what
is supposed
to have declined and fallen
when
. By the traditional end date of
476 CE, the power of the Roman emperor in the west had long
been negligible; it would have made little difference if the line had
been broken decades earlier or persisted for another century, if not
for the loss of the irony that the last emperor of Rome, Romulus
Augustulus, carried the name of its founder and the diminutive of
its first emperor. Meanwhile, the Roman Empire actually maintained
its power more or less undiminished for centuries afterwards in the
wealthy eastern half of the Mediterranean; only the power of the
Roman church, ignorance of the Greek language, sheer insularity
and general prejudice against the east persuaded anyone otherwise.
Furthermore, this line of argument carries with it the assumption
that ‘Rome’ should be understood simply in terms of its political
organisation at the highest level, so that the end of the lines of
emperors (in the west) must mark the end of everything. If one
considers the economic, social or cultural structures of the Empire,
let alone the life of the countryside, then the chronology of change
appears very different, and in many cases much less dramatic than
the images of catastrophic collapse. Nevertheless, the idea of ‘decline
and fall’, resulting from some combination of external barbarians
and internal weakness, and dominated by images of destruction,
slaughter and the collapse of civilisation, continues to haunt the
Western imagination.
At the heart of the problem is the ambiguous relation of the
Roman Empire to Roman culture; this is rarely defined or clarified
in modern discourse, not least because blurring the distinction
between the power of a polity (deliberate, coercive) and the
nebulous, inoffensive power of culture is a crucial element in the
repertoire of imperialism. Culture is seen as natural, and hence
stable; cultural change therefore requires explanation. Empire is
thought of as unnatural, and hence inherently unstable; the real
question, historians from Gibbon onwards have asserted, is not
why Rome fell but how it succeeded in enduring for so long. The
fate of the Roman political order, which did indeed come to an
end in the west in the fifth century, is projected onto the whole of
Roman culture, so that cultural change is interpreted as cultural
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ThE roman EmpIrE
collapse. All evidence of disruption and change in every area of
life is accumulated to demonstrate the severity of the catastrophe;
evidence of continuity or of a lack of drama – for example, the
fact that the vast hordes of barbarians overwhelming the Empire
numbered at the most a few hundred thousand, facing a population
of 60 million or so – is discounted in the face of the assertion that,
like it or not, the Empire did cease to exist.
In the modern discourse, the conflation of empire and culture
serves to compel assent to the former – opposition to Western
hegemony is presented as opposition to freedom, democracy,
Shakespeare and so forth – but it also creates the impression that
‘our’ culture is under serious threat from the forces that threaten
the empire, and demands acquiescence in whatever measures are
deemed necessary to protect them. The pervasive analogy with
Rome, and the dominance of the theme of ‘decline and fall’ in
Rome’s image, means that we are presented with Hobson’s choice:
this civilisation, warts and all, or barbarism and darkness. There
is no realistic alternative; the historical record makes that clear.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just of their
own free will; not under circumstances chosen by themselves,
but under circumstances directly encountered, given and handed
down. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a
nightmare on the brains of the living. And if they nevertheless
seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in
creating something that has not yet existed, precisely in such
periods of revolutionary crisis they fearfully conjure up the
spirits of the past to their service, borrow from them names,
battle cries and costumes, in order to present the new scene
of world-history in this time-honoured clothing and with this
borrowed language. Thus Luther masked himself as the Apostle
Paul, the Revolution of 1789 to 1814 draped itself alternately as
the Roman republic and the Roman empire, and the Revolution
of 1848 knew nothing better than to parody, now 1789, now
the revolutionary tradition of 1793–5.
20
Karl Marx’s essay,
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
,
remains one of the most important and insightful discussions of
the power and pitfalls of drawing on the past. On the one hand,
historical examples can be a source of inspiration and courage,
‘magnifying the given task in imagination rather than fleeing from
its solution in reality’; analogies with Rome not only sustained the
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EnvoI
135
extension of Western imperial power across the globe, they also
inspired the radical political traditions that opposed such brutality
and oppression, not least through Marx’s own reflections upon
ancient history. On the other hand, history offers the illusion that
we can fully understand human nature and the possibilities open
to human society on the basis of our knowledge of the past, and
that illusion tends to work as a conservative force, undermining any
revolutionary hopes. ‘The historical record shows’ that revolutions
always betray their ideals; ‘the historical record shows’ that human
nature is incapable of setting aside self-interest. ‘The historical
record’ shows that Rome collapsed into barbarism (of course,
historians of early medieval Europe tend to resent the label ‘Dark
Ages’, and insist on the vibrancy and vitality of that society, but the
image of ‘decline and fall’ is too strong in Western culture for that
to have much effect), and so we must work to preserve the existing
order for fear of the alternative. The possibility of a different, his-
torically-unprecedented development arising out of the dissolution
of the present state of things is simply ignored. The power of Rome
continues to compel obedience to the empire.
Modern revolution, Marx argued, ‘cannot draw its poetry from
the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before
it has cast off every superstition about the past.’
21
The task of the
historian is to understand Rome and its continuing influence in
order to break its power over the modern imagination.
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further reading
gEnEral hIsTorIEs of romE
A great many narrative accounts of the rise of Rome have appeared in recent years, as
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