The Rest Is History - 156. When did the Roman Empire fall?

Episode Date: February 28, 2022

Tom and Dominic explore what Edward Gibbon called “the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene in the history of mankind”: the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Join The Rest Is History Club for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Jack Davenport *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. On the evening of the 27th of June, 1787, the historian Edward Gibbon wrote the final sentences of his great book, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It was, he wrote, among the ruins of the capital that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised nearly 20 years of my life. And since then, he said, his research had taken in many of the events most interesting in human annals, from the artful policy of the Caesars to the foundations of Constantinople, from the character and religion of Muhammad to the ruin of the Greek Empire in the Middle Age. The fall of

Rome, said Gibbon, was the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene in the history of mankind. But Tom Holland, it took Gibbon 20 years to write that book. It's a massive, massive book. And what he doesn't actually quite tell you is when the Roman Empire fell, because the story of the decline and fall for Gibbon takes centuries and it actually goes on for centuries after the date that is most commonly given as the fall of the Roman Empire so if I look it up on Wikipedia Tom or in Google it will give me the date 476 and I think this whole podcast is about when Rome fell. And we wouldn't be doing this podcast if 476 was the easy answer, would we? No, absolutely not. So I think that this is

a really interesting angle on the whole process of, well, as Gibbon said, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. And is there a single date where you can say the Roman Empire fell? As you said, the kind of the traditional date, I mean, actually, you know, there's the 23rd of August 476, which is when the very last Roman Emperor is deposed. And he has the ironic name of Romulus Augustulusus and it's ironic because Romulus was the first king of Rome Augustus so Augustus means little Augustus was the first Roman emperor so it seems a kind of perfect drawing of the line under the great structure but of course as Gibbon suggested in that passage that you read there is the salient fact that of course what we're

talking about is the fall of the Roman empire in the West, and there is an eastern half ruled from Constantinople. And that, of course, continues until Constantinople falls to the Turks in 1453. And that has been the other traditional date on which the Roman Empire falls. Now, I would argue that both those dates are inadequate, although both of them are very, very significant punctuation points. So I thought that this would be a kind of interesting way to explore the broader theme of decline and fall. It's a brilliant way of doing it, actually. It's a much more interesting way in some ways than why did it decline and fall fall but maybe we should start with the empire itself i mean obviously this is a whole different podcast but when did the roman empire start imperium which we translate as as empire means kind of

rule authority and it's something that is invested to begin with with magistrates, with political figures. And it's only once that comes to be associated with physical territory that you start to get the idea of an imperium being something physical, so being an empire. And I suppose, you know, if you're saying on that level, Rome, according to legend, is founded as an aggressively military state so romulus the first king um he he launches an attack on a neighboring king kills him with his own hand brings his armor back dedicates it to um the to jupiter on the on the capitol um below which gibbon many many centuries later would meditate on the fall of the empire. But he dedicates the armor. He celebrates a great triumph.

And from that point on, Rome is a military power. And it's a military power of a kind that the Mediterranean had never seen before. And the measure of that is that Rome ends up achieving something that no power in history has ever done, which is to bring the entire seaboard of the Mediterranean under its unitary control. So that happens under, I mean, at that point where you've got the whole of the Mediterranean, that basically happens under Augustus. And the first century BC, under Octavian,

Julius Caesar's adopted heir, who takes the title Augustus or was given him by the Senate. And he's commonly remembered as the first emperor. I mean, his name was Imperator. He changed his name, didn't he? Yes. I mean, all these names. So Augustus means halfway to heaven, basically. So you're halfway to heaven, victorious general, son of a god. These are all proper names. They're not titles. So he's in many ways a sensationally immodest man. And what you say, what you could say.

So if you're looking for dates for the fall of Rome, the end of Rome, what you could say is that Rome ends when the Roman people become slaves. So when the res publica, the affairs of the public matters of the state are subordinated to the rule of one man rather than to the Senate and the people of Rome. And so that is a view that accompanies the civil wars that leads to the rise to power of Augustus. So the emblematic figure who symbolizes that is a man called Cato.

Yeah. Cato the Younger. There's an elder one who's also famous. And when we did our episode on the crossing of the Rubicon and the kind of the backstory of that, the collapse of the Republic, Cato was, we left Cato out because he was in a way a too bigger figure to introduce. But he's a figure who, for his contemporaries, symbolized everything that made the Republic Roman. So he was a kind of steely, flinty embodiment of the determination of the Romans never to accept rule by a single man and the sense that to be Roman was to reject slavery.

And Caesar crosses the Rubicon. He wins a sequence of great victories. One of these is fought at a battle in North Africa at a place called Thapsus in 46 BC. And Cato is in a town called Utica. He's brought the news of this great defeat that Caesar's army is marching towards Utica. And he kills himself. And this provides a model of behavior that aristocrats who look back to the great days of the Republic, when aristocrats like them had not been subordinated to Caesars, would every so often kind of take up

as a model. So under the oppression of particularly tyrannical Caesars, they would commit suicide and consciously evoke the model of Cato. And the reason for that is it was kind of summed up by Cicero, the great orator who himself ends up being put to death by the alliance between Mark Antony and the future Augustus. And he wrote that every other people, every other nation, every other city, they can endure slavery. And the evidence of that is that they have submitted to Roman rule, but Rome cannot. And so therefore, if Rome submits to slavery, it is no longer Rome. Well, that's obviously, yeah. I mean the fact that rome does then persist with under the emperor's centuries suggests that i mean if cicero pitched up in the fourth century or third century and said this is not rome i mean people just laughed at him yeah but you can see the rhetorical force of it yeah because the moral force of it yeah because that's him rome is an

idea but obviously for the for the rome is an idea that's a republican idea, but obviously for the duration of what we commonly think of as the empire, so the period from Augustus onwards, Rome doesn't mean freedom from slavery so much as it means order, structure, continuity, law,

taxation, security, these kinds of things that are commonly attributed by empires to themselves. And there is a kind of, I mean, that's, I mean, there is obviously a continuity of a time period where power is exercised over the Mediterranean, the surrounding territories, largely from central Italy. And obviously then it moves away. But we we can talk about so the empire in the fourth century let's say I mean it looks different in lots of ways but it's still the same civilization isn't it as yes as the the empire in the first century BC created by Augustus so a century before

in 248 Rome had celebrated its millennium and this is in the middle of the third century, which is a period of convulsive civil war, barbarian invasions, general collapse. And yet there is in this celebration of the millennium, a sense that already that Rome is becoming the eternal city. And so the idea that Rome cannot fall is really starting to bed down and actually I mean this is this is quite a radical kind of change because actually for for most of their history the Romans had been shadowed by a sense that Rome might fall I mean there's that you know it there's absolutely a sense in the Mediterranean that is conquered by Rome that empires rise and empires fall because they've seen what happened to Egypt, what happened to Alexander the Great's empire,

or the Seleucids, or all those kinds of empires, right? Well, the classic example is when the first great kind of imperial rival that Rome fights and then brings to destruction is Carthage. So there are three terrible wars, and the third war against Carthage culminates when the Romans lay siege to Carthage. They capture it and they destroy it utterly. You know, they wipe out not just the physical fabric of the city, but they burn its libraries.

So that in a sense, their aim is to render the very memory of Carthage absolutely gone. But Scipio Aemilianus, who's the general who has captured Carthage, he's watching it and he starts to weep. And he quotes lines from Homer describing the ruin of Troy that will come. And he turns to a companion of his who's a Greek Polybius historian who himself has been brought as a kind of hostage from Greece by the Romans. And he says, you know, I dread that the fate that we are now visiting on Carthage will be visited on Rome as well. And he is, I mean, he's not unusual in saying that. Lots of Romans worry about that. And it's absolutely part of the kind of cultural swirl of the second and first centuries BC. But also, isn't that the kind of thing that you say when your hegemony is more fragile?

So when you're competing with people, when you know that you might lose. I mean, do people say that under Hadrian, under Trajan, centuries later when Rome appears? No, I think you're absolutely right that it is bred of the sense of instability. So the same year that Carthage is burned, the Romans also destroy Corinth, which is one of the great cities of Greece. And that generates an amazing sense of instability across the Mediterranean that these two famous cities can be wiped out. And you have, you know, so the Greeks absolutely have a sense that empires rise and fall. So Herodotus, the very first historian in the opening of his book, he says that, you know, powers that were great are now

small and vice versa. And this is one of the reasons that he wants to write his history. So he feels that he's recording the rise and fall of empires. And of course, you've got the Jews as well with that. You know, we've talked about the book of Daniel in, I think, in the Babylon episode, didn't we? Where he sees four beasts coming out of the ocean. And he's told that these beasts are empires that will succeed one after the other.

So, and these Greek and Jewish traditions kind of merge and blur to create prophecies that are attributed to old women called Sybils. And these in the first and second centuries B.C. are predicting that Rome will fall. And of course, the Romans themselves are aware of this. You know, they don't want to think about it. But when the civil wars happen, when Caesar crosses the Rubicon, when you have the civil wars between Antony Cleopatra and the future Augustus. People in Rome look at these prophecies and worry about it. And they have kind of terrible fantasies of Rome being trampled down by enemy horsemen, of the capital being burned.

So Horace, the great great poet writes about this but then the achievement of augustus really is to reassure the cultural elites in rome and indeed i think more beyond the cultural elites of the mass of the people that civil war is something that is is no longer going to happen therefore that rome is stable and therefore people can start looking to the future so horace ends up writing. He says, you know, he hopes that his poetry will be eternal. And he compares the eternity he wants for his poetry with the spectacle of the pontiff climbing up the Capitol to offer sacrifice to Jupiter. And he envisages that this will happen forever and ever and ever. And this, although you do have a renewed bound of civil war in AD 69, and although you do then have civil wars starting to corrode the fabric of the empire in the third century, when Romans celebrate their millennium, they pretty much take for granted that Rome is eternal, that it does embody a kind of eternal ideal of how the world should be organized, that the gods will uphold, and there's no reason for it ever to fade.

So let's take this story and let's go through the narrative a little bit. So Augustus sets up the empire at the sort of turn of the millennium, basically. I mean, that's the classic, I know it's obviously much more complicated, but that's the sort of classic textbook view. And then you have his successors, Julio-Claudians, and then you have a that's the sort of classic textbook view. And then you have his successors, the Julio-Claudians, and then you have a succession of kind of dynasties. And then you have this thing, I mean, so Zachary Watts,

one of our listeners has asked us about the crisis of the third century. Is that a break, Tom? Because you start moving towards military emperors who are no longer from the old kind of, the ruling families, the patrician kind of families that dominated roman politics you get these officers who come and go kind of sometimes within a year right and and the at that point does the the system start to feel a bit

different from what had been before or Or is there still an underlying continuity? Yeah, I think that the empire is transformed pretty radically in the third century, and has to be because otherwise it would disintegrate. And I think that the salient fact to remember when looking at both the making of the empire and its disintegration is just how vast the distances are, because this is a pre-industrial society. And the thing is that across the empire, there are obvious fracture points. So the Channel would be one, the Alps would be another, the Pyrenees would be another, the mountainous terrain of the Balkans separating Italy from the East would be another. And of course, the Mediterranean.

And the Mediterranean serves to join the empire. You know, it's Mare Nostrum, it's our sea, the Romans call it. But it also divides. You know, it is, I think, telling that Rome is the only unitary power, the only power to have made the Mediterranean kind of, you know, its own territory, because it suggests that it is hard to join lands gathered around the Mediterranean kind of, you know, its own territory, because it suggests that it is hard

to join lands gathered around the Mediterranean. And essentially, whenever you look at the civil wars that periodically break out in the empire, what you see are the same fracture points. So most obviously between the Greek speaking and the Latin speaking halves of the empire. But those are not just cultural. They're not just linguistic. They also correspond to the Adriatic is a really long line of sea that then joins with the rest of the Mediterranean. So it's a very, very obvious physical barrier. But then also you have, as I say, the Alps. So there are endless Gallic empires. Britain is always kind of drifting off.

And basically, that is what the third century with its great crisis kind of exposes, is that it's quite easy for bits of the empire to drift off. And the only way that a central power can keep these together is by raising more taxes and spending them on the military. And to do that, essentially, you have to have a military person. And by this point, the central kind of belt of the Roman Empire has been demilitarized. And so increasingly, it's impossible to rule the Roman Empire from Rome, you have to do it from the frontiers. And so you get all these kind of burly, balkan, peasant figures who rise to become emperors. And of course you get Constantinople.

Constantinople gets founded because it is at a convenient distance between the two key fronts for Rome, which is the Danube-Rhin frontier, where there are Germanic tribes constantly kind of pressing against it. And the Eastern Front, where a very, very aggressive and powerful Persian empire has emerged, and again, is constantly kind of pressing against it. And Rome is wholly unsuited to provide a seat of empire from which to tend to both these two fronts. So that raises one of our first possible dates, which is 330.

So that's the foundation of Constantinople as a capital, as a rival capital. But there's no sense to people, you think at the time time that that marks a sort of definitive, you know, what we would call a full stop. It's a semicolon rather than a full stop, right? It's not the end of something. It's merely an evolution. Rome remains the kind of the emotional, the symbolic capital. I think that there is a certain degree of trauma at the kind of the bleeding of some of that kind of sacral, dare I say, emotional, cultural capital into Constantinople. But

it's quite a gradual process. And so people within Rome are able to adjust to it, I think, fairly easily. And they don't feel, I think, that the empire is no longer Roman, because Constantinople is also, you know, it's the new Rome, it's the second Rome, and it's modelled on Rome. There is a, you know, a senate, the fabric of the city is modelled on the fabric of Rome itself. It said that the Palladium, which had been supposedly taken by Aeneas during the sack of Troy, and which had been the totem for Troy, had then gone to Rome and then had been taken by Constantine and taken to Constantinople. So there is perhaps that slight sense that there's been a migration. But I don't think in any way it leads anyone in the in the empire to think that the roman empire is no longer roman i mean it isn't and of course as you know the uh the the

empire that we today generally call byzantine they called themselves romans they were the romeo yeah well we'll come on to that in a second tom because i wanted to ask you about something else that is definitely associated with constantinople because in the in the public imagination i would say when people think about the empire that was based at constantinople the emperors at constantinople the images that we see in our minds are often they look very like icons i mean they're christian images and obviously is it 380 the edict of thessalonica um where theodosius the great makes christianity the state religion of Thessalonica, where Theodosius the Great makes Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire. Now that to me as an outsider, as a historian of the very modern period,

that to me looks like a definite punctuation point, a cultural revolution. I mean, is that too strong? It is a cultural revolution. You know, I think that Christianity is properly transformative. However, again, I don't think that that is how it seems to most Romans. For the same reason that, you know, a frog in a slowly heating saucepan doesn't realize that he's being cooked. Because Christianity gets legalized by Constantine because he has his vision of the cross in the sky. Jesus tells him, yes, conquer in this sign, the sign of the cross. And because we know what will happen and because we can recognize Christianity as something radically different to what had gone before, we attempted to see that as a kind of great fracture point, as with Theodosius as well. But basically, what Constantine is doing is what emperors have been doing actually for quite a long time, which is to audition a single, all-powerful god who can kind of serve as a mirror image for the emperor's rule on earth so you are an autocrat on earth ideally you want a single god who can provide a mirror image to you

and also because by you know by the third by the fourth century the idea is basically everyone is roman within the empire the old kind of of divisions between Romans and conquered peoples has faded. Every male, free male within the limits of the empire has become a citizen. And so therefore you, again, that's why you're kind of looking around for a single God who can provide a focus of loyalty for people in Egypt and Italy and Gaul and whatever. To sort of transcend the local gods. So Constantine, before he becomes a christian has been auditioning um hercules apollo sol invictus the the unconquered son so in that sense jesus is just the guy who passes the audition i mean he's not it doesn't seem that

radically different yeah of course over the course of of the the fourth century it comes you know people do start to wake up to the fact that actually something quite different is happening so you do get um towards the end of the fourth century you you have uh senators in rome who get terribly upset when um you know for instance statues within the senate house emblems within the senate house that they see as having kind of represented um you know, the symbols of Roman victory and so on. I mean, it's a bit like conservatives worrying about statues of Churchill being toppled or something like that. It has that kind of emotional impact, people that get upset about it. But again, I think even then, they're

not thinking that Rome itself has fallen, that rome itself has changed okay but i agree christianity is is is transformative let's deal with one more event in the fourth century before we take a break um the theodosius who's the emperor who makes christianity the state religion he dies in 395 i think it is um you're the expert not me he and he i think i'm right in saying, is the last emperor who rules the whole thing. Because on his death, am I right in thinking he divides it between Arcadius and Honorius, his two sons, eastern half, western half? Now, that's been done before. Diocletian has experimented with having four emperors working together, a sort of committee. But this is the point, after this point, after 395, there is never one man running the empire

ever again. Isn't that a big punctuation point, Tom? Yes, absolutely. It is. Although, as you say, it's not radically innovative. Because actually, I mean you go you go back to the first century bc and you think about those civil wars what's striking is how you get exactly the same split then so when caesar crosses the rubicon caesar takes possession of the western half including italy and pompey and the senate go to the eastern half and then of course octavia absolutely and that is formally done so there's there's you know there's a tramumvirate, but one of them, Lepidus, gets kind of shunted to one side. And essentially, you know, it is formally decre going against the grain of roman history for that to happen and you're right that that but from that point on the sense of there being a western half and an eastern half absolutely beds down and for those people who don't know who aren't experts in this uh the eastern half is the richer kind of more dynamic

cosmopolitan it's basically the more interesting half even though we think of it the other way around isn't that right tom i mean yes so so absolutely the the uh the eastern half is compared to the western half fabulously rich that's not to say the western half doesn't have very rich areas as well it does but but the east is is more kind of cultured more sophisticated and and definitely has more gold. Okay, very good. We will take a break to inspect our own hordes of gold, and we will return to talk about more dates when the Roman Empire might have fallen or not.

See you in a minute. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to

live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Tom, I bring tremendous news. Our friends at UnHerd have been back in touch. The free-thinking internet magazine. The crucial question, Tom, do you know how to spell it? U-N-H-E-R-D. I'm thrilled to have them back as sponsors because I think they've been going from strength to strength. Pushing back against herd mentality.

Pushing back against herd mentality, but also recruiting really excellent columnists, among them yourself. Yes, I write for Unheard about every two weeks. I've written for them about Tory leadership contenders. I've written for them about Vladimir Putin, very much not a friend of the show, I have to say. I've written for them about J.R.R. Tolkien, which greatly annoyed you at the time because they didn't mention religion. They had Hadley Freeman recently. Brilliant article, actually.

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About the parallels between the fall of Rome, subject of today's podcast, and contemporary America, didn't you? What did you say? I said that, so it was about, was America going to fall as Rome had fallen? And I argued that because the founding fathers modelled the American Republic on the Roman Republic, they were shadowed by the threat both of autocracy and then a final

collapse. And obviously, there was a lot of, you know, in the wake of the storming of the Capitol, there was a lot of anxiety about that. But I argued that the parallels were in a way so tendentious that americans need worry on that account but just because it happened to rome it's not necessarily going to happen to america so uh cheer up was my message yeah i think that's a reasonable i mean america is not an empire in any way thing like the same way i mean it's just an utterly different society isn't it so you i mean i think i think the only the only um the real way in which it kind of affects the discourse in america is that the very existence of the parallel leads people to think that um you know it's inevitably that it might actually happen and so in that sense it you know

people continue to talk about it anyway do have a read of it uh see what you think um and and do check the rest of the magazine because i say say, it's full of great stuff. Now I should say, normally it is £1 a week, but as always with UnHerd, there is a special offer for Rest Is History listeners. So you get your first 10 weeks free, £10 off, basically. Amazing value.

Go to unherd.com slash rest. It's a really interesting publication that tackles these kinds of thorny stories. So there you go. From the horse's mouth. Goodbye. Welcome back to The Rest is History. So we are cantering through possible dates for the fall of the Roman Empire. Now, Tom, we got up to the end of the fourth century. So Rome has become Christian, or at least Christianity has become the state religion.

It is already, the empire is, I mean, this is a colossal subject and one that sort of bitterly divides academics to this day. So we don't need to get massively into it. But Rome is already having to face the challenge of mass migration from the east. In the year 410, Rome itself, the city, is sacked, isn't it? This colossal moment.

Can you tell us a bit about who does that and why? And why that's not the fall of Rome? Yeah, so the last time that Rome has been captured by barbarian enemies was with the Gauls back in the early 4th century BC. So a long, long time before. For a long time, Rome did not, you know, its walls have been left to crumble. Then in the 3rd century, it's a measure of how turbulent the times are that vast walls are built. And these are the walls that you can still see built by the Emperor Aurelian. But no one thinks that Rome, you know, there's a serious chance that Rome will be sacked.

But then in 378, there is an absolutely disastrous battle. The worst defeat that the Romans have suffered since the time of Hannibal, who had the great Carthaginian general. And essentially, this is a kind of immigration crisis, if you like. People called the Goths are trying to cross the Danube because in their rear, there are all kinds of kind of the distant hoofbeats of the Huns are starting to be heard. They want to cross over. The Romans agree, but it all kind of goes wrong. They set up camps. The camps aren't very good. And essentially the Goths who've crossed over, they attack the Romans. kind of goes wrong they set up camps the camps aren't very good then they um and essentially the goths who've crossed over uh they attack the romans the romans then attack them the romans lose an emperor is burnt to death in a shed um valence yes and it tears a massive great hole in the um

in the available manpower to to the to the. And essentially, you then start having bands of Goths roaming around the various provinces. And again, this isn't kind of something exceptional. Outsiders have repeatedly been kind of brought in within the fabric of the empire and settled and made Roman. The problem with the aftermath of Adrianople is that this hasn't happened. And therefore the Goths feel that they have a kind of license to start roaming around. And what happens in 410

is that under their King Alaric, they fix on the richest prize of all, Rome. And they turn up and they discover that actually, you know, the capital of the empire has no clothes. It can be... So this is an extraordinary thing. It's people who don't know the story of the kind of the sort of the late

antique period, the sort of late Roman period, it will seem completely bewildering that this kind of massive, I mean, I don't know whether you'd call it a horde or whether academics today would consider that too loaded, but this sort of, this sort of roaming tribal kind of gang are able to basically roam all the way into Rome. Rome is undefended or weakly defended, shall I say. And they're able to just get into the imperial capital and smash everything up. That would seem extraordinary. I mean, the image of that happening in

any modern society would be unthinkable, right? Well, I think it's the measure of how prosperous and unaware that it is in the process of declining and falling. Rome and Italy is. That people just, it doesn't cross people's mind that that that might happen um because as i say you know italy and rome have have basically been rome hasn't been sat by foreign enemies for centuries and centuries and centuries and so that's why when it happens it is such a shock it it affects it affects what is now a christian world in in contradictory ways so saint jerome who is he's in the holy land at the time, and he's brought

the news, and he regards it as an absolute catastrophe. He hails Rome as the mother of the world. He can't believe the news of what's happened. And that is to associate Rome with, basically with Christianity. But therefore, the attack on on, on, on the church as well. Because the Goths are still pagans at this point, are they? I think they, they're Aryans. So they're kind of different kind of,

um, a different kind of Christianity. Jerome articulates what will become a very, very influential understanding, which is that, um, Rome's eternity is ordained by God. That,

that Rome had been brought into existence so as to provide the perfect um setting for jesus to be born and then for the church to spread so jesus is born in the reign of augustus um and they're all the roads and they're the shipping lanes and everybody's joined under the same ruler so therefore the christian message can spread. And this is the doing of the almighty. And this then feeds into a kind of very distinctive understanding of Paul's second letter to the Thessalonians, where he writes about the antichrist and Christian scholars come to the conclusion that it's the Roman empire that is stopping the antichrist from

coming. And that therefore, as long as the Roman empire exists, the Antichrist won't come. And so therefore, Rome gets written into the fabric of the history of the future, that the book of Revelation and the sense that Christ will come again is absolutely kind of writing in people's imaginations. So that's the sense of Rome as an eternal city in that sense is Christianized. The idea of the Roman Empire as something that will play a part in the great apocalyptic drama that Christians believe is looming is an important feature of this period.

But the fall of Rome has another very, and ultimately more influential impact, which is on Augustine, the great bishop from North Africa. And he responds to non-Christian senators, non-Christian intellectuals who look at the spectacle of Rome being sacked. And they say, this has happened because we have turned our backs on the traditional way of doing things, the traditional gods. We have abandoned them. And therefore, this shows that we should go back to the old ways. And Augustine says, absolutely not. It doesn't prove this at all. But his argument is the radical one, that Rome is not particularly significant, that all of humanity, all the world is fallen. And therefore, Rome is implicated in that. And therefore, all the world is fallen, and therefore Rome is implicated in that. And therefore, in the long run, it doesn't really matter if the empire stands or falls,

because what matters is the church. And what that does is to set up an absolutely crucial contrast between the idea of the church and the empire, which will have very, very momentous implications for medieval Europe, and I think right the way into the present. Okay, but to most people who are not keen listeners to or readers of Augustine, presumably it does matter that Rome still stands, that the taxes are still being paid, aqueducts are being repaired, troops, that there's law and order. I mean, it actually genuinely matters to people that Rome falls or doesn't fall and it doesn't fall in 410 so the

goths have their sort of sort of hooligan rampage in rome but then that's that's that's not the end of the empire right that they somehow the although the western empire clearly at that point is ailing, struggling to cope. It still continues, doesn't it, for decades? Yes, but essentially, the sinews that have joined the various parts of the Western Empire together are starting to be cut. So around 410, Britain seems to essentially slip the moorings. And the more the ability of uh the central empire to to maintain a monopoly of force which is what the roman empire had always been about it's about maintaining monopoly of force yeah once that starts to slip a centralized control then the standing temptation for warlords whether they be roman or barbarian both, essentially to kind of carve off fiefdoms from the mass of the empire becomes overwhelming.

And the more they do that, the more the empire, the process of implosion is set in trade. effectively i suppose if you're a local commander or a local a gang boss is the wrong word but you know the the local strongman there's a point at which you just think i'm not going to bother handing on my slice of the tax take to the guys above me i mean they don't have any troops i can just do what i like and keep it for myself and then and then presumably it's a um not a short step but it's an inevitable step that eventually these people will say well well i could, I could be king. I mean, I could be king of this place. Well, this is why, this is why the barbarians are so important because actually the, the Roman elite is very, very civilian, very civilian. I mean, you know, all they do is study Virgil. Surely they go to the baths and they...

They go to the baths and things like that, but they're not, they're not military men. Yeah. And so essentially this has been franchised out to barbarians who are often, you know, just as they all speak Latin and they're as Roman as anyone. But it's a bit like framework depends on there being a monopoly of violence that's maintained by a central emperor. When that ceases, then you start having to accommodate the military men who inevitably are starting to take over. And we call these barbarians, but they're often very, very Romanized, as we said. So you start to get the people carving out chunks of gall. Then you get the vandals who sweep through spain and then crucially they cross into africa and africa is the great grain basket

that keeps rome fed and once that's gone then really there's nothing left uh and rome is in real trouble then and this is the background for this this date. Yeah, I thought we'd come to this. So let's get to the 4th of September, 476. So Romulus Augustulus has been, he is a boy. Am I right? A teenager? Yeah. A small boy?

I can't remember. He is named after, ironically, Rome's founder. And his second name means little Augustus, I think. Is that right? Yeah, it's an abusive nickname. I mean, it's romulus augustus so it's not really so so we say oh it's ironic he's called that but it's not it's not an accident it's it's deliberate it's a way of mocking and belittling yes yeah and he is basically deposed isn't he by a guy called odoaco i don't know how to pronounce it um who's the head of the Ostrogoths,

who basically just kicks him out of the... I mean, how does it even work? So Romulus Augustus, he's the son of a guy called Orestes, who is a kind of a Djokovic guy. He's from the Balkans. He's an anti-vaxxer. And he's been appointed the magister militum, so basically the head of the army, by a guy called Julius Nepos, who also is from the Balkans. And Julius Nepos, he's the last emperor to be crowned in Rome until Charlemagne.

Sorry, a really, really boring, banal question. When you become emperor at this point, what does that actually mean? I mean, do you get given a special... Do you get a crown? Do you get a robe? Yeah. Yeah, you get the robes. And what do you do? Are you doing the paperwork? Are you kind of... Yeah. And you have civil servants and stuff? You have civil servants, all that kind of stuff.

Who are just constantly bringing you bad news at this point. But by this point, essentially, your rule has shrunk to Italy and a section of the Balkans. Okay. And you're very likely to be toppled in a coup, which is basically what happens, that Orestes stabs Julius Nepos, who's appointed him, in the back. Julius Nepos crosses the Adriatic to hang out in his native Dalmatia in the Balkans. Orestes makes his son emperor.

Orestes then gets toppled by a Durka, you've mentioned the king of the ostrogoths but basically there's very little to choose between them they're all kind of scrapping over the over the you know the the feast um and a durca just decides well this is pointless i mean you know there's no emperor i'm just going to make myself king and so that's what he does and he packs um uh romulus augustulus off to uh the villa of a famous general from the time of caesar called lucullus the guy who brought the cherry back to rome and um as far as we know yeah the cherry he brings the cherry back where the cherry bean uh pontus on the black sea okay wow that's a claim to fame poor old romulus augustulus kind of well poor i mean they yeah he seems to have had

quite a nice time the villa was clearly very swanky he's the richard he's the richard cromwell of romania he's the richard cromwell exactly exactly except we don't know how long he lived i mean we don't really know what happened to him but he is not actually the last so this is why saying that 476 is the date of the fall of the roman empire is wrong because um julius nepos is still very much on the scene. It's just that he's the other side of the Adriatic, the Balkans, and he lasts until 480 when he gets murdered. So if you wanted to say the end of, you know,

when does the Roman Empire in the West fall, it would be 480, I think. But, but, and this is crucial. Yes, yes, Dominic, yes. And the other but, the other but is that Odoica does not completely cast off Roman rule because he sends the insignia of the Empire of the West to Constantinople. And he basically rules as a kind of, you know, he gets his legitimacy from the fact that he's a friend and an ally of the emperor in constantinople so so in a way actually what's happened here is that odoica is in a way saying you don't need an emperor in the west anymore you you're that you're still the overlord the guy in constantinople but i'm your man in rome now and we don't need a

separate emperor is that basically what's happening yeah that is basically what's happening. And it's a way it serves both sides well, because it gives prestige to these kings. So he's succeeded by Theoderic, who is a very Roman figure. And Italy in this, you know, under Odoca and Theoderic remains very, very Roman. Consuls continue to be elected. The Senate still sits in the Senate House. Chariot races happen in the Circus Maximus. Basically, the Romans have no idea that the Roman Empire in the West has fallen. And in lots of ways, it hasn't. The framework is still functioning. Quick question for you.

Has the focus moved from Rome to Ravenna at this point? Because it does move to Ravenna, doesn't it? Yes. Yeah. you has the focus moved from Rome to Ravenna at this point because it does move to Ravenna doesn't it yes yeah so so Ravenna had been the kind of the the place again where the where emperors within Italy are based because it's up north so close to the you know close to to where all the action is and you have a you it's open to the sea so that you can kind of slip away and you can have constant communications with Constantinople by sea right so sea. So everything is in a state of flux. But if I kind of pitched up Tom in Ravenna in 490 and I said to somebody, if I did some vox pops, has the Roman Empire fallen?

What would people have said? I think they'd have said no. I think they wouldn't have understood the question because all around them, the evidence of Roman civilization and Roman cultural practices and political practices carries on it's just that there isn't an emperor ruling in italy but there is an emperor in constantinople so all the romans can feel that they're still the roman empire still exists meanwhile theodoric can feel that he is you know he's integrated into the roman system but he is a king and so he does this in the kind of classic way by issuing very roman style coins and medallions but showing himself with a

moustache which no no self-respecting roman would ever wear no no of course not they'd look ridiculous and further afield the same thing is kind of happening. So in Gaul, where obviously the hold of Constantinople is very, very much weaker, even so, you're still getting the same kind of game being played. So you're getting, so Anastasius, one of the emperors in Constantinople in the 5th century, sends messages to Clovis,vis the frankish king saying um you know i'm appointing you a consul and this is great clovis can pretend to be a consul but that's completely meaningless to clovis right i mean does it mean it's not it's not it's not meaningless because it gives him a kind of stamp of prestige okay so it's still likewise you get kings kind of saying very freely um you know we we are subject to you. We acknowledge your supremacy, even though need.

I mean, both sides know that this is bogus, but it suits the interests of both sides. Both are kind of flattered by it. However, by the beginning of the 6th century, Romans are starting to wake up to the fact that something has really quite seriously gone wrong. So you have one of them. He writes about how what the world needs is an armed Caesar before whose advance both land and sea will quake until at last with the renewed power of his war trumpet, he will serve to rouse the navies of Rome from their sleep. And that, of course, comes to fruition with Justinian, I know you're a big fan of, who does send an expedition to reconquer first Africa and then Italy. Well, let's just ask about that, Tom. You said reconquer. So we've moved on a generation

or two from the deposition of Romulus Augustus and the end of what we conventionally see as the end of the Western Empire. Is there a sense now in the East that the West has been lost? And that's basically because the kings are no longer responding to the messages. They're saying, you know, you can stuff your consulship. I'm my own boss now. Who cares what you think? Is that basically what's going on yeah they're barbarians i mean you know they are barbarians it's embarrassing you know it's we're

kind of familiar with where you have diplomatic or you know um treaties between powers that eventually one decides it's just not interested in it yeah um and i think that that's basically what happens so justinian sends this this army which does kind of you know it's quite successful but the collateral damage is is actually the city of rome itself you know there are a series of very brutal sieges the aqueducts get cut so therefore the viability of rome as a major city is completely lost and it becomes very rapidly depopulated as a result both of of the collapse of infrastructure and of kind of forced movement of people.

So I think that if you want a date for when does the Roman Empire in the West really finish, I think it's then. And I think, ironically, the gravedigger of the Roman Empire in Italy is Justinian, the Roman Emperor, who's trying to bring Italy back into the embrace of the Roman Empire. Because the very act of the reconquest basically shatters the economy and the landscape of Italy. No more Senate, no more chariot races, no more consuls. That's when it ends.

But just to wind this story up, because we'll obviously have to take a break now and do the rest in subsequent episodes, so often the story of this podcast, the Roman Empire has had two capitals for a long time. So Constantinople. Meanwhile, Constantinople still think everybody there thinks of themselves as Romans. To them, the Roman Empire is absolutely going strong. They are the guardians of it. They have chariot racing, you know, with the famous kind of blues and the greens that riot. And they have triumphs.

So Justinian celebrates a triumph, just as Romans have done in the streets of roman yeah so so it very much carries on so this is and and this is absolutely we call this if i look up justinian online if i google him he will be described probably more often than not as a byzantine emperor but he is absolutely a roman emperor. He's a Latin speaker. Okay. He speaks Latin. Okay. Very good.

Perfect. So we have got to the mid-6th century. The Roman Empire, contrary to what you often read, has absolutely not fallen. Britain is no longer part of it, or Britannia, I should say. Gaul is no longer part of the Roman Empire. And oddly, Italy and basically Rome are soon to be detached from the Roman Empire base. They're kind of semi-detached at this point,

aren't they? Mid-6th century. I mean, just in this tricep. Well, no, Rome has now been brought back into the Roman Empire, but it's in a bad way. It's going to fall out again pretty soon, isn't it? A few centuries. It's there for a few centuries more. We will return next time with what happens to the eastern roman empire and also the afterlife of rome because tom i think you believe that rome doesn't die uh with well it does die but there are attempts to bring it back to life so it's it kind of takes on a vampiric form it's undead rome undead rome zombie romans so return to us next

time for zombie Romans. Goodbye. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman.

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