As a field of study, Late Antiquity is largely the product of Anglo-American scholarship, and it is perhaps two generations old (Ando 2001: 371-5; see Rebenich, ch. 6). It came into existence in part through the discovery of new subjects for inquiry and in part through the rejection of earlier preoccupations. Thus Peter Brown, in his remarkable review of A. H. M. Jones’s Later Roman Empire, simultaneously applauds its erudition in matters of law and government and removes those topics from the nascent field of Late Antiquity altogether: Jones, Brown suggests, had provided ‘‘not a complete social history of the Later Roman Empire, but the first, irreplaceable chapter in the history of the Byzantine state’’ (Brown 1972a: 73). The discovery of Late Antiquity also sets Anglophone scholarship of the last four decades apart from historiographic traditions in Germany, France, and Italy, in each of which the end of Antiquity is attributed to a variety of causes and made the antecedent of eras marked, in the eyes of historians, by radically different characteristics (Marrou 1938: 658-702; Momigliano 1963a; Hubinger 1968, 1969; Cracco Ruggini 1988; Brown et al. 1997; Carrie 2001).
Even so, all these varied traditions take their cue from Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the first volume of which was published in 1776. A French translation was started in the same year; and German and Italian translations began to follow in 1779. Publication of the complete work in English was achieved in 1788, and it has remained in print ever since. The life of its text and the responses it has generated have been the subject of two works of reference and a recent monograph (Norton 1940; Craddock 1987; Womersley 2002). Yet, the nature of Gibbon’s influence consists neither in his overall periodization - no one has followed him in dating the fall of Rome to 1453 - nor in his specific arguments, which are often unexpected and have just as often been misread. Rather, it rests upon the language and form he gave to the trope of‘‘fall’’; upon the power of his portrait of Antonine Rome, which emerges as a simulacrum of Enlightenment Europe avant la lettre; and upon the strength of his conviction not only that Rome fell but also that
A Companion to Late Antiquity. Edited by Philip Rousseau © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-11980-1
Its fall mattered, that it was ‘‘a revolution which will ever be remembered, and is still felt by the nations of the earth’’ (Gibbon 1994 (hereafter DF), i. 31), ‘‘the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene in the history of mankind’’ (DF iii. 1024).
I highlight the notion of ‘‘decline and fall,’’ not only because Gibbon gave near final form to a dominant preoccupation of European historiography, for which that phrase might serve as token (Pocock 2003), but also because it is precisely in its evaluation and consequent rejection of that tradition that modern historiography diverges from Gibbon’s own. Preferring to live in a world transformed rather than fallen, modern scholars of Late Antiquity have focused on a set of phenomena - ceremony and asceticism, poverty and paideia - analyzed in such a way as not only to suggest the contours of an age but also to assign to them heuristic value in the interests of a new periodization. The axes along which earlier generations charted decline - those of law and government, political culture and civic institutions - have been either superseded or ascribed to periods of history not denominated ‘‘late antique.’’
But, if our modern preoccupations were not Gibbon’s, he did not ignore them. In his view, monks and eunuchs were not agents or engines of social change: they were, rather, symptomatic: if not accidental then incidental consequences of other movements in culture, society, and politics. Writing of eunuchs, for example, Gibbon believed that ‘‘the use and value of those effeminate slaves gradually rose with the decline of the empire’’ (DF i. 182); and on monks, ‘‘If it be possible to measure the interval, between the philosophic writings of Cicero and the sacred legend of Theodoret, between the character of Cato and that of Simeon, we may appreciate the memorable revolution which was accomplished in the Roman empire within a period of five hundred years’’ (DF ii. 429). Reading Gibbon thus confronts us with a periodization that subordinates our interests to another narrative, and it behooves us to ask what changes in culture and society that greatest of historians privileged in narrating and explaining both decline and fall and, necessarily, the start and end of Late Antiquity. In that task we are at the very outset doubly confounded, first by that sleight of hand with which Gibbon several times identifies the reign of Augustus as a turning point in the fortunes of the empire, even though he commences his narration more than two centuries after Augustus reorganized the government (DFi. 211-12; see also 127-8 and 611-12), and, second, by his endpoint. For if his choice of AD 1453 requires his process of ‘‘decline and fall’’ to include what we now think of as Late Antiquity, we have to acknowledge that choice problematic. Not only was it not a canonical date for the fall of Rome: Gibbon failed to make it so, one obvious reverse in the pervasive influence of this most canonical text.
If Gibbon’s Late Antiquity is not quite ours - despite its remaining the sole great narrative of that period in any language - it was not the one expected by his contemporaries either. To understand why, we need to appreciate the historical and historiographic contexts in which Gibbon worked. As a historian, he drew upon four bodies of work in crafting his text. First, Enlightenment histories of manners aimed above all to explain the progress of human society, along axes both moral and economic, toward a condition in which the ability of citizens to exercise their virtue and maintain their station was grounded positively in commerce and property and, more distantly, in systems of law, and then, more negatively, in their freedom from confessional interference (Womersley 1988; Pocock 1999b). Second, Gibbon rested his narrative upon the extraordinary chronological spadework achieved in ecclesiastical historiography. Third, remarkable efforts to recover nonliterary evidence, undertaken by the Academie des Inscriptions as the champion of a more scientific history, were making possible new forms of historical writing (Kelley 1970; Pocock 1999a: 137-68, 207-39, 261-74). Fourth, and more remotely, there was by Gibbon’s day a long tradition of both writing about and questioning the reality of the fall of Rome (Pocock 2003). Those responsible for these separate schools of thought and bodies of work found much to admire in Gibbon’s account; but they were also both astonished and dismayed by his forging of a new genre based upon their own approaches but reaching well beyond them.
It was clerics - ecclesiastical historians, whom Gibbon dubbed ‘‘the watchmen of the Holy City’’ - who felt most aggrieved, and whose attacks he countered with a lengthy essay, ‘‘A Vindication of some passages in the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’’ (1779). The exchange did not end there (Womersley 2002). Their sense that all was not right in Gibbon’s History was correct; but his errors were not those they identified, nor did they characterize his argument correctly. Although he would not excuse its sordid past, Gibbon did not blame the Church for the fall of Rome. Yet, in an important sense, the reaction of the ecclesiastical establishment confirmed Gibbon in two crucial convictions, one historiographic, the other political: first, that ‘‘in the relation of religious events’’ few ‘‘deserved the singular praise of holding a steady and equal hand’’ (DFiii. 1171); and, second, that while ‘‘the operation of... religious motives was variously determined by the temper and situation of mankind’’ (DF ii. 416), established religions had their own recursive power over the societies in which they worked. For though they might once have been products of societal forces, the institutions of utopian and scriptural religions in particular, ascribing their own legitimacy to extra-human powers, come inevitably to exercise an autonomous influence upon those societies. This had been the most pernicious effect of the credulity of some Christians, among whom miracle tales ‘‘debased and vitiated the faculties of the mind; they corrupted the evidence of history; and superstition gradually extinguished the hostile light of philosophy and science’’ (DF ii. 428).
Against those backdrops - the one sketching Gibbon’s context, the other our own - I shall begin to explore the unfolding of Gibbon’s Late Antiquity. What understanding of society and of social change made Antonine, or even Augustan, Rome the starting point for decline, and what were the devices whereby Gibbon so famously made Christianity the handmaid of politics? In what might decline and fall consist, and what can it tell us about Late Antiquity?
World History
