James J. ODonnell - The Ruin of the Roman Empire: A New History

An American soldier posted in Anbar province during the twilight war over the remains of Saddams Mesopotamian kingdom might have been surprised to learn he was defending the westernmost frontiers of the ancient Persian empire against raiders, smugglers, and worse coming from the eastern reaches of the ancient Roman empire. This painful recycling of history should make himand uswant to know what unhealable wound, what recurrent pathology, what cause too deep for journalists and politicians to discern draws men and women to their deaths again and again in such a place. The history of Rome, as has often been true in the past, has much to teach us.

The reign of Caesar Augustus consolidated and secured Roman domination in the lands around the Mediterranean. For 200 years after he died in 14 CE, the prosperity and the pomposity of the empire were wondrous to behold. Then, through a long series of lost opportunities, blunders, and wars, Augustuss heirs first showed that they could sustain their inheritance in time of crisis, then worked to release their world from ancient confrontations, and then in a tragic reversal bludgeoned into dust the opportunities Rome had created. This book tells the story of the central, tragic episode, when the mighty Roman empire, unable to understand itself or its world, chose to be true to its past ambitions and accomplishments and so brought itself to ruin. The figure of the emperor Justinian looms over the ruins, a figure mighty for his accomplishments, yet tragic for the calamities that his reign both saw and spawned.

The stories I weave together here will be unfamiliar to most readers. Specialists will disagree with at least some of what I venture and debate it heatedly, as they (and I) should. Nonspecialists should expect some surprises. Because I mean to tell a fresh story with old materials, I have also tried to recount the whole of it for the benefit of the reader who knows none of it.

There are borders and boundaries being overrun and reinforced on every page of this book, so it may be relevant to admit that I was born about five miles outside the outermost boundary of the Roman empire in Germany; grew up within a few miles of the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso (attending high school in a structure built by Jesuits hiding out from an anticlerical revolution in Mexico); once owned, in the farthest west of Ireland, a farm that my ancestors acquired when they were on the run from the British after the battle of Kinsale; and have other family reasons for knowing a lot about the history of Ukraine, the nation whose name means borderland. Is it personal bias or scholarly judgment that makes me say that great capitals and bustling cities are all well and good, but that the constructive and creative energies of humankind are often best seen among the mixtures and minglings of peoples at the margins of nations and empires? I leave it to my readers to decide.

I have meditated and written this book in some unusual places, on travels to every continent save one, in the intermissions of my unscholarly duties as provost of a great university that has long understood itself to have a global responsibility. Because my professional role now makes me think in very concrete terms about shaping institutions to serve a more democratically understood humankind, it was doubly important to explore and tell this story, not just for readers, but also so that I can do my own job better.

The night sky changes every night yet never seems to change, as the seasons bring the same stars in the same constellations on the same day of the year, age after age. The sky defines the calendar, for the stars never fail. For many thousands of years, until the smoke and light of human fires and human ingenuity began to plunder the night of its glory, the order and regularity of the stars surveyed and guided civilized life below.

The anomalies of the night offered hints. The planets (the word comes from the Greek for wanderers) followed paths just unpredictable enough to challenge the mathematical abilities of generations, until Copernicus found a simpler model. It was easier to believe that the planets were the chariots of godsfor gods were notoriously whimsical and footloosethan to study the ancient mathematical models. Watchers below easily gave religious readings to other occasional anomalies of the night. Comets, shooting stars, the shimmer of the aurora borealisall were safer to ascribe to divinity than to a blind material order. For us, the silence and darkness are beautiful, the stars a beautiful adornment; for the ancients, the night was terrifying and familiar and mysteriously well ordered.

Sitting beneath these stars and thinking in these ways, civilized humankind went about its business without grasping what evidence the skies bore against its habitual ways of thinking. Unable to measure the vast distances that separated the heavenly bodies patent before their eyes, they took the dimensions of this planetor, rather, of Eurasia and northern Africaas the measure of space. Incapable of grasping the evidence of the skies as a sign of the great age of the world and the long revolutions that bring us our flickering moment of consciousness, they measured time by the span of human memory and the stories of a few dozen generations.

Small wonder that they understood their world so poorly. Small wonder as well that even when we know better in principle and when we can grasp the age and reach of the universe, we still fail to explore and explain this world on a scale expansive enough to make it genuinely intelligible. Science measures boldly the unimaginably large and small of the cosmos, the breathtakingly fast and unspeakably slow movements of bodies. History struggles to contain those universes in its imagination while observing in minute detail as well. Historians struggle to think of human experience in a way both congruent with the experience of mortals and expansive enough to offer real explanation.

The sky of the Greeks and Romans, carrying the names of their gods and heroes in arbitrary patterns of stars, still passes over our heads at night. The Great Bear and Little Bear circle each other at the top of the sky, while Orion and his dog go hunting in the fall. They will do so long after all of us now alive are gone, long after all our descendants have destroyed themselves with nuclear fission or automotive exhausts. The ancient communities that put those names on the sky have already disappeared or altered beyond recognition, and yet they continue to shape the world in which we live.

This is a book about changes on earth below that left ancient heroes marooned in the sky, stripped of their celestial powers. If we can understand those changesand what has not changedwe may have a better chance of avoiding calamities of our own.

We will begin with a man who thought that the world below the stars was flat.

COSMAS THE VOYAGER

The two visitors, skillful and knowledgeable merchants, found the obelisk and the throne facing west, away from the sea. They stood at the gate of the city of Adoulis, a trading town on the Red Sea coast of what is now Eritrea. The lands distinctive products were ivory from elephants, horn from rhinoceroses, and tortoiseshell. Both obelisk and throne pointed up into the mountains, toward the great city of Axum, more than 100 miles away in what was already called Ethiopia. Their inscriptions honored the Hellenistic king Ptolemy III Euergetes (Benefactor), by then dead for about 750 years. Ptolemy had probably never come this far south, but these lands still paid tributeyou could call it a tax, or you could call it protection moneyto Egypt when they were not at war with the Egyptians.

The throne was cut from a single piece of gleaming white marble. The visitors were surprised to see this, because they knew of such stone only in the Mediterranean, from the island of Proconnesus in the Sea of Marmara near Constantinople. The thrones base was square, with four delicate columns at the corners and one more supporting the seat at the center. The obelisk was carved of basalt on a square base and stood behind the throne. Both objects were inscribed in Greek.