Loading summary
Transcript142 lines
- [00:02]
A
This episode is brought to you by the Financial Times. When it comes to news, it's easy to find out what, who, where and when. But why is harder. FT journalism goes deeper to help you see the whole story and understand the issues that matter. Why did it happen? Why is it important? Why will it matter?
- [00:24]
B
Listeners to the Rest is History can save over 40% of on an annual digital subscription to the Financial times by visiting FT.comhistory for the why Financial Times.
- [00:39]
A
This podcast is brought to you by Carvana Car shopping shouldn't feel like preparing for a marathon of paperwork.
- [00:47]
B
That's why Carvana makes buying and financing your car easy.
- [00:50]
A
From start to finish. Search thousands of vehicles with great prices, all online, all on your time, and when you're ready, your new car shows up right at your door. It doesn't get better than that. Buy your car the easy way on delivery fees may apply. Shopping is hard, right? But I found a better way. Stitch Fix Online Personal styling makes it easy. I just give my stylist my size, style and budget preferences. I order boxes when I want and how I want. No subscription required. And he sends just for me pieces plus outfit recommendations and styling tips. I keep what works and send back the rest. It's so easy. Make style easy. Get started today@stitch fix.com Spotify that's stitchfix.com Spotify. On the evening of 27 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 Capitol 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?
- [03:14]
B
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 Augustulus. 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 Gibbons 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.
- [04:40]
A
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? 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?
- [04:55]
B
Imperium, which we translate 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. It's only once that comes to be associated with physical territory that you start to get the idea of. Of an imperium being something physical. So, so being an empire. And I suppose the aren't, you know, if you're saying on that level. Rome, according to. To legend, is founded as an aggressively military state. So Romulus the first king, he. He launches an attack on a neighboring king, kills him with his own hand, brings his armor back, dedicates it to the. To. To Jupiter on. On the Capitol, 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 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.
- [06:08]
A
So that happens under. I mean, at that point where you've got the whole of the Mediterranean, that basically happens. Doesn't.
- [06:14]
B
Under Augustus.
- [06:15]
A
And the first century bc, under Octavian, Julius Caesar's adopted heir, who takes the title Augustus or is 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?
- [06:30]
B
Yes. So, I mean, all these names kind of. So Augustus means halfway to heaven, basically. So, you know, you're halfway to heaven. Victorious general, son of a God. These are all proper names, they're not titles. So he's. He's a. In many ways, a sensationally immodest man. And what you, 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. When the Roman people become slaves. So, so, 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, who, 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, the collapse of the Republic, Cato was. We left Cato out because he was, in a way, a too big a 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. Yeah. 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. 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. 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 Caesar's, would every so often kind of take up as a model. So under the. Under the, you know, the oppression of particularly tyrannical Caesars, they would. They would commit suicide and consciously evoke the model of Cato. And the reason for that is, is it was kind of summed up by Cicero, the. The great orator, who himself ends up being put to death by the alliance between Mark Anthony 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.
- [09:23]
A
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 had pitched up in the 4th century or 3rd century and said, this is not Rome, I mean, mean, people just laughed at him, you know.
- [09:37]
B
Yeah, but you can see the rhetorical force of it.
- [09:39]
A
Yeah.
- [09:39]
B
Because indeed, the moral force of it.
- [09:41]
A
Yeah. Because that, to 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.
- [10:01]
B
Law.
- [10:01]
A
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. It moves away. But 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 the empire in the first century B.C. created by Augustus.
- [10:39]
B
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 quite a radical kind of change because actually, 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 of in the Mediterranean that is conquered by Rome, that empires rise and empires fall because they've.
- [11:26]
A
Seen what happened to Egypt, what happened to Alexander the Great's empire or the Seleucids or the, you know, all those kinds of empires. Right?
- [11:33]
B
Well, the classic example is where is when the, the first great kind of imperial rival that, 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, they, they burn its libraries. So that in a sense their aim is to, to, 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, you know, the ruin of Troy that will come. And he turns to, 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, I, I dread that the fate that we are now visiting on Carthage will be visited on, on Rome as well. And he is, he, 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 2nd and 1st centuries BC.
- [12:53]
A
But also isn't that the kind of thing that you say when you're, your, 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?
- [13:08]
B
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, that he wants to write his history. So he feels that he's, he's, 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, 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 BC 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, the civil wars between Anthony, Cleopatra and the future Augustus, people in Rome look at these prophecies and worry about it. And they, they have kind of terrible fantasies of Rome being trampled down by enemy horsemen, of, of the capital being burned. So Horace, you know, the 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, culturally, it's 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, that his poetry will be eternal. And he compares the eternity he wants for his poetry with the spectacle of the, 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 bout of civil war in, in A.D. 69, and although you, you do then have civil wars starting to, to corrode the fabric of the empire in the third century, when, when Romans celebrate their millennium, they, 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.
- [15:51]
A
So let's take this story in. 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, the empire, the structure, I mean, that's the classic. I know that it's obviously much more complicated, but, but that's the sort of class. And then you have his successors, 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, 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, you know, the patrician kind of Families that dominated Roman politics. You, you get these officers who come and go kind of sometimes within a year. And at that point does the system start to feel a bit different from what had been before or is there still an underlying continuity?
- [16:47]
B
Yeah, I think 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 factor, 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, 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, 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 there, that it is hard to join lands gathered around the Mediterranean. And essentially whenever you look at the, the civil wars that periodically break out in, 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. Yeah, but those are not just cultural, they're not just linguistic. They, they also correspond to the, you know, the Adriatic is a, 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 the, you know, as I say, the, the Alps. So, so there is, there are endless Gallic empires. Britain is always kind of drifting off. Yeah, and basically that is, that is what the third century with its great crisis kind of exposes is that it's quite easy for bits of, 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, 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, to become emperors. And of course you get Constantinop. Constantinople gets founded because it is at a convenient distance between the two key fronts. For Rome, which is the, the Danube Rhine frontier, where there are Germanic tribes, press, you know, 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.
- [19:51]
A
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 that that marks a sort of definitive, 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.
- [20:18]
B
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, 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 modeled on Rome. There is a, you know, a senate that the, the fabric of the city is modeled 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, you know, been that 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 it in any way it leads anyone 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 empire that we today generally call Byzantine, they called themselves Romans. They were the Romeoi.
- [21:40]
A
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 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 where Theodosius the Great makes Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire. Now that to me, as an outsider, as a, 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?
- [22:22]
B
It is a cultural revolution. You know, I think that Christianity is properly transformative. However, again, I, 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, gets legalized by Constantine because he has his vision of, of cross in the sky. Jesus tells him, yes, conquer with, you know, 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 that basically everyone is Roman within the Empire. The old kind of divisions between Romans and conquered peoples has faded. Every male, free male in the, in, 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.
- [24:02]
A
Of transcend the local, the local gods.
- [24:05]
B
So, so Constantine, before he becomes a Christian, has been auditioning Hercules, Apollo, Sol, Invictus, the, the unconquered sun. 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. Of course, over the course of 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, towards the end of the fourth century, you have senators in Rome who get terribly upset when, you know, for instance, statues within the Senate house, emblems within the Senate House that they see as having kind of represented, you know, the symbols of Roman victory and or so on. I mean, it's, it's, 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 that rope, that Rome itself has fallen, that Rome itself has changed.
- [25:07]
A
Okay, but I agree.
- [25:08]
B
Christianity is transformative.
- [25:11]
A
Let's deal with one more event in the 4th century before we take a break. Theodosius, who's the emperor who makes Christianity the state religion, he dies in 395. I think it is. You're the expert, not me. 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, he, his two sons, Eastern half, Western half. Now, that's been done before. Diocletian has experimented with having four emperors, you know, working together, sort of committee. But. 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?
- [25:56]
B
Yes, absolutely, it is. Although, as you say, it's. It's not radically innovative. Because actually, I mean, if you, you know, if you go. You go back to the first century B.C. 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. Absolutely. And that is formally done. So there's. There's, you know, there's a triumvirate, but one of them, Lepidus, gets kind of shunted to one side and essentially, you know, it is formally decreed that the future Augustus will rule the western half and Anthony the eastern half. So in that sense, it's perfectly possible to have an empire where there are kind of two halves and there are two emperors. It's not entirely going against the grain of Roman history for that to happen. And you're right. But from that point on, the sense of there being a Western half and an Eastern half absolutely beds down.
- [26:56]
A
And for those people who don't know, who aren't experts in this, 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?
- [27:10]
B
I mean, yes. So, absolutely. 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 the east is. Is more kind of cultured, more sophisticated, and definitely has more gold.
- [27:26]
A
Okay, very good. We will take a break to inspect our own hoards of gold, and we will Return to talk about more dates when the Roman Empire might have fallen or not. See in a minute.
- [27:40]
B
This episode is brought to you by the Financial Times. I think we both agree, Dominic, that in the clamor of countless voices competing to break the news and telling you the what, the who and the where on these stories, there's often something missing, isn't there?
- [27:56]
A
There is, Tom, because I think to get a true understanding of any story, you really need to know why. Take FT journalism, it goes deeper, providing the insight, analysis and perspective to help you see the whole story and truly understand the issues that matter. Why did it happen? Why is it important? And why will it matter? I've got a brilliant example. So they had an article recently, a fascinating article about why populism bec popular. And this Financial Times article absolutely delved into that. It was so interesting.
- [28:30]
B
And does it nail it?
- [28:31]
A
Yeah, it nailed it. Absolutely nailed it. And it really made me look at populism in a new light.
- [28:36]
B
Well, if you're interested in the why, we have good news.
- [28:40]
A
Yes, listeners to the rest is history can save more than 40% on an annual digital subscription to the Financial times by visiting FT.com/history for the why Financial Times. Tom, I bring tremendous news. Our friends at Unherd have been back in touch. The. The. The free thinking Internet magazine. The crucial question, Tom, do you know how to spell it?
- [29:15]
B
U N H E R D. I'm thrilled to have them back as sponsors because I think they've been going from.
- [29:21]
A
Strength to strength, pushing back against herd mentality.
- [29:24]
B
Pushing back against herd mentality, but also recruiting really excellent columnists among them yourself.
- [29:30]
A
Yes, I write for Unherd 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 I didn't mention religion.
- [29:44]
B
They had Hadley Freeman recently.
- [29:46]
A
Brilliant article, actually.
- [29:48]
B
A great range of different voices, different perspectives, different political standpoints and I think it's a wonderful website. They put what's kind of three or four kind of essays up every day and.
- [30:01]
A
But you wrote an excellent essay for them after the. The sort of Trump Capitol riots, didn't you, about the parallels between the fall of Rome, subject of today's podcast, and contemporary America, didn't you? What did you say?
- [30:14]
B
I said that. So it was about. Was. Was America going to fall as Rome had fallen? And I argued that because the Founding Fathers modeled 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 needn't worry on that account that just because it happened to Rome, it's not necessarily going to happen to America. So cheer up was my message.
- [30:52]
A
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?
- [30:58]
B
So you, I mean, I think, I think the real way in which it kind of affects the, the discourse in America is that the very existence of the parallel leads people to think that, you know, 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, see what you think and, and do check the rest of the magazine because I say it's, it's full of great stuff.
- [31:23]
A
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 pounds off, basically amazing value. Go to unhd.com 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, the 4th 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. About who does that and why and why that's not the fall of Rome?
- [32:37]
B
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 had been left to crumble. Then in the third 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, 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 hoof beats 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. Then they, and essentially the Goths who've crossed over, they attack the Romans. The Romans then attack them. The Romans lose. An emperor is burnt to death in a shed valens and it tears a massive great hole in the, in the available manpower to the, to the Roman Empire. And essentially you then start having bands of Goths roaming around the various provinces and you know, again, this isn't kind of something exceptional. Outsiders have, have repeatedly been kind of brought in within the fabric of the empire and settled and made Roman. The problem with, 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.
- [34:41]
A
So this is an extraordinary thing. And to people who don't know the story of the kind of the, 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, is it. I don't know whether you'd call it a hoard 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, or weakly defended, shall I say. And they're able to just get into the imperial capital and kind of smash everything up. And you know, that would seem extraordinary to, I mean the image of that happening in, you know, any modern society would be unthinkable. Right.
- [35:25]
B
Well, but I think it's the measure of how prosperous and unaware that it is in the process of declining and falling Roman Italy is that people just, it doesn't, you know, cross people's mind that, that that might happen? Because as I say, you know, Italy and Rome have basically been. Rome hasn't been sacked by foreign enemies for centuries and centuries and centuries. And so that's why when it happens, it is such a shock. It affects, it affects what is now a Christian world in contradictory ways. So St. 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, of what's happened. And that is to associate Rome with basically with, with Christianity. Yeah, that therefore the attack on Rome is an attack on, on. On.
- [36:22]
A
The Church Are still pagans at this point, Are they?
- [36:25]
B
I think they, they're Aryan, so they're kind of different. Kind of a different kind of Christianity. Jerome articulates what will become a very, very influential understanding, which is that Rome's eternity is ordained by God, that, that Rome had been brought into existence so as to provide the perfect setting for Jesus to be born and then for the Church to spread. So Jesus is born in the reign of Augustus and they're all the roads and there are 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, the history of the future, that the Book of Revelation and that the, 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, in the kind of great apocalyptic drama that Christians believe is looming is, is. Is kind of important feature of this period. But there is 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. Right. And Augustine says, absolutely not. It doesn't prove this at all. But his argument is, 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 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.
- [39:04]
A
Okay, but to most people who are not, you know, keen listeners to, or readers of Augustine, presumably it does matter that Rome still stands, that the, the tax, taxes are still being paid, aqueducts are being repaired, troops are, you know, 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, although the Western Empire clearly at that point is, is ailing, struggling to cope, it still continues, doesn't it, for decades.
- [39:45]
B
Yes, but it 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 that the ability of 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.
- [40:10]
A
Yeah.
- [40:11]
B
Once that starts to slip centralized control, then the standing temptation for warlords, whether they be Roman or barbarian or 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.
- [40:37]
A
Because they set in train effectively. I suppose if you're a local commander or a local, a gang boss is the wrong word, but you know, 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, not a short step, but it's an inevitable step that eventually these people will say, well, well, I could be king. I mean, I could be king of this place.
- [41:05]
B
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.
- [41:17]
A
Sure, they go to the baths and they.
- [41:18]
B
They go to the baths and things like that, but they're not. They're not military men.
- [41:21]
A
Yeah.
- [41:21]
B
And so essentially this has been franchised out to barbarians who are often, you know, just as, you know, they all speak Latin and, you know, they're as Roman as. As anyone, but they. But they're, you know, it's a bit like in China, you have a very, very civilian ruling elite, a ruling caste, and they are the people who, in the 5th century, can't really cope with it, because that whole kind of framework depends on there being a monopoly of violence that's maintained by the. By. By central emperor. Then you start having to accommodate the military men who inevitably are starting to take over, and we call these barbarians, but they're, you know, often very, very Romanized, as we said. So you start to get, you know, 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. The great grain basket that keeps Rome fed. And once that's gone, then really there's nothing left, and Rome is in real trouble then. And this is the background for this. This key date.
- [42:21]
A
Yeah, I thought we'd come to this. So let's. So let's get to the 4th of September, 476. So Romulus Augustulus has been. He is a boy, am I right? A teenager?
- [42:32]
B
Yeah, A small boy.
- [42:33]
A
I can't remember. He is named after, ironically, Rome's founder, and his second name means Little Augustus. I think it's that, right?
- [42:41]
B
Yeah, it's an abusive nickname. It's Romulus Augustus.
- [42:44]
A
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.
- [42:53]
B
Yes. Yeah.
- [42:54]
A
And he is basically deposed, isn't he, by a guy called Odo Echo, I don't know how to pronounce it. Who's the head of the Ostrogoths.
- [43:03]
B
Yeah.
- [43:03]
A
And who basically just kicks him out of the. I mean, how does it even work?
- [43:07]
B
So. So Romulus Augustus is the. He's the son of a guy called Orestes, who is a kind of a Djokovic guy. He's from, you know, the Balkans.
- [43:20]
A
He's an anti. Vaxxer.
- [43:21]
B
He's a. And he's been. He's been appointed the. The Magister Militum. So basically, you know, the head of. Head of the army by a guy called Julius Nepos, who also is from the Balkans. Julius Nepos. He is the last emperor to be crowned in Rome until Charlemagne.
- [43:41]
A
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?
- [43:50]
B
Yeah, you get the rapes. You get the. Yeah.
- [43:51]
A
And what do you do? Are you doing the paperwork? Are you kind of.
- [43:54]
B
Yeah.
- [43:55]
A
And you have civil servants.
- [43:56]
B
And you have civil servants, all that.
- [43:57]
A
You're just constantly bringing you bad news at this point.
- [43:59]
B
But by this point, essentially your rule has shrunk to Italy and a section of the Balkans.
- [44:04]
A
Okay.
- [44:05]
B
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 Aderka, who 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, you know, the. The feast. And a DOA 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 Romulus Augustulus off to the villa of a famous general from the time of Caesar called Lucullus, the guy who brought the cherry back to Rome. And as far as you know. Yeah, the cherry. He brings the cherry back.
- [44:53]
A
Where the cherry been?
- [44:54]
B
Pontus on the Black Sea.
- [44:56]
A
Okay.
- [44:57]
B
Wow.
- [44:57]
A
That's a claim to fame.
- [44:59]
B
Poor old Romulus Augustulus. Kind of. Well, poor. I mean, they. Yes, he seems to have had quite a nice time. The villa was clearly very swanky.
- [45:05]
A
He's the Richard Cromwell of Romani.
- [45:07]
B
Yeah, he is the Richard Cromwell, 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 Julius Nepos is still very much on the scene. It's just that he's the other side of the Adriatic in the Balkans, and he lasts until 480 when he gets murdered. So if you wanted to say, the end of, you know, the last. When does the Roman Empire in the west fall? It would be 480, I think.
- [45:35]
A
But, but. And this is crucial.
- [45:37]
B
Yes, yes, yes. And the other. But the other part, yeah, is that a Doica 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. He gets his legitimacy from the fact that he's a. He's a friend and an ally of the Emperor in Constantinople. So.
- [46:00]
A
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?
- [46:18]
B
Yeah, that is basically what's happening. And it's a way it. It serves both sides well because it gives prestige to these kings. So he's succeeded by. By Theodoric, who, you know, is very. Is a very Roman figure. And Italy in this, you know, under. Under Oderka, and Theodoric remains very, very Roman consuls continue to be elected. The Senate still sits in. 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. It, you know, the framework is still functioning.
- [46:57]
A
Quick question for you. Has the focus moved from Rome to Ravenna at this point? Because it does move to Ravenna, doesn't it?
- [47:02]
B
Yes. Yeah. So. So Ravenna had been the kind of the. The place again, where they. Where emperors within Italy are based, because it's up north so close to the, you know, close to where all the action is. And you have a. It's open to the sea so that you can kind of slip away and you can have constant communications with Constantinople by sea.
- [47:21]
A
Right.
- [47:21]
B
So, yeah, so everything is in a state of flux.
- [47:24]
A
But if I kind of pitched up Tom in Ravenna in 490 and I said to somebody, if I did some vox pops, you know, has the Roman Empire fallen? Would people have said. What would people have said?
- [47:35]
B
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, he does this in the kind of classic way by issuing very Roman style coins and medallions, but showing himself with a mustache which no, no self respecting Roman would ever wear.
- [48:14]
A
No, no, of course not. They'd look ridiculous.
- [48:17]
B
And further afield, the same thing is kind of happening so in, in Gaul where obviously the hold of, 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 Anastasia is one of the, one of the emperors in Constantinople in the 5th century, sends messages to, to Clovis the Frankish king, saying, you know, I'm appointing you a consul. And this is great. Clovis can pretend to be a consul.
- [48:49]
A
But that's completely meaningless to Clovis. Right. I mean, does it mean anything?
- [48:53]
B
It's not, it's not meaningless because it gives him a kind of stamp of prestige.
- [48:56]
A
Okay.
- [48:57]
B
So it's still likewise, you get kings kind of saying very freely, you know, we, we are subject to you, we acknowledge your, your supremacy. Even though neither, I mean both sides know that this is bogus. But it suits the interests of, of both sides. Both are kind of flattered by it. However.
- [49:14]
A
Yeah.
- [49:15]
B
By, by the beginning of the 6th century, Romans are starting to wake up to the fact that something has, 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.
- [49:46]
A
Yeah.
- [49:47]
B
Who does send an expedition to reconquer first Africa and then Italy.
- [49:52]
A
Well, let's just ask about that tomorrow. You said reconquer. So we've moved on a generation or two from the deposition of Romulus Augustulus 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 basically because the kings are no longer responding to the messages, they're saying, you can stuff your consulship, I'm my own boss now. Who cares what you think? Is that basically what's going on?
- [50:23]
B
Yeah, they're barbarians. I Mean, you know, they are barbarians. It's embarrassing. You know, it's. We're kind of familiar where you have diplomatic or, you know, treaties between powers that eventually one decides it's just not interested in it.
- [50:38]
A
Yeah.
- [50:39]
B
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 the collapse of infrastructure and of kind of forced movement of people. So I think that if you want to date for when does, when does the Roman Empire in the west really finish? I think it's then and I think ironically the grave digger of the Roman Empire in Italy is Justinian, the Roman Emperor who's trying to bring Italy back into the embrace because the very act.
- [51:24]
A
Of, of the reconquest basically shatters the economy and the sort of landscape of the, of Italy.
- [51:30]
B
No more Senate, no more chariot races. Yeah. No more consoles. That's, that's when it ends.
- [51:35]
A
But just to wind this story up because we'll, 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.
- [52:00]
B
Greens that riots and they have triumphs. If Justinian celebrates a triumph just as Romans had done in the streets of Roman. Yeah, so, so it very much carries on.
- [52:08]
A
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.
- [52:22]
B
He's a Latin speaker.
- [52:23]
A
Okay.
- [52:24]
B
He speaks Latin.
- [52:25]
A
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 mid 6th century.
- [52:50]
B
I mean, just Rome has now been brought into, back into the Roman Empire, but it's in a bad way.
- [52:55]
A
It's going to fall out again pretty soon, isn't it?
- [52:57]
B
A few centuries. Yeah. It's there for a few centuries more.
- [53:00]
A
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.
- [53:12]
B
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.
- [53:19]
A
Undead Rome. Zombie Romans. So return to us next time for zombie Romans. Goodbye.
- [53:24]
B
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@restishistorypod.com that's restishorypod.com.