BOOK REVIEW: When barbarians were not

OPINION:

THE RUIN OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

By James O’Donnell

Ecco, $15.99, 448 pages

Reviewed by Claire Hopley

As a proper noun “ruin” indicates something broken, and for many centuries of its existence that was the case with the Roman Empire. But in “The Ruin of the Roman Empire,” James O’Donnell focuses more on the other meaning of ruin - a destructive course of action, premeditated or otherwise, which, in this case, caused that ruin.

If asked who undermined the grandeur that was Rome, most of us would point to those Vandals, Goths, Huns and Franks, whom we met in high school history books. They appear in the fifth century as curved red arrows swooping from Northern and Eastern Europe right at the corrupt and decadent heart of Rome. The Ur-source of this view is Edward Gibbon, who began to publish “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” in 1776, perhaps coincidentally but nonetheless intriguingly, the very year that the United States detached itself from Britain’s empire.

Today, the United States seems just as unrivaled as the greatest military power in the world, but Mr. O’Donnell draws attention to the misguided notions that recent American governments have shared with Imperial Rome - implicitly highlighting the cautionary lessons of history.

In particular, he notes distant and inconclusive military ventures that have wasted energy and treasure for little reward, and the sheer ignorance that has led to major misjudgments. He does not belabor this point, but he makes clear that when leaders are not up to their task, either because of ideological intransigence or personal weakness, their countries inevitably flounder.

Such was certainly the case in Rome. Its famed decadent senators and lascivious emperors are not figments of our imagination, nor are the emperors who were just too young or too dumb for the job. But, beyond this, Mr. O’Donnell turns older historiography on its head by showing that the red-arrow invaders, though called pejoratively “barbarians,” were settlers rather than ravagers, and numbered many skilled generals and administrators in their horde.

In particular, Mr. O’Donnell shows that after 330, when Constantine made Constantinople the capital of the empire, the newcomers who moved into Italy, Gaul and Spain effectively preserved the Western Roman Empire. Most notably, in the early sixth century Theodoric, one of the maligned Goths, stabilized life in Italy and set the stage for prosperity and perhaps the continued integrity of the empire. Unfortunately, ruling from Constantinople in the years after Theodoric’s death, Justinian squandered his gains by losing control of the borders, and most disastrously, by not concluding a peace with the Persians.

Almost equally problematic was Justinian’s efforts to resolve the doctrinal differences among Christians. Most of these were about the divine and human characteristics of Jesus Christ. Since doctrinal allegiance was often regional, Justinian thought that if rival theologians could reach agreement, then he could decree one form of Christianity for the whole empire - a consummation devoutly to be wished from the administrative as well as religious point of view. But Mr. O’Donnell shows that chasing the chimera of Christian accord wasted time Justinian could have better spent more fruitfully. In his view, Justinian almost always chose the wrong policy. Even his buildings in Constantinople emerge from this book as the overweening of a man plodding on and on, ever more out of his depth as the dream of restoring the empire faded into the distance.

Mr. O’Donnell’s analysis of the geopolitics and doctrinal controversies of late Antiquity is based on wide and close reading of the rather amazing number of texts that have survived from that era. His citations from these are so many and various that paradoxically they raise questions about what was happening in the empire that escaped the radar of these records.

Many people must have been scarcely aware that the Romans were their rulers. Christianity was the official religion, but the frequency with which emperors excoriated pagan practices suggests the persistence of older religions.

Reading between the lines, we can also glimpse the phenomenal effort needed for the Roman’s monumental buildings, the epidemics of bubonic plague and other diseases that tore through the cities, and the almost constant threat of famine if the weather or client states didn’t behave as they ought.

Mr. O’Donnell ends his book somewhat elegaically with an account of the work of the wise and talented Pope Gregory. Yet his insistence that the various invaders were seriously concerned with good order suggests how much of the empire survived. Constantinople remained its capital until 1453, when the Ottomans conquered it and made it the jewel in their own Imperial crown. Similarly, the Franks, who invaded the Roman province of Gaul eventually turned it into the empire of Charlemagne, whose successors reigned as the Holy Roman emperors of Europe until Napoleon put a stop to their titles in 1806.

Still today, Europe and the Middle East are full of Roman remains. Only yesterday I ran into a burly centurion and 20 shield-bearing followers - actually schoolchildren on a field trip to the Roman city of Chester in England, where I am writing this review. They were en route to see the heating system of a Roman house, part of a Roman amphitheater, and most important, the massive wall the Romans built around this city on its northernmost frontier.

The diligence with which such ruins are visited suggests the fascination of the Roman Empire. So, too, does much of the governmental architecture in Washington. Understanding what the Romans actually did, who ruined their empire and what we have inherited from them is therefore vital to the understanding of ourselves. Mr. O’Donnell is an excellent guide: a scholar who is both witty as well as learned, and most important, a reader who looks behind the texts of late Antiquity and asks what really was going on.

Claire Hopley is a writer and critic in Amherst, Mass.