Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, volume 4 (Folio Society Edition). We arrive at last at the Fifth Century and the agonising collapse of the Western Roman Empire. Assailed by barbarians on all sides (The century kicked off with the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410), the Romans tried to mitigate the damage by allowing some barbarians to settle within the borders of the Empire. Although this worked for a while — with many barbarians adopting the trappings of the Romans — pressures both external (the Huns in central Asia) and internal (the worsening of the economy combined with rampant corruption and general mismanagement) led to many barbarians declaring de facto independence within the Empire. One Constantine, supposedly maintaining Britain against piracy from Angles and Saxons, took his legions to Gaul in a bid to capitalise on the worsening chaos, leaving Britain to its fate: the island was instantly plunged into a darkness that lasted almost two centuries, and of a depth that even modern scholars find hard to penetrate (see my review of Max Adams’ The First Kingdom, and Thomas Williams’ Lost Realms, below). The Vandals settled in North Africa, the breadbasket of Rome, and from their base at Carthage inflicted piracy on a Mediterranean that had once been mare nostrum. All of a sudden, the Romans were catapulted back to the Punic Wars — but without the spirit or the energy to fight them. As time went on, many of the Empire’s best generals and ministers were in fact barbarians. The Roman general Stilicho had to repel barbarian invasions by cobbling together coalitions of other barbarians, and was himself a Vandal in origin. The Huns were only stopped at the Battle of Chalons in 451 by a coalition of Romans and Visigoths. That army was led by Aetius, whose father had been a Scythian. Many of the Goths were already ruling Gaul and Spain in any case; and the battle didn’t stop Attila the Hun ravaging northern Italy afterwards. The last few Emperors of the West — by then consisting only of parts of Italy and Dalmatia — were puppets of barbarian ministers, only there for ceremonial reasons. The very last, Romulus Augustulus, was gently deposed in 476 by Odoacer, the de facto ruler of Italy. It says something about the weakness of the Empire that Odoacer didn’t even think him worth assassinating. The Empire of the West, therefore, ended not with a bang but a whimper, a circumstance that made its disappearance all the more poignant. The event, nonetheless, is generally regarded as the End of Antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages. In Gibbon’s view, the establishment of Christianity was one of the factors that weakened the Empire, with the diversion of thought and energy into religion rather than defence or government. Although he admits that monks preserved culture that might otherwise have been lost
.. posterity must gratefully acknowledge that the monuments of Greek and Roman literature have been preserved and multiplied by their indefatigable pens.
he is scathing about the institution of monasticism itself, noting that ascetics
… obeyed and abused the rigid precepts of the Gospel, [and] were inspired by the savage enthusiasm that represents man as a criminal, and God as a tyrant. They seriously renounced the business and pleasures of the age; abjured the use of wine, of flesh, and of marriage; chastised their body, mortified their affections, and embraced a life of misery, as the price of eternal happiness.
Nowadays we’d call this kind of behaviour ‘virtue signalling’. It worked, too — monks attracted legions of devotees who, if they could not join the throng themselves, showered religious institutions with gifts, the effect being a general corruption in which the monastic life became, in some cases, every bit as luxurious as that of a Roman patrician, but with none of the responsibilities. Gibbon reserves some of his sharpest barbs for the hagiographies of early Christians which, in his opinion, make very poor substitutes for history:
The lives of Paul, Hilarion, and Malchus, by [St Jerome], are admirably told; and the only defect of these pleasing compositions is the want of truth and common sense.
The knowledge and reason of antiquity were swept aside by faith and credulity. The Age of Faith was fecund with the miraculous. Gibbon dismisses most miracles with the contempt they undoubtedly deserve. There was one, though, that he found affecting. This is the tale of the Seven Youths of Ephesus. As Christians during the persecutions of the emperor Decius, they were walled up in a cave and left to starve. Two hundred years later, workmen removing stones for building found the men merely sleeping. They awoke to a world that had changed utterly. The Empire was Christian, and the capital had moved from Rome to Constantinople. Gibbon notes the persistence of legends like this, noting that the fable has ‘general merit’.
We imperceptibly advance from youth to age without observing the gradual, but incessant, change in human affairs; and even in our larger experience of history, the imagination is accustomed, by a perpetual series of causes and effects, to unite the most distant revolutions. But if the interval between two memorable eras could be instantly annihilated; if it were possible, after a momentary slumber of two hundred years, to display the new world to the eyes of a spectator who still retained a lively and recent impression of the old, his surprise and his reflections would furnish the pleasing subject of a philosophical romance.
Cue Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in the court of King Arthur and Woody Allen’s The Sleeper to The Time Machine and every other story of time travel right down to recent films such as Interstellar. The fable about the sleepers of Ephesus resonates down to our own times.
Annie Proulx: Barkskins Like many people, I suppose, I first came across Annie Proulx with her redemptive novel The Shipping News. Later on I read Accordion Crimes. The two novels are totally different in scale and scope, yet both united by their unequalled grasp of the effects of history on the residents of North America, and their spare, unsentimental style. Barkskins follows this tradition. At the very end of the 17th century, two down-and-out youths from the slums of Paris are transported to New France — today’s Nova Scotia and New Brunswick — as indentured labourers. One, René Sel, becomes a woodsman, set with his axe to fell what seems to be the inexhaustible forests of the new continent. His descendants largely belong to the indigenous Micmac people — woodsmen, fishers, trappers, hunters, ever trying to hold on to the threads of their ancient traditions. The other, Charles Duquet, absconds, and eventually founds a mighty dynasty of lumber barons. So begins a walloping great family saga, which could have degenerated into a potboiler, but works because of Proulx’s signature style – pure, terse prose occasionally ornamented by sentences of breathtaking beauty and startling originality. Many of the characters are explored in depth — the Micmac paterfamilias Kuntaw Sel, the timber baroness Lavinia Duke — but most make only fleeting appearances. The real stars are the panoramic landscapes, the trees, the great forests of America, and, later, the world, felled by the human need to conquer and subjugate. If I could find one fault, it is the tendency to dump a lot of historical information into the mouths of her characters as a way of helping you, the reader, catch up with world events. The thing is, you see, Proulx’s best characters struggle when the need to express themselves hits their fundamental inability to carry it through, usually because, in their world — a tough world of physical hard labour to which Proulx’s style is ideally suited — doing counts for a lot more than saying. Think Brokeback Mountain. (Yes, Proulx wrote that, too). Most of her characters work best when they say little. By giving voice to the unlettered and inarticulate she elevates them to a kind of dignity and greatness.
Thomas Williams: Lost Realms This book is something of a heroic failure. I suspect that the author would concur, for that, in essence, is what it is meant to be. If it weren’t hard enough trying to unearth something about the lost history of Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries — perhaps the darkest and least documented period in the history of these islands (see my review of Max Adams’ The First Kingdom) — the author homes in on those parts of that history that are more obscure still. It is likely that many petty polities rose and fell between the departure of the Roman legions in about 410 and the arrival of Augustine in 597, but evidence for most of them has been irrecoverably lost. Given that the earliest history of what Williams calls ‘the Big Beasts’ of Northumbria, Wessex, Mercia and East Anglia is hidden in the mists of myth and legend, recovering the stories of the lesser realms of Elmet, Hwicce, Dumnonia, Essex, Rheged, Powys, Sussex and Fortriu would seem like a fool’s errand. The existence as independent entities of some, (Sussex and Essex, for example, along with Lindsey, in north Lincolnshire; and Hwicce, in what is now Gloucestershire and Worcestershire) is attested only after they became subject to the domination of larger neighbours. Powys has achieved a spurious legitimacy through the creation of a ceremonial county whose borders may bear little relationship to the ancient kingdom that existed (possibly) in the valley of the River Dee. Evidence for Elmet (in modern West Yorkshire) is a gossamer-wisp away from oblivion, while Rheged (Cumbria, Dumfries and Galloway) might not have actually existed at all. And so on. There are, however, some very revealing details. Such as, for example, the existence of people living in Roman luxury at Tintagel (in Dumnonia), long after the fall of the western Empire, possibly benefiting from the resurgence of the Empire and the re-opening of the Mediterranean and Atlantic trade under Justinian. Yet, hardly a stone’s throw away, in Hwicce, perhaps one of the most Romanised parts of Britain, towns were deserted in short order after the legions left, in favour of hilltop forts — perhaps the last holdouts of a population, desperate and fragmented, trying to hold on to what they had lost, an aim as futile as it was poignant. The author’s style veers from passages of a shade of purple that tends to the ultraviolet, to humour that draws on references that might baffle some people today, let alone in the fifth century. Modern Cirencester, for example
… remains genteel, well-to-do and liberal, in a Waitrose, National Trust, Radio 4 sort of way.
…to the names of native British warlords, which sound less like personal names than crude boasts:
It has also been suggested that ‘Vortigern’ was a title and not a name at all … when set aside other Brittonic names like Brigomaglos (‘mighty prince’) and Maglocunus (‘top dog’), Vortigern seems hardly out of place. (Even Biggus Dickus might feel at home in this sort of company).
No, you look it up. And on the bullying nature of some early English kings:
The so-called Mercian Supremacy was really an exercise in early medieval gangsterism, and the Mercian king was an Offa you couldn’t refuse.
Ba-boom, and, moreover, tish. So what is the point of it all? The book, I think, invites us to look critically — very critically — at the history we are taught about the foundation of our nation, to show that almost all of it is myth created retrospectively to justify present circumstances, and even the bits everyone thinks are true hardly stand up to much scrutiny. Williams closes with a discourse on how some historians are disowning the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ as it has, in some places, acquired connotations of racism, even white supremacy. Such notions rest on outmoded ideas of race, nation and identity, in which it was assumed that (for example) an early medieval body buried in lowland Britain with jewellery similar to that found in northern Germany or Scandinavia must have been that of a Germanic invader, rather than — say — a person of British ancestry who just happened to like that kind of bling. After all, the fact that the streets of Britain now thrum to the engines of Japanese cars doesn’t mean that Britain has been invaded by Japan. When presented with such evidence, it is hard, therefore, not to project on to such mute remains the prejudices we hold today, when what we should be asking is how the people who lived in those remote ages saw themselves. This is hard enough to do now, even of ourselves. As David Berreby shows in his masterpiece Us and Them: Understanding our Tribal Mind, we can change our identities as often as we change our socks, and yet convince ourselves that the persona we wear today has been true for all time. So who can tell what a person who lived in fifth century Britain — a time of dramatic but ill-documented change — thought of themselves? That is something that we can never know. Oh, and one last thing. Whoever Thomas Williams imagines himself to be, he loves Tolkien. So that gets an extra star from me.
Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, volume 5 (Folio Society Edition). The period between the end of the fifth and the beginning of the seventh centuries is dominated by one name – that of Justinian, who ruled for thirty-eight years (527-565), which in Roman terms was practically forever. His domination is reflected in his documentation, for his times were described in minute detail by Procopius the Copious. So minute, in fact, that he documented the salacious private lives of the Emperor and his Empress, Theodora, who had started out in what we’d nowadays call the adult entertainment industry (her party piece involved a live goose and some birdseed). The Romans were as keen on spectator sports as anyone today. Supporters of popular chariot-racing were divided into the mutually hostile ‘green’ and ‘blue’ factions, whose supporters adhered to their teams with the fanaticism of religious mania that often became destructive. Sports hooliganism is nothing new. Gibbon repeatedly pokes fun at the Romans’ love of luxury over learning. The Romans devoted a great deal of ingenuity to wheedling the secrets of silk production out of the Chinese. Gibbon writes:
I am not insensible to the benefits of elegant luxury; yet I reflect with some pain that if the importers of silk had introduced the art of printing, already practised by the Chinese, the comedies of Menander and the entire decads of Livy would have been perpetuated in the editions of the sixth century.
And after a long discussion on the splendour of the Cathedral of St Sophia in Constantinople:
Yet how dull is the artifice, how insignificant is the labour, if it be compared with the formation of the vilest insect that crawls upon the surface of the temple!
At the same time, the centuries-old philosophical schools of Athens withered and died — less by the incursions of barbarians than from the proscriptions of Christianity, which Gibbon takes every opportunity to chastise:
The Gothic arms were less fatal to the schools of Athens than the establishment of a new religion, whose ministers superseded the exercise of reason, resolved every question by an article of faith, and condemned the infidel or sceptic to eternal flames.
And here:
The king of the Lombards had been educated in the Arian heresy, but the catholics in their public worship were allowed to pray for his conversion; while the more stubborn barbarians sacrificed a she-goat, or perhaps a captive, to the gods of their fathers.
to which Gibbon adds a characteristically waspish footnote:
Gregory the Roman supposes that they likewise adored this she-goat. I know but of one religion in which the god and the victim are the same.
Elsewhere Gibbon laments the survival of devotional literature that adds nothing very much either to our general knowledge or improvement. He writes of the works of a monk called Antiochus whose ‘one hundred and twenty-nine homilies are still extant, if what no one reads may be said to be extant’.
Procopius also wrote about (and Gibbon faithfully follows) the stellar career of the heroic general Belisarius, who, although henpecked at home, reconquered Italy, southern Spain and the African littoral for the Empire.
It wasn’t all good news, though. The reign of Justinian was punctuated by natural disasters such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and most notably an epidemic of plague (c.541-544). Gibbon devotes no more than a few paragraphs to this, but then, neither did Procopius, though nowadays this is the one event, perhaps understandably, that people associate with the reign of Justinian. The plague, and incessant warfare, depopulated many areas, so that, eventually, northern Italy and the Apennine spine of the country were occupied without opposition by the Lombards, whose kingdom fragmented into a series of mutually hostile polities such as the Duchies of Spoleto and Beneventum. The Imperial possessions remained, though, in pockets that eventually became the Republic of Venice, the Papal States, the Kingdom of Naples, and so on, and this led to the patchwork pattern of Italian politics that lasted until the time of Garibaldi.
The centrepiece of this volume, however, is Gibbon’s essay on Justinian’s revision of Roman law.
The laws of a nation form the most instructive portion of its history; and although I have devoted myself to write the annals of a declining monarchy, I shall embrace the occasion to breathe the pure and invigorating air of the republic.
By Justinian’s time the edifice of Roman law had become so confused and cluttered that wholesale revision was necessary:
In the space of ten centuries the infinite variety of laws and legal opinions had filled many thousand volumes, which no fortune could purchase and no capacity could digest.
The commission set up by Justinian pulled as much of extant Roman law together as it could gather and eventually disgorged three great works: the Code, the Pandects and the Institutes. Gibbon is critical of those who said that Justinian’s revision consigned much extant Roman law to the ashes, noting that only a limited amount of a thousand years of precedent would have been available. Laws existed in only a few copies, made by hand; codes that were superseded had very likely been destroyed deliberately; and, after all, this was not the kind of literature people read for entertainment. The result, therefore, of all this effort, could never have been the image of perfection:
Instead of a statue cast in a simple mould by the hand of an artist, the works of Justinian represent a tessellated pavement of antique and costly, but too often of incoherent, fragments.
The final part of this volume discusses the relationship between Rome and Persia. In the First Century, Augustus had recommended that the bounds of the Roman Empire (the Rhine, the Danube, the eastern Mediterranean shore as far inland as the Euphrates, and the Sahara Desert) were natural limits and should not be exceeded. His successors largely held to these limits. Yet for half a millennium or more the Romans existed in a state of armed truce with the Persian Empire, and the various episodes of back-and-forth usually ended up in more or less the same places. Yet the reign of Heraclius (610-641) saw warfare between Rome and Persia erupt on an unprecedented scale. At one point the Persians swept through the entire eastern part of the Empire as far as the Bosphorus, with their allies, the barbarian Avars, advancing to the walls of Constantinople on the other shore. But for the heroism of Heraclius (one of the few Roman Emperors who took to the field in person), and the fact that the Persians lacked a navy to press their advantage, the Roman Empire came within a day of extinction. But Heraclius counterattacked, advancing into Persia as far as modern Azerbaijan. In the end, though, and after much destruction, the ancient borders were re-established. Such imperial friction could have gone on forever, but for some unlikely news from a far country. Gibbon writes that the King of Persia
received an epistle from an obscure citizen of Mecca, inviting him to acknowledge Mohammed as the apostle of God. He rejected the invitation, and tore the epistle.
Hindsight might view such casual dismissal as a mistake.
