Bryan Ward-Perkins has recently excoriated cultural historians for failing, with our talk of cultural ‘‘transformation’’ rather than ‘‘decline,’’ to address the material devastation brought about by repeated war and a collapsing economy (Ward-Perkins 2005). There are two important points here for the historian of gender and family. First, that the developments in family and gender identity in Late Antiquity can be understood only with reference to what we know about the material reality of the period. The second, equally important, is that political, military, and economic ‘‘realities’’ often had cultural causes.
Peter Heather has argued that a crucial element in the fifth-century failure of the western empire was the ‘‘opting out’’ of landowners who, faced with a choice between vigorous barbarian warlords in the neighborhood and a distant Roman government whose armies might take months to arrive if they arrived at all, frequently made the self-interested decision to cast their lot with the local strong man in the hope that their own estates would be preserved (Heather 2005). Even the less well off could see opportunity in defection. We see this, for example, in the fifth-century historian Priscus of Panium, who described his surprise at meeting, during a diplomatic mission to Attila the Hun, a fellow Greek who had some years before been taken captive by the Hunnic chief Onegesius, and had subsequently neglected to return to the Romans, even when his freedom had been earned. In his view, the Romans could not match the package of low taxes and clean, honest living available among the Huns (Priscus, Hist., fr. Blockley 1981: 268-73). Of course, this was a view straight out of Tacitus (Wolfram 1988), but it may still have been widely held: indeed, Priscus’ Latin contemporary Salvian of Marseille makes a similar point (Salvian, On the Government of God, 5. 21-3, Lagarrigue 1975).
No military historian today would argue that the Romans were not in with a chance of defending the limes in the fifth and sixth centuries, had they made doing so their first priority. (On what follows, see also Gillett, Halsall, and Vanderspoel, chs. 26, 27, and 28, respectively.) Rather, it is widely agreed that the Romans squandered a considerable military advantage through what amounts to perpetual civil war in the repeated succession crises of the fifth century - even the comparatively stable fourth century saw lapses, such as the failure to capture the Gothic leader Alaric in ad 397, that can be attributed to the army’s uncertainty over who was in command (Matthews 1975: 272). Modern scholarship suggests that, far from there being a continuous decline through the so-called ‘‘third-century crisis’’ across the fourth century into the sack of Rome and the eventual annexation of the western empire by Gothic kings in the fifth, the third and fourth centuries were characterized largely by prosperity and economic vitality. But, faced with threats from Persia and the Germanic peoples on the eastern and northern limes respectively, the Roman armies were repeatedly deployed to less than full advantage, or even led against one another, as emperors tried to insure that no one general became powerful enough to make a bid for the purple, while the generals attempted to crush one another’s ambitions. A thousand self-interested decisions, many of them minor in themselves, amounted to a suicidal failure by Roman men to place the salus populi romani ahead of personal gain.
At the same time, the old techniques of accommodation and absorption of subject peoples were not functioning smoothly. The failure to settle Alaric’s Goths on an amicable basis in the decades leading up to the sack of Rome in AD 410 is the classic example here, but there are countless others. If Rome failed to assimilate the Goths and Vandals as it had assimilated countless other subject peoples across a millennium of Mediterranean dominance, this was in essence a cultural failure as much as a military failure. The two critical tasks of empire, military victory and the coopting of non-Roman elites into the Roman hierarchy of power (see Ando 2000), both had a crucial cultural component. Each process involved a choreography of thousands of people who needed to fall into line quickly and efficiently - and to guide others in doing so - with a minimum of counterproductive input. The failure to stifle self-interest, where it did not coincide with duty, was essentially a cultural failure. But the Roman men in power after the death of Theodosius I in ad 395 seem to have been less bothered by failure than by the high cost of success. From the point of view of gender and family history, we may say that Roman mothers were no longer raising their sons to do their duty or to die trying.
Guy Halsall has breathed new life into Gibbon’s view that the fall of the Roman Empire followed from a failure of Roman manliness, by calling attention to how the Later Roman Empire differed both from the early empire and from barbarian societies, in that the hierarchy of civil authority depended on a population of literate aristocrats without military experience, instead of requiring that civil authority be ‘‘earned’’ through military prowess. Thus in the Notitia Dignitatum, the Roman list of offices that has come down to us in its early fifth-century form, a disproportionate number of the regiments had ‘‘barbarian’’ names, alongside others bearing the names of ferocious animals, not because the soldiers were members of a barbarian people, but because certain peoples, like lions, were perceived as icons of masculine prowess (Halsall 2004). This meant that military power itself could slip away from being perceived as an intrinsically ‘‘Roman’’ virtue, even if the literati were raised on a diet of epic poetry and Roman military history.
A compelling alternative is offered by Peter Brown, who argued in The Rise of Western Christendom (Brown 2003) that the crisis of the fifth and sixth century was not caused by cultural factors at all, but was rather the inevitable outcome - long in reaching fruition - of the sheer implausibility of Roman military success, tensions that had been building ever since the Roman armies had pushed the frontier to its fullest expansion in the second century. On this view, Christianity can be understood as part of the solution - a new technology for establishing the bonds necessary to an ordered society - rather than part of the problem. This evocative hypothesis is in many ways compatible with Halsall’s approach, in that it leaves open the question of how gender fits in. A far-reaching examination of the gender culture of the Roman civil bureaucracy is urgently called for, but such a task is beyond the scope of this chapter. I shall seek instead to establish initial terms of reference for understanding the role of gender in the fall of Rome, in the light of what we now know about Roman strategies for establishing hegemony and reciprocity; cultural strategies centered on religion, gender ideals, and the family.
World History
