In Our Time - The Roman Empire's Collapse in the 5th century

Episode Date: April 5, 2001

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the causes of the fall of the Roman Empire. Edward Gibbon wrote of its decline, "While that great body was invaded by open violence, or undermined by slow decay, a pure and humble religion gently insinuated itself into the minds of men, grew up in silence and obscurity, derived new vigour from opposition, and finally erected the triumphant banner of the cross on the ruins of the Capitol."But how far is the growth of Christianity implicated in the destruction of the great culture of Rome? How critical were the bawdy incursions of the Ostrogoths, the Visigoths and the Vandals to the fall of the Roman Empire? Should we even be talking in terms of blame and decline at all?St Augustine wrote about the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century AD, Edward Gibbon famously tackled it in the eighteenth and it is a question that preoccupies us today.With Charlotte Roueché, historian of late antiquity at Kings College London; David Womersley, Fellow and Tutor at Jesus College, Oxford and editor of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Richard Alston, Lecturer in Classics at Royal Holloway, University of London.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, Edward Gibbon wrote of the decline of the Roman Empire. While that great body was invaded by open violence or undermined by slow decay, a pure and humble religion gently insinuated itself into the minds of men,

grew up in silence and obscurity, derived new vigor from opposition, and finally erected the triumphant banner of the cross on the ruins of the Capitour. But how far's the growth of Christianity implicated in the destruction of the great culture of Rome? How critical were the brawny incursions of the Austrogoths, the Visigoths, and the vandals to the fall of the Roman Empire?

Should we even be talking in terms of blame or decline at all? St. Augustine wrote about the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century AD. Edward Gibbon, famously tackled it in the 18th century, and it's a question that preoccupies my guests today. With me is Charlotte Roushé, historian of late antiquity at King's College London, Richard Olson, Lecturing Classics

at Royal Holloway University of London, and David Wormersley, fellow and tutor at Jesus College Oxford, and the editor of the latest edition of Edward Gibbons, the history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Let's start in 410. It's quite an astonishing year for the West, really. Alaric Saxe, the Roman army withdraws from Britain,

and St. Augustine starts to write the City of God, so an immense amount was going on. Charlotte Roushier, in the city of God, he almost takes on the argument that Gibbon puts out 1,400 years later. He defends Christianity for being responsible for the fall of the empire to a certain extent. Why did he feel impelled to do that in 410? Well, precisely, Gibbon picks up all those years later, a tradition which runs all the way through the crises of late antiquity.

Because the big question, always is, if you lose a battle, have you offended the divine powers? And from the third century onwards, the very question of persecuting the Christians arises from the question of whether Christianity is offensive to other divinities. The duty, the first duty of a Roman emperor is to conciliate the divine powers and ensure the continuing power of Rome with their support. If you lose that support, if you're defeated, the first and most obvious explanation is that something is wrong in your religious practice. And Augustine is engaging head on with that argument when he argues with the Romans in their own terms as to whether or not this particular religious

diversion has undermined Roman power. Can you give us some idea of the strength and nature of the arguments between, as it were, the Christian point of view from Constantine under the beginning of the 4th century and the pagan point of view as to whether this Christianity was an enfeebling, a declining force, as some of them in Rome did think. I think infebling and declining, undermining is a slightly more modern take because we have a very strong image of Christianity is gentle in a way. I think what is more effective. I think what is more offensive to contemporary thought is the exclusiveness, is the argument that this religion excludes others, that you can't, although it's absolutely clear from archaeological evidence that

people in fact did, honour the Christian god and other gods at the same time. David Womersley, Gibbons famous for having us, well, for many things, of course, of being one of the greatest historians and so on, but one of the things he associated, he did associate Christianity with the fall of the Roman Empire. The first volume of history of his history came out in 1776 and caused huge controversy, I think partly because of this Chapter 15, about Christianity. That's right.

What was he saying, and as importantly almost, what did people fear he was saying? Well, the argument that he runs in Chapter 15 is not quite the argument that Charlotte's just put forward. In fact, he picks up a point that Machiavelli has made about Christianity in the empire. And his argument is that Christianity and feeble the empire because it took people out of public life. Christians couldn't take part

in public life fully because they weren't able to make the sacrifices that were part of public life. That's the argument that he wants to carry forward. It causes controversy in the 18th century because it seems to be a covert attack on established religions and it seems to be a subtle argument in favour of secularisation. That's why it caused outrage at the time. Was it all that covert? He did seem to point out that the Christians claimed that they were persecuted more than in fact they were persecuted. They were often persecuted for treachery and crimes rather than for their religion, for instance. So he was attacking in that sense, wasn't he?

One of the things he wants to attack is what he sees as a historical tradition which has ramped up the number of martyrs unsustainably. and there's a very amusing section at the end of chapter 16 when he reduces the number of martyrs what he calls the annual consumption of martyrs to something like 50 throughout the empire. So in that chapter what he's really doing is apart from suggesting that there's been great exaggeration there, he's pursuing a kind of private vendetta

with earlier historians who he thinks have written irresponsibly about the persecution. Richard Olson, Roman life was centred on the urban. What effect did Christianity have on the shape of the city, the shape of the city, the physical shape, as well as the idea of the city, and do you think that is part of the argument? I think so. The great difference, of course, of Christianity is that all the wealth,

or all of the wealth that was being generated by the exploitation of agriculture was not devoted to public ceremonies anymore, but was being moved into building churches and not maintaining the old traditional infrastructure of, call you workatistic, the beneficial elements like putting charitable donations into run games and things like that. So the whole ceremonies of traditional life

were changing in decline. There is two different patterns, though, we have to see in that. In the West, the traditions of games seem to decline much earlier than in the East, and in many cases in the West predate the advent of Christian. But is there a sense in which Christians were putting money into the city? I'm just asking you about this, obviously,

by this idea that the rich should support the poor and in charitable works, didn't that enhance the city in some ways? Well, what they were doing was supporting the very poor. They were putting the widows and orphans. You had a widows and orphans fund for the church. And to a greater extent for the classical period, the money that was being devoted to good causes was for political purposes and therefore it was essentially to be going to the wealthier members of the aristocracy

or people like victors and games who are receiving dolls on that basis. And this would probably have meant that there was quite a large underclass, which are completely invisible, largely invisible within our classical tradition, but who get talked about a lot more within the Christian tradition, especially when you have bishops who are engaged in charitable activities and setting up hospitals and hospices for the poor, and even the first maternity hospitals so that women who have given birth can have a few days of rest,

which is an entirely Christian idea. So there's a whole change in the cultural values that are being expressed in the cities, and that also has its reflections in the architecture of cities. No longer do you need these great amphitheaters. You now need churches, and you need lots of churches, and a whole raft of other kinds of Christianism. institutions which develop in the fourth of the sixth centuries.

But my favourite story of this is the story of the seven sleepers of Ephesus, who go to sleep during one of the great persecutions, wake up several hundred years later, and wander down the hill into Ephesus, and find the city unrecognizable, and are shocked when they ask where the city is, and they're told that it's Ephesus. It's a completely new social environment that they're working in,

and that I think is a very radical change from a continuity, or a believed continuity, in classical architecture and in classical styles from, certainly for 800 years before that. So we're talking about Christianity bringing huge cultural changes which can be seen in the streets and the daily practices of people. Can you be seen in, Hachar at Ruchet, can you be seen, just to conclude this business of the Christians in it,

can it be seen in the way, for instance, knowledge was purveyed, knowledge was sought, we're talking about monotheism instead of many gods, can we just develop what it would be like to see? You know, your sturdy golden age pagan looking with horror of what was happening, what is happening that makes him look with horror? Well, of course, we have the ultimate sturdy golden age pagan, the very last one in a way.

The symbolic figure about whom so many people write is the emperor Julian, the emperor who suddenly, in a string of Christian emperors, the last pagan emperor, who has this brief moment of trying to, as we see it now, turn the clock back. And as people saw it then, turn the clock back in many ways.

interestingly, one of the most contentious things he did in his tiny short reign was to intervene in the educational process. Because education of cultivated people was rooted, as I hope it still is, in the study of classical literature, because where else would one begin? And it was he who said that it isn't appropriate for people who don't believe in the gods and goddesses to teach such material. therefore Christians, professed Christians should not be allowed to teach literature. And that shocked everybody.

It shocked pagan commentators as well as being a rather mean approach because they realised that being educated in classical literature was the only way to status and influence in society. And the interesting thing is that the strong logic of his position was in fact not accepted, although it caused quite a lot of anguish to the Christians, and Christianity from then on managed to fuse amazingly the classical tradition of education with Christian belief. One of the embarrassing things about Christianity is that its basic documents were written in a low rather than a high level of language. And you have,

for example, a wonderful Egyptian poet at the end of the 5th century who translates St. John's gospel or transmutes St. John's gospel into Homeric hexameter. verse to sound as much like Homer as possible, because it's so much less embarrassing to read your sacred texts if it's in gentlemanly speech. And if you consider reactions to modern translations of the Bible, you can see a rather similar idea that the speech of sacred texts should be gentlemanly. Richard, do you think that the word decline is still useful? It's used with tremendous ringing finality by Gibbon. And it was used, a word like that was used at the time, what's your view of it? It's now not

generally used by Byzantine and ancient historians because they think that the term has undesirable connotations. So the term that tends to be used is transformation. Everyone agrees that there are changes going on in the third and the fourth century. But decline becomes

an ideologically difficult term. You also have to work out what you're declining from and how you define decline. And this is one of the real problems. I don't think this is really the problem for historians, such as Gibbon who can talk about the zeitgeist in a very vague way as to what's happening.

When more modern historians try to pin down where decline is, they have great problems of working out where there is decline. Cultural history, for instance, is one of the areas where we might look for declining. We see that cultural values are changing. We see that people are writing in different kinds of ways. But a lot of these people who are writing still very learned. However, one does have to admit that at some point the Roman Empire falls, it is a defined historical fact.

And because of that, something has to change. There's no argument, I think, that the Roman state is not as powerful in the 5th century as it was in the 2nd century. And similarly, in the 7th century in the East, when the Arabs arrive, these Arab invaders managed to take over this very previously powerful state. Something must have happened in between. Very difficult to escape from using the word decline in those kinds of contexts. My model of decline comes from excavating out in Turkey

and a place where I've worked for quite a long time and where for many years the only source of a shower at the end of the day was a tank of water that had been left out in the sun and that had a tap soldered onto it. And thinking about this at about midday, standing in the ruins of the large second century baths, which were maintained quite carefully

until the sixth century, I think there is a level at which decline is quite measurable. I'd have thought hot and cold running, water wouldn't be a bad estimate of decline. And there was hot and coal running water throughout the Roman Empire until when? The excise of the bars tends to get smaller, but people seem to manage to keep this one of the last things that people tend to hang on to maintaining their bars ever less elegantly, but functioningly, very often until the end of the 6th century.

What caused the decline? I mean, we usually think, was it defeat in war? Was it the economy? or was it this Christian influence, was it a combination of all those things? Let's have a crack at that. What do you think, David Wormwood's there? His view is that you can't expect things to go on forever.

Immoderate greatness is the cause of the empire's decline, and that one shouldn't be shocked by it. And in fact, there are good things that come out of it. If I could just go back to the point I made earlier about, given not being an apologist for empire, what he is writing about is how we get from the ancient world to what was then the modern world, him, what he called a Christian Republic of Nations.

And that comes out of the body of the empire. And that was, he thought, a much better way of organising society than the empire, which you thought was an unnatural and irrational form of political organisation. And so, decline for him is something that actually doesn't really need to be explained. It's just a natural process. So decline is, I mean, just to put simply, decline for him is a good thing because it leads to a better thing that follows the decline. The decline of the Roman Empire in his case.

I'm just trying to clarify it. It's not to be mourned. It's what happened before we got to a better place. Absolutely right. We've got to divide this here because otherwise it's going to get complicated. We're talking about the decline of the Western Empire at the moment. Let's stick to the 5th century. The Eastern Empire, because they split, went on until 1453 when the Turks came.

So let's just stick to the 5th century and we're now basically talking about the West. What would you say were the key, a Marxist would say, the economy. What do you say about that? Richard Olsen. Well, various things seem to happen in the third century. It's very difficult to disembed the various causes. Obviously, in the third century, you'd get a wave of barbarian invasions, which do seem to slow people down.

Once a large number of barbarians come and burn down your villa, it probably is an economic disadvantage. And in various areas of the West in the third century, you get invasions in northern Gaul, some sense of disruption in some areas of Britain, and problems in Spain. And these areas never seem really to recover from those shocks. In other areas, the pattern is very uneven.

The third century, people survive the third century, in the fourth century, is an area of great expansion in terms of sites, in terms of very great villas, in Gloucestershire villas, for instance, at their apogee then. And then in the fifth century, we get another wave of barbarian invasions, and a lot of ancient sites disappear at that stage. But already in the late 4th century

we're beginning to see fewer coins appearing on ancient sites. The urban centres appear to be getting smaller, certainly in the northern provinces, and to a certain extent in more southern provinces as well, which suggests there is some kinds of broad economic change. If you get a passage of decline of cities, and there are lots of reasons why cities might be declining in that period, that process can then go into reverse, and that's a long-term process.

It seems very unlikely that the barbarians, who arriving, would want to destroy this extremely rich and powerful culture that they actually want to adopt, they want to exploit. And when we find barbarians arriving in Italy, for instance, in the 5th and 6th centuries, what they do is they use the Roman bureaucracy, the Roman administrative systems, etc., to enrich themselves. I must say I'm a bit unredeemed in that I'm really rather keen on the barbarian invasions as the primary cause.

But barbarians, you don't know why, I think I read someone that you said you didn't know why the movement, why they came from the steps. Well, I'm not an expert on the history of the upper steps, but it seems to, I sit inside the Roman Empire looking out. And it seems to me that I have no reason when this starts to happen in the third century, I have no reason to believe that it's going to go on and on, that just when I've dealt with one load of barbarians, I'm going to find myself having to deal with another. And this is when, if I'm living in an empire, which is also having to deal with a much more important power in Mesopotamia than it's had to deal with for several centuries. There's a great growth of power in the kingdom based in Iraq from the third century onwards. So suddenly the empire is under serious military pressure from both sides and it must be unpredictably impossible that this should go on. the extent that it does, because if you're Roman, you know that you'll go on forever. Because, I mean, obviously you will, because you always have.

Yes, 300 years of peace at the heart of a massive empire, the known world as then was, in a way, is an extraordinary psychological thing, isn't it? It is. And I think it's very, we always, it's very hard to imagine being inside such certainty. So the old-fashioned thing is they declined because they were beaten on the battlefield? I'm increasingly attracted by the, and its economic consequences. I would have thought that it's difficult, isn't it, to think of these barbarian invasions as just some kind of eruption of the completely unknown and other

because there had been interactions between empire and barbarism for many centuries. The empire had been employing barbarians as auxiliaries. How did the barbarians learn to beat the Romans on the battlefield? Because in many centuries, they've been actually fighting for the Romans against other barbarians. What you find is that barbarism isn't a stable category.

It changes. And barbarians, become rather civilised. One of the interesting things about Gibbons' portrait of later barbarian leaders, such as Alaric or Attila even, is the way in which he will use the language which he's previously used of an emperor like Augustus to describe them.

So he will talk about the artful barbarian, in the case of Attila. Or with Alaric, he says that he combined the daring spirit of a barbarian with the consummate art of an imperial general. So what we're getting here is some kind of miscegenation of quality. One of the problems that one has is trying to explain this is why an extraordinarily rich and powerful empire, suddenly, I mean years have been dealing with barbarians on the frontiers, three centuries quite successfully,

suddenly finds it very difficult to deal with these barbarian invaders. And a lot of these barbarian invaders, as far as one can tell, were not coming in in absolutely huge numbers, and were coming in as refugees. They were being coming in over the Ryan and the Danube without any resources, having been pushed out of the territory by other movements on the steps. They had very few resources,

and suddenly these people are able to overwhelm the Roman army. One of the things the Romans do is get very confused about this. Well, why our army is not able to beat these barbarians anymore? In Jerome says, well, the barbarians are Christian as well, so that's maybe why they're winning. Other people like Vigetius writing in the first. fourth century says, well, one of the reasons why we can't beat them is our soldiers just aren't as good as they used to be. They don't train as well. They don't have such good armor,

which of course is, that's another one. Why are the soldiers not as good as they were two centuries earlier? Well, there is a sense, to switch it to North Britain. When Beads talking, that Christianity and clever and brave young men going into the church is taking the eye off the army. The state's getting weakened by the church sucking our good, people. Is that anything? Does that come into the calculations at all? I mean, there's an off-the-shelf sort of argument that's available to explain that, and it's, it traces the fall of an empire to the natural history of a republic. You have a republic, which is full of people who are virtuous in the sense that they fight and they also speak in public. Because they've got all these virtues,

they conquer all the surrounding territories. When they conquer all the surrounding territories, the wealth of those territories comes in. They retire to their villa on the campaigning coast. They don't want to talk in public and fight anymore. They're prepared to pay people to do that. And then gradually, the empire collapses in on itself because there's a loss of civic virtue at the centre. And that's an explanation that is available to Gibbon,

which he plays with, and which I think has quite a lot, at the level of just sort of human psychology to recommend it. Can I just, I know, I know, I know, I have a lot to say. I want to move on to one more thing, because we have been talking about part of the argument, because the Western Empire, as it were, let's assume it declines at least in the 5th century

and maybe starts a totter and fall in the 6th century. But we have the Eastern Empire going on Constantinople until 1453 for almost more than another 1,000 years. Now, Charlotte, can you say why that continued when the West fell? The great gift of Gibbon to our studies was that he didn't say that the Roman ever... Empire fell in 476, just some rather unimportant northwest Europeans disappeared. But Constantinople survives as the new Rome. And because Constantinople had been founded on top of an older

city called Byzantium, we call its empire, the Byzantine Empire, because we're no good at saying Constantinopolitan because it actually is too difficult to say very frequently. And there are a whole series of reasons. This is a kind of classic examination question. Why does the West fall and the East not fall? Constantine, who started from York and to conquer the Roman Empire, become emperor of the Roman Empire,

spotted a very good strategic point when he moved his capital to Constantinople. And I think the strategic importance of the actual city itself is surprisingly important. Again, I'm going back to these military explanations.

But in the very darkest ages... Blutting the hearts of all our minotrys. But it's absolutely clear that there are several points in the history of Constantinople, when its power almost is limited to what is within the walls of the city. And it is unconquerable until, in fact, the disaster of 1204 when the Crusaders conquer it,

and then 1453 when the Turks take it. But it also is in a crucial position for defending your Balkan frontiers and also getting reasonably fast to the eastern frontier. Now, it's still not sufficiently strong to resist the Arab advances of the 7th century. And, of course, the Eastern Empire from 640 onwards is a very much smaller empire

than the whole Greek-speaking half of the Roman Empire. Is it the Greek and, just so people, the Greek and Latin divide, If you draw a line sort of down the Adriatic and cut through the Balkans and cut half through Libya, you tend to have Latin Spote on one side in the Western Empire and Greek on the other side. So that's just a reference that one or two people were making earlier.

Right. What do you think about this survival of the Eastern Empire? I think it's one of the great problems because if you look at the fourth century, late fourth century in the West, where everything seems to be going downhill, you say one model of how the empire is developing. In the East, when you look at the fourth century,

4th century. You see the number of sites are increasing. The towns seem to be flourishing. Monuments are being put up. And this carries on certainly into the 6th century and maybe even into the 7th century in many areas. So you have economic, social prosperity. The frontiers of the empire remain virtually where they were in the eastern half up until the Arab invasions. There's a bit of a problem with the Persians who conquer it all, but then Heraclius beats them and actually defeats the Persian enemy who the Romans have been trying to defeat for six, seven hundred years. And here they've won, they've won this great historical battle 20 years later. They're back on the walls of Constantin Alpo.

So there is a huge structural problem if we're trying to explain the decline as to why the kind of social and economic phenomena that happen in the West are not replicated in the East. And the East is undergoing a period of unprecedented prosperity, you see the development of furtherance of a great educational tradition, which maybe Gibbon wasn't so aware of. People are touring around the Eastern Mediterranean in the 4th century, developing learning.

They're going to places like Alexandria to Beirut to learn Roman law, which may sound a bit unusual nowadays, given the reputation of Beirut. Athens is still a center of philosophy, and people like Julian are touring the empire to, develop the learning. Well, I was thinking, I was just thinking we might devise a hypothesis by which the survival of the East Roman Empire and the success of Byzantium is entirely thanks to its academics.

And that the strength of a culture should be measured by the power influence and arguably pay of its academics. And you see this with the development of Byzantium. You see it with the survival of Byzantium. It is in this entrepore position between many cultures. And what the Byzantines realize is that you have to understand those people in order to manipulate them. What's your reaction, Richard Olson, to this claim that the academics, in fact, caused this to last a thousand years longer than the mere warriors in the West?

I think it's a touch unlikely. I think one has to look for more general socioeconomic causes for the survival of the empire in the East. You may proclaim the Romanus of Carlisle, but I suspect it was a very commoner. a very backward area really. That is too provoking. I was liking it to learn. Thank you very much, Charlotte Roush. David Wompson.

Richard Alson. Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash Radio 4.