Justinian and the Barbarians
James O’Donnell, The Ruin of the Roman Empire. New York: Harper Collins, 2008.
Justinian
is one of the most famous Roman emperors. During his long reign
(527-565) he built the great church of Hagia Sophia and many other
buildings, beautified the city of Constantinople, reconquered Italy and
north Africa from the barbarians who had overrun them, and, so the
usual story goes, restored for a time the glory of the empire.
James
O’Donnell hates Justinian. Really hates him. Thinks he was stupid,
wicked, vain, pompous, and responsible for the final collapse of the
Roman Empire. And he seems to have worried, back in 2007 when he wrote
this book, that George W. Bush was a new Justinian, whose actions might
cause another catastrophic collapse of the civilized order. “Old
errors,” he tells us in his conclusion, “are easy to reenact.”
Justinian, possessed of “too little education and too much
religion” – which American president is that supposed to remind us of?
– launched thoughtless wars and wicked persecutions that undermined the
Roman world and left it vulnerable to, in the west, a slow slide into
medievalism and, in the east, Muslim conquest. O’Donnell’s heroes are
the “barbarian” generals who led the revival of the empire in the
fourth and fifth centuries, men like the Vandal Stilicho, Clovis the
Frank, and especially Theodoric the Ostrogoth. These men, O’Donnell
thinks, had the true Roman spirit and cared much more for the fate of
the empire and its people than Justinian, debating theology and
plotting war in his palace on the Golden Horne.
But this is getting ahead of ourselves, because The Ruin of the Roman Empire
develops its argument gradually and the point of much that O’Donnell
does is not clear until the end. One thing he asserts at the beginning
is disdain for the Romans’ own story of their rise to greatness, all
bound up with manly virtue and Republican government. His Rome is a
multi-ethnic empire, centered more in Antioch and Alexandria than in
the Eternal City. So theories of Roman decline based on the collapse of
those good Roman virtues do not impress him. Actually, come to think of
it, I am not sure what his theory of imperial decline is, although he
does not seem to think the decline had progressed very far by AD 500.
O’Donnell
gives us an entertaining tour of the empire in the fourth and fifth
centuries, imagining the great cities, describing the social structure
and the government, introducing us to famous emperors and saints. My
problems with the book started here, because in O’Donnell’s telling the
empire in this period was in fine shape. I doubt it. When I teach this
period I have my students read Ammianus Marcelinus, whose History
covers the period from 354 to 378. I have never spoken to student who
did not think, after reading Ammianus, that the empire was doomed. The
corruption, violence, and just plain wickedness of the ruling class are
staggering. Of course, Tacitus made the first century seem pretty bad,
too, but everything we know about the empire in the fifth century
points toward trouble: large districts controlled by bandits, other
large districts controlled by tribal kings or mercenary leaders,
economic dislocation, declining trade, increasing religious conflict,
frequent treason trials, falling urban populations, and so on. It is
certainly true that in AD 450 there was still much economic, political
and cultural strength in the empire, but it was not what it had been
250 years before.
The most lovingly crafted section of
O’Donnell’s book is a description of Italy under the rule of Theoderic,
focusing on a nearly imperial visit he paid to Rome in that magical
year of 500. Theoderic is usually called an Ostrogoth, and his realm
the Ostrogothic Kingdom, but O’Donnell does not think there was very
much gothic about him. O’Donnell calls Theodoric’s father Theodemer “a
successful general” and think his people were a Roman army, not a tribe:
So much for the ancient tribal traditions of the Goths, or the noble past of the Theodoric’s Amal family.
In Italy, O’Donnell explains, Theodoric ruled in Roman fashion:
He
relied on men from the old Italian aristocratic families, like
Cassiodorus and Boethius, to staff his administration. He did
expropriate land for his followers, but that had been a tradition in
the empire for centuries. He behaved in most ways like a junior emperor
– a Caesar in the system of Diocletian. He issued coins in the name of
the Emperor Zeno in Constantinople, to whom he repeatedly pledged his
allegiance. He commissioned public works and sponsored chariot races.
Roman culture continued to thrive in this time, expressed in works like
Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. Italy in this time was peaceful,
thriving, and thoroughly Roman.
Things went along fine until
Theodoric died in AD 526. A period of conflict followed, and one of
Theordoric’s nephews eventually emerged as the leader of Italy. Then
the villain of the piece enters: Justinian, the new emperor in
Constantinople. Justinian inherited a flush treasury from his careful
predecessors, and rather than using it to achieve some sort of lasting
settlement with his main enemy, Persia, he used the money to raise
armies and fleets and send them westward. First he conquered the Vandal
kingdom in North Africa, centered on Carthage, which O’Donnell also
thinks was a well-governed and very Roman sort of place. In 535
Justinian’s general Belisarius landed in Italy with a large army. The
nephew did nothing, so he was overthrown by a general named Witigis. By
539 Belisarius had defeated Witigis and declared victory, but the Goths
refused to give up. Another leader emerged, named Totila, and he fought
on until 552. This 17-year war devastated Italy. Rome was besieged
twice, in the course of the fighting its precious aqueducts were
damaged, and by the end of the war its population had shrunk to perhaps
20,000. Many other parts of the peninsula suffered similar devastation.
In
O’Donnell’s telling, this war was mainly responsible for the collapse
of Roman civilization in Italy. Certainly the war was devastating, but
I doubt Justinian could have brought down civilization all by himself,
or even with the help of 100,000 soldiers. There is just too much fire
spewed at Justinian himself here, and too little analysis of broader
conditions. To O’Donnell, the war in Italy was just the bloodiest of
Justinian’s many crimes. Perhaps even worse, in the long run, was
Justinian’s obsession with theological orthodoxy. The classical world
had been, in general, tolerant, but Justinian (in O’Donnell’s view)
pioneered the medieval style of religious intolerance and repression.
(The occasional slaughters of Christians are dismissed as an
aberration.) He even has harsh words about the great Hagia Sophia,
saying, “the outsize scale of Justinian’s buildings shouts aloud the
ego and insecurity of their creator.” (286) If only the average
politician left such an amazing monument to his ego!
The Roman
empire endured for centuries of bad rule, civil war, invasion, and so
on. What explains its resilience? I would say that the empire endured
because it had become the political expression of the social power of
the Mediterranean elite. The Roman world was dominated by a wealthy
upper class that comprised much less than one percent of the
population, based in the cities and towns but owning vast swathes of
the countryside. These people shared a common culture across the
empire. While the peasantry in each region used their own languages,
told their own stories, and honored their own gods (or, later, saints),
the elite spoke Latin or Greek, studied classical rhetoric and
literature, and tried to keep up with fashions in the great cities. The
Roman world recovered from the disasters of the third century because
this class of people remained in control of their districts, and when a
strong emperor eventually emerged they gave him their support, and
order was restored.
I know little about the eastern half of the
empire, but I know a fair amount about the west, especially Britain,
Gaul, and Italy. It seems to me that reason the western empire never
recovered from the crises of the sixth century is that the old elite
disappeared. In the fifth century, to judge from the letters of
Sidonius Apollinaris, they were still numerous and optimistic about the
future. Boethius was one of the last impressive specimens of this type,
and the Consolation of Philosophy one of its last worthwhile
productions. By the 590s, when Gregory of Tours was writing his
great history of Gaul under Frankish rule, this class of people had
disappeared. 
Why
did that happen? In China, the Mandarin class survived the fall of the
Han Empire and went on to dominate several more empires over the next
1700 years. But in western Europe a new elite arose that was very
different in its composition, values, and interests than the
aristocracy of the Roman period. These people – Frankish barons,
Lombard dukes, Norman knights, Cluniac monks, and so on – identified
with their families and their local districts, not any
continent-spanning state or civilization, and they kept Europe divided
throughout the Middle Ages. Many of them could not read, and those that
could read mainly the Bible.
I think part of the explanation for
the disappearance of the old elite was that they were replaced by
invaders. By this I do not mean just biological replacement, although
that happened in part, but cultural replacement. Gregory of Tours shows
very clearly that the Frankish nobles had different interests and
concerns (e.g., blood feud) than the Gallo-Roman aristocrats they
displaced. Paul the Deacon shows us the same for the Lombard conquerors
of Italy, who divided the peninsula into two dozen squabbling dukedoms
and fought even more savagely with the members of their own families.
In the cultural mixing that took place in the “barbarian” kingdoms,
much that the invaders brought with them disappeared, such as their
languages and their Arian Christianity. But much of the old Roman way
was also discarded, such as the tradition of service to the empire and
the interest in classical education. Since these were two of the
fundamental pillars of the Roman elite, it is hard to see how the
western nobility of the seventh century could really be called Roman.
In their style, in the way they dressed, in their amusements, in the
way they spoke to each other, they were something quite different.
O’Donnell, who thinks that the Franks and Goths were just Roman armies,
and anyway not numerous to cause far-reaching social changes, cannot
account for this transformation.
I think the barbarians had much
to do with these changes. I think the Goths, Vandals, and especially
the Franks saw themselves as something very different than Roman
soldiers with funny names. Think for a moment about the long war that
resulted from Justinian’s invasion of Italy. Why did Witigis, Totila
and their men fight on so long, against the armed might of the Roman
emperor? Why didn’t they just join the conquerors, as the men of the
warlord Odoacer did after Theodoric killed their boss? I think they
fought on because they had a strong sense of themselves as a people who
were not Romans. They were Goths, and they did not accept that the
Emperor of Rome had any right to rule them. They considered submission
to Rome a surrender of something dear to them, the independence of
their people. So they fought on for decades.
Theodoric, at
least, had been raised in Constantinople, and O’Donnell is probably
right that he was personally better educated in Roman than in Gothic
ways. Once he was back with his people, and especially after he was
securely in Italy, he did emphasize his Gothic roots by measures like
sponsoring the copying of Gothic books and commissioning those
histories of the Goths that O’Donnell thinks were made up. Still, there
was much of the Roman about him. Where I think O’Donnell goes utterly
wrong is by putting Clovis in the same category. Clovis was a barbarian
through and through, and a glance at any page of Gregory of Tours shows
us that the Franks were not just a Roman army.
The story of
the Franks is mysterious. They did not ride out of some distant forest
but arose from the culture of the Roman frontier zone, and when we
first hear of them they were already fighting in Roman service. Yet
they somehow acquired a royal family surrounded by magical taboos, and
they buried at least one of their kings in a Sarmatian-style tomb
ringed with horse sacrifices. The name they gave to themselves, the
Free People, surely draws a contrast to those who lived under the yoke
of Rome. They were familiar with Rome, knew some of its ways, and
sometimes fought in its armies, but their knowledge of Rome only made
them more determined to assert their own independence. They had a
strong tribal identity that survived the Roman empire by several
centuries, their own songs, their own heroes, and a language that
endured into modern times. To call them a “contract army” is simply
wrong.
As the alternative to his own way of seeing the barbarians, O’Donnell offers this straw man:
To
O’Donnell, the Goths and Franks were “fully assimilated Romans”, while,
he says, other historians see them as “insensate brutes”. (A cynic
might ask whether there was really any difference between a Roman and
an insensate brute, given the Romans’ record of savagery, but that is a
question for another time.) I wish to argue that the Goths and Franks
were neither Romans nor brutes, but men of a different sort. They had
their own ideas about what was good and bad in life, about what
mattered, about who should do what to whom. They were passionately
proud about their families and quick to draw their swords in defense of
their own kin. Toward abstractions and faraway emperors they felt very
little. Their values were not necessarily worse than those of the Roman
elite, but they were much less conducive to the maintenance of a large,
centralized empire. Nor were the invaders much interested in cities,
civil engineering, tax policy, or long-distance trade. They were
warriors, first and foremost, and they spent a great deal of time and
energy fighting each other or whatever groups of Romans they could find
to oppose them. In an era of plague and worsening weather, the lack of
order led to a downward economic and demographic spiral, which seems to
have hastened the cultural changes that turned the Roman world into the
Middle Ages.
I
must pause here to ponder a question about Justinian. Now it may well
be that Justinian’s invasion of Italy was bad policy and led to a bad
outcome. But what else was a Roman emperor supposed to do? To be a
Roman leader was to command armies in wars. By Justinian’s time it had
gone out of fashion to conquer new areas, but restoring imperial
control over areas within the empire’s traditional borders was still
very much encouraged. For Justinian to accept Vandal rule over Africa
and Gothic rule over Italy and Spain would have been un-Roman. In
trying to reconquer them he was acting as the most famous of his
predecessors had, and it is hard to fault any leader for doing that.
Some of O’Donnell’s other charges against Justinian also seem weak to
me. O’Donnell wants to argue that Justinian first made the persecution
of heretics a major plank of imperial policy, which seems a little odd
for a man whose last book was a biography of that great persecutor
Augustine. He spends dozens of pages complaining that Justinian did not
somehow settle relations with Persia, preventing the future conflicts
that fatally weakened the empire. Yet he does not say how Justinian
could have solved a problem that had troubled Rome for 600 years. I
agree with O’Donnell that Justinian was not a great man or a great
emperor, but Rome had had many worse emperors over the centuries, and
to blame the empire’s implosion on him is foolish.
After three
hundred pages about Justinian and his sins, O’Donnell pulls back and
takes a broader view of events in the lands between the Mediterranean
and Persia. He gives a brief summary of Jewish history from the
Babylonian Captivity to the destruction of Herod’s temple, and an even
briefer account of the rise of Islam. The main thing that comes through
here is O’Donnell’s suspicion of religion; “Abraham,” he writes, “has a
lot to answer for.” The problem with religion is that it leads to
persecution and religious conflict, something that seems very much on
O’Donnell’s mind.
The strangest section of The Ruin of the Roman Empire
comes next, in which O’Donnell ponders the shape of empires and asserts
that Rome was really the wrong configuration all along. The right sort
of empire, in his view, is one like the Ottoman Empire or Alexander’s,
that is, one that controls the entire Near East from Persia to the
Aegean. O’Donnell does not really say why this would be better, beyond
some unconvincing stuff about natural connections and different modes
of transportation. The reason seems clear enough, though: O’Donnell
longs for an empire that would encompass all the dangerous religious
fanatics whose boiling anger threatens the modern world. If the
Israelis and Palestinians were both under the thumb of some great ruler
like Mehmet the Conqueror – a favorite of O’Donnell’s, it seems – we
would not have to worry about boundaries between them or terrorist
attacks by one on the other. Under these wise emperors, tolerance was
the order of the day, and people of different religions and ethnicities
lived harmoniously together in great cities like Alexandria, Baghdad,
Damascus, and Istanbul. But no, we moderns have “failed to build a
society that could bring together Europe, Africa, and reaches of Asia
in neighborly respect.” O’Donnell actually seems a little embarrassed
by his imperial fantasies – “If we must think empire a good thing,” he
starts one sentence – but he still has them. Not even his own account
of a Roman world divided between an elite that could not be routinely
beaten and a mass of people who could dampens his longing for a world
like Theodoric’s Italy.
Contemplating the sad aftermath of
Justinian’s wars, and the confusing aftermath of American and Israeli
“victories,” O’Donnell feels a gnawing anxiety about the security of
civilization. Is our future safe in the hands of men like George W.
Bush, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Benjamin Netanyahu?
But
triumph over what? And if the Roman empire was “civilization”, would we
want it to triumph? In fifth-century Gaul, whole districts had driven
out their aristocratic rulers and accepted leadership by bandit chiefs,
and when the Franks came many towns happily hung their imperial tax
collectors from the walls and opened their gates to the barbarians.
Yes, Justinian’s wars were disasters, and the fall of Rome led to great
turmoil and the loss of a whole culture. But disaster at that scale is
all too common in human history, and all cultures eventually fall.
People adapt and go on. We have been doing so for 150,000 years, and we
will keep doing it, no matter what mayhem the fanatics inflict on each
other.
June 17, 2011
Commonplace Book
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Wretched men cringe before tyrants who have no power, the victims of their trivial hopes and fears. They do not realise that anger is hopeless, fear is pointless and desire all a delusion. He whose heart is fickle is not his own master, has thrown away his shield, deserted his post, and he forges the links of the chain that holds him.
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--Boethius
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