Yes, long time since I had time to post anything here, for which I can only apologise to anyone who’s actually interested. It hasn’t all been the usual mid-term weight of teaching and admin, nor can I entirely blame the kittens, their various ailments and the way they’ve been behaving since they got better, that have made uninterrupted sleep a rare and precious commodity. No, there was also a trip to the First International Conference on Anticipation in Trento last week, plus writing the paper for that beforehand, a fascinating and stimulating event that I shall be blogging on in due course – but you’re going to have to wait a bit until I’ve caught up on the emails.
In the meantime, if you’re feeling bereft of history-related reading, I’d like to point you in the direction of Ned Richardson-Little’s latest blog post (he’s also well worth following on Twitter, @HistoryNed, for pictures and stories from the DDR), on The Long Fall of the Berlin Wall. On 9th November 1989, thanks to a press conference cock-up by the East Berlin party boss and then the decision of outnumbered border guards to let everyone through without checks (see the rather entertaining film Bornholmer Strasse), the wall opened and the DDR collapsed, followed by the rest of the Warsaw Pact. Well, no; as Ned explains, it looks like that in retrospect, but that was hardly obvious at the time. The system was cracking, but few anticipated that it would crumble so quickly, let alone that the transition would be peaceful – it could have turned into another Tiananmen Square instead, and certainly there was no guarantee at the time that it wouldn’t.
It’s an excellent illustration of the human tendency to simplify the past, compress it, rearrange or distort it, tidy up the jagged edges and loose ends – in brief, to turn it into story, and most often a certain sort of story. A lengthy, complicated process involving the interaction of different institutions and individuals in the East German state, dissidents and protesters, and ordinary East Berliners, both before and after 9th November, becomes in retrospect either a story of heroic struggle or a story of the disintegration of a system, in both cases culminating and concluding on 9th November. As Ned notes, this occludes the continuing activities of protesters who helped ensure that this opening was widened, rather than forcibly closed again. We’re offered a single explanation of all that happened, and a process is reduced to a single moment, figured from our perspective as an irrevocable turning point.
As I say, it’s what we do; and it’s not that we professional historians don’t do it at all, we just tend to prefer relatively complex (but still simplified and streamlined) accounts to really simple reductionist ones. Some of us more than others, perhaps; I was contacted the other week by another journalist writing about the ‘Richard III found under car park’ thing, which is clearly a substantial theme in my web presence (or, anyone Googling ‘cynical historian being sceptical of Richard III find’ quickly encounters my name), and that was another opportunity to explain that I actually regard Yorkist kings as pretty well irrelevant to any significant historical processes and changes – but it’s a nice story, and I do appreciate that lots of people do like that sort of thing. Good King, Bad Man, Wall Comes Down and Freedom Triumphs.
Indeed, I caught myself doing it half-unconsciously this week, in a sense; falling into the pat explanation of why students should care about the economic structures of the later Roman Empire by emphasising the possible causal chain from poor harvest to falling tax yields to inadequately resourced state agents to the Roman defeat at Adrianople. Understandable, given that I’m well aware most students are much more interested in battles and hordes of hairy barbarians than in agri deserti and legislation restricting the rights of coloni, but part of me wanted to slap myself and yell at the class “Look, forget the bloody battles! That sort of defeat was becoming increasingly inevitable sooner or later, and was largely irrelevant anyway!” But since lectures are now recorded and such things might be held against me in future, I restrained myself.
Late Antiquity, the ‘decline and fall’ period, offers reminders time and again of this human tendency to find a decent story to tell about complex, world-shaping events. There are so many competing theories on offer, that we often feel driven to pick one and champion it against the others – it’s really down to the Huns, or really about cultural fragmentation, or whatever – rather than trying to think through their complex interaction. But it is also about timescale, and how comfortable we feel in thinking through complex processes over a longer period of time. One of the reasons I was at a conference on Anticipation in the first place (the main reason was of course Thucydides-related) is that the ancient world offers a way of exploring social responses to environmental change, and the limits of human institutions in dealing with large-scale processes (TL;DR: they’re not very good at it). Again, what strikes me is the tendency to turn this sort of longue duree into l’histoire evenementielle wherever possible: climate change is recuperated into the history of the barbarian migrations and thence into the history of Adrianople and the collapse of the frontiers, erosion and harvest failure becomes a story of taxation, debasement and imperial legislation, disease is conceived in terms of short-term devastating plagues rather than the far more devastating changes in the penumbra of ‘normal’ diseases affecting much of the population in the long term. We have, to be fair, moved away from the idea of 476 and the deposition of Romulus Augustulus as the Berlin Wall moment for the Roman Empire – but there is a certain tendency to try to set up Adrianople or a similar event as an alternative Berlin Wall moment, rather than recognising that they can only ever be misleading.
Sphinx 
Apologies in advance for the td:dr
Ah, Roman Late Antiquity, my kind of discussion!
I am always worried whenever anyone tries to construct a narrative of decline that hangs from their favourite coathook. It is always going to be too glib, to neat and too unsatisfying.
I am more inclined, in my less optimistic moments, to see decline and fall as being inherent in existence. However, in the case of the Western portion (in particular) of the Roman Empire (in general) I think that we can look at the empire and see that the seeds of failure were planted long before the tribes ouside of the limes first started forming confederations and looking over the fence at the goodies available inside.
I think that we need to look at the problems inherent in a political and economic system that became successful through expansion and which paid for itself via expropriation and, in effect, looting. Once the empire stopped expanding, it became an essentially defensive and entrenched entity, as opposed to a dynamic one. Once it was no longer to pay for the costs of its military from the profits of war, it was compelled to pay for the military from ints internal resources. Once it drew lines around the empire and said “here, but no further” it implicitly created a system whereby it had to build a series of client entities (we cannot call them states or kingdoms) to act as intermediaries between the empire and the unregulated and unknown people in te outer world. Therefore, the client rulers were able to draw upon that experience to aggrandise their own polities and build up clients of their own, creating larger economic, political and military units of increasing sophistication who all wanted a piece of Roman cake of their own.
At the same time, Rome itself never really resolved the issue of government and continuity across successive rulers. The Principate system was deeply flawed, relying as it did on personal patronage to survive, which it failed to do halfway through the third century, not really that long after the empire stopped expanding and started entrenching.
Instead of sending ambitious senators off with armies to conquer new lands, the empire found itself with lots of bored garrisons who cost a lot of money to keep happy and lots of ambitious generals with time on their hands, and, no doubt, the idea that they could do a lot better than sitting in a provincial capital watching the tribes in the forests just over the river build themselves up into better foes.
So, we end up with a succession of revolts by the troops, generals making a play for the top job and a frittering away of seasoned troops against those former clients who used to be a nice buffer against the wild people.
Of course, once you have a political system that is run by soldiers, for soldiers, you have a situation where it becomes possible for any general with a following to see himself in a nice purple robe, glitzy diadem and expensive red buskins, which is pretty much what killed the Principate.
I suppose that we can argue that the Dominate was successful in its own terms. It professionalised the business of government and was capable of raising huge sums in taxation, but the Dominate was basically an organisation inside the empire whose primary purpose was the maintenance of the Dominate. Once the government became synonymous with the military it effectively cut itself free from any real bond with the wider empire. The provinces existed only to fund the military and provide recruits for the army. Of course, if harvests did fail, or if plague struck, the tax revenue fell, which meant that there was less money to pay for the army, which was often called into play against other Roman armies instead of those troublesome outsiders.
The seeds of failure are implicit in the structures, but it isn’t fair to say that collapse of the system was inevitable. Unfortunately, things being as they were, no one was able to step back and do anything differently. Partly, I think, because the Romans were so inward-looking that they found it almost impossible to see that their problems were inherent in their systems. The challenge wasn’t really whether they could turn back a Marcomanni incursion or defeat Zenobia, the challenge was that they if you wanted to have a political system that worked you would have to start again from scratch, which wasn’t really possible.
In a system so conservative, so entrenched in tradition (no matter how spurious) and so inward-looking, you are unlikely to get new thinking. Even Diocletian’s Tetrarchy fell foul of the same things that cause the Principate to fall; greed, pride, mistrust, arrogance and the lust for power. Of course, the failure of that short-lived idea led to Constantine, and, I think, once he decided to create his New City, the game was up for the west. OK, it took a long time for it to happen but once the centre of power moved east, the west would always struggle.
With increasingly more powerful and sophisticated tribal confederations making inroads in the west, why should the local Roman elites continue to support a distant imperial idea if the new chap could keep the peace? OK, he wasn’t exactly One Of Us, but he was a Christian (of sorts), he could read a bit and he liked the Baths and the fine dining.
What do you think?
I think this must be the first time I’ve had a comment that’s twice as long as the original post… 😉
To start with a general philosophical point: I’d go with Heraclitus, that all is flux and nothing is stationary; history is all about change, all the time. (There’s a long quote from Robert Burton that Anthony Powell uses at the end of ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’ that makes this point rather well). It is us who interpret and ascribe value to different changes. So, yes, decline and fall can always be identified in history, as can birth, development, transformation etc. Traditionally, the Roman Empire has been valued highly by later European cultures, so we tend to see its collapse as a process of degeneration into barbarism.
Partly it depends where we look: if we focus on political and military structures, then, yes, the Roman Empire in the West just sort of fizzles out and is replaced by smaller, more local and arguably in some respects more effective systems. There’s a sense that holding together such an empire over long distances under pre-modern conditions (esp slowness of travel and communication) was always a struggle, perhaps a surprise that it held together as long as it did, especially in the West where the cultural and political structures that underpinned Roman rule had much shallower roots than in the East. I wouldn’t see the empire as wholly dependent on conquest (after all, plenty of its military adventures weren’t at all profitable) – but it did depend on a pretty light-touch approach to rule, collaborating with local elites (who might always decide that it was more trouble than it was worth, especially as the grip of the state started to weaken), and was not in a strong position to increase its tax take when new demands on its resources developed. Iain Banks’ idea of the Out of Context Problem also seems useful – the empire simply didn’t know how to respond to waves of migration and raiding parties from beyond the frontier, and of course had no conception of climate change of its consequences.
But of course from a different perspective, the story of this period is one of triumph (Christianity) – or of nothing much happening beyond the usual (the mass of the rural population)…
Yes, managing large political entities in a world where nothing goes faster than a horse has to be a tricky thing. Over the centuries, the Persians also had perennial problems with provincial governors seeking to carve themselves out a domain.
I wouldn’t want you to think that I am only interested in the political and military structures, it was more a case of what could I write about without it becoming too long? You are, of course correct that we should look at the cultural aspect too, and I am including the rise of Christianity as a cultural phenomenon, and the peasantry surely had little interest in whether they paid their taxes to someone with a name like Gaius Severus or Ermanaric, so long as it stopped their barn geting burned down by raiders too often.
I like the Out of Context Problem approach. You are surely right in thinking that it was beyond the Romans to find an adequate response to the migrations. Possibly, I could blame their essential lack of interest in “barbarians”, in part. They never really showed much interest in the outsiders, except as a kind of mirror to hold up to the failings of the Roman elite, when it suited them. It was essentially a Noble Savage view of the world outside the limes, I suppose, which must have prevented them from thinking there was much of importance to learn about them. OK, they accepted a few leading barbarians into the fold, when it was expedient or inevitable, but did they ever think of them as equals? I doubt it.
I’ll avoid another tl:dr and stop now 😉
I think there’s lots to be said about contrasting approaches to state structure and development – and even ambition. In pre-modern societies, at one end of the spectrum you have China: elaborate, expensive, reasonably effective in controlling society. At the other end (thinking in terms of large states and empires rather than small, cohesive city states) you have Persia – minimal approach, largely leaving constituent parts to their own devices, fairly cheap to run because doesn’t try to do too much. Rome tries to be more like China, but without the resources or the infrastructure (not least, ability to tax the wealthy) to support it.
Actually I think the Romans *did* come up with a reasonable approach to the barbarians – bring them into the empire, make them allies, give them land, get them to do the fighting. Mostly worked, depending on the barbarians in question – but in the West, meant that when other tendencies to fragment kicked in, the main military forces had no great stake in the Empire as a whole. But I’m aware that the Peter Heather ‘terrifying barbarians destroyed the empire’ line is a lot more popular at the moment than this Walter Goffart gradualist view.