For Syme, Roman history was shaped by the people at the top. Women, slaves, peasants and the like existed to buttress their power. The sheer brilliance of his analysis cast into the shadows an earlier work that was no less influenced by the catastrophic events of the earlier twentieth century, Michael Rostovtzeff’s Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (Rostovtzeff 1957, originally published in 1926).
While Syme’s style of historiography could flatter the egos of scholars who might insist on passing judgment upon the foibles of great figures of the past, it also offered some comfort to all who wished to see evil as the product of individuals. By focusing attention on the emperors and those around them, Roman historians tended not to ask how they got away with it. Surely Tacitus saw through it all, and his history could be read as if it were the work of some proto-Solzhenitsyn, exposing foibles of the regime that all discerning observers could agree upon. Sadly such a view would not have much in common with that of Tacitus. Tacitus thought that the imperial system was the inevitable result of the failure of government in the last centuries bce. His governing class was complicit in the acts of Tiberius, Claudius, and Nero. Tacitus saw the structure of imperial power arise from a dialogue between emperors and their subjects. Tacitus’ vision shared a great deal with that of Rostovtzeff, whose basic thesis was that power arose from the people. In the first two centuries ce, Rostovt-zeff’s emperors supported the interests of what he termed the urban bourgeoisie, before switching direction and becoming the tools of the peasant armies they had previously kept in check, armies that shared the rural population’s class hatred for those in the cities. Exploitation of the peasantry led to revolution and military dictatorship. Rostovtzeff’s vision, born, as he made very clear, of his experience of the Russian revolution, and less explicitly, perhaps, of his personal relationships with some early leaders of the Bolshevik movement, did not let the people off the hook so easily as did Syme’s. If things went wrong, the average person was complicit to the historical process. In Rostovtzeff’s view of the empire, the peasant was just as worthy of study as was the senator.
In a sense, Rostovtzeff could be more easily dismissed than Syme. For while Syme possessed an unrivalled mastery of the details of his subject, Rostovtzeff’s use of ill-defined modern terminology and admitted tendency to get his facts wrong from time to time invited dismissal of his broader vision. He could easily appear antiquated, and perhaps even a bit amateurish in his use of early twentieth-century sociology. But, even though they rarely admitted it, his critics still tended to operate within the parameters set by Rostovtzeff. One could deny that long distance trade was important, could argue that the empire existed basically at the subsistence level, but the destruction of Rostovtzeff’s version of the economy left further questions in its wake. What did matter and how could historical change be explained? At the same time, some scholars began to wonder if Rostovtzeff’s understanding of the ancient world, based upon personal experience of a society making a rapid transition from medieval to modern times, was all that inaccurate. Unlike many of his critics, Rostovtzeff had met illiterate peasants striving to make a living with inadequate tools, and felt the contempt of the urban dweller for the rural. Conditions of life in late nineteenth-century rural Russia were closer to those in the Roman Empire than they were to those of the mid-twentieth century.
World History
