enough even if taking it little into account in their writings – is that it is simply not possible to know the past ‘as it really was’. This makes historical debate, inevitably, an exercise in different shades of approximation and error. We need to stop hammering the sources into a pre-ordained interpretive straightjacket, explaining away the bits that don’t fit or euphemistically labelling the data that agree with our view ‘the better evidence’ (and therefore those that don’t as somehow qualitatively worse). Instead, we need models that can cope with the fuzziness and discordance of the contemporary voices (written and material) and have sufficient complexity and elasticity to evolve in accordance with discussion and further data. In line with that, I have attempted as far as possible to limit my polemic here to ideas which are simply not supported by evidence, as a means of stripping away some deadwood to allow new discussions to bear more fruit.
Provisional Contents List:
Introduction
Chapter 1: The
evidence
Chapter 2: The
Debates
Chapter 3: The
Barbarians at Home
Chapter 4: The
Frontier: A clash of civilisations
Chapter 5: The Horrible
Huns
Chapter 6: The
Barbarian Invasion of the Roman Empire
Chapter 7: The
End of Civilisation
Chapter 8: Different Questions: Another
vision
[1]
I predict that if, in a future
world, the baton of ‘hateful outsider’ is passed on from Muslims to Sikhs or
Hindus, these right-wingers or their heirs will instead be bleating about the
preservation of Europe’s roots in the Abrahamic religions.