Any period as remote as Late Antiquity we see through a thick haze of memory and interpretation. What meaning we decide to attach to the phrase ‘‘Late Antiquity’’ will be governed not only by our own interests and prejudices but also by the account of the period we have received from more recent observers. The same will have been true of those observers themselves; observers who, in the case of Late Antiquity, are scattered across more than fifteen centuries.
Those observers are part of Late Antiquity’s future. They thought of the late Roman centuries in ways that the people of the period itself could rarely have imagined. What must fascinate the historian is the variety of viewpoints that were thus established, to all of which we stand as heirs. A moment’s reflection will confirm that such an outcome is hardly surprising; but it remains easy to forget how differently the same series of events could seem to people in changed circumstances - leaving aside, for the moment, the fact that more was discovered or remembered as time passed.
The five chapters that follow, therefore, present us with two sets of data: first, the shifting viewpoints of those who came later; and second, the accumulated judgments that we must now come to terms with in making our own historical assessments.
Men and women of the Byzantine period, right down to the fifteenth century, seem to have been content to imagine that they were part of what we now think of as late Roman history. What Stratis Papaioannou helps us to see, however, is the conceit, perhaps even the illusion, that informed that view; and his account reminds us how easily nostalgia and traditional affirmations can overlook or occlude deep change (ch. 2). In the medieval west, by contrast, there was a readiness to reform and restore; but Conrad Leyser’s most telling point, perhaps, is that the appeal to ancient models could be an instrument of transformation: one had to adjust one’s view of the past, if one wished to put it to the service of a contemporary agenda (ch. 3).
The restoration of the past took on a different complexion in the Renaissance. Mark Vessey reminds us that there was considerable tension between an admiration for what had been ‘‘lost’’ in medieval darkness and a loyalty to elements of Christian culture that were precisely what the ‘‘Middle Ages’’ had preserved: one suspects that applause for ‘‘rebirth’’ was often designed to assuage the sense that one was not as novel as one might have wished (ch. 4). With the Enlightenment comes, in Clifford Ando’s chapter, a more disengaged sense that the Roman world really had collapsed, and that modernity, whether of ideas or technologies, represented a more honest sense of progress (ch. 5). That confidence would be modified during the Romantic period; but Stefan Rebenich (ch. 6) presents us with a vivid description of scholarly enthusiasms, which provided (on the basis, to be fair, of exhaustive learning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) not only an inconceivably richer database than even Gibbon could marshal but also fuel for the emotional and constitutional needs of the nation-state (feelings and institutions that would eventually undermine all taste for empire).
Memory, however, is never content with what is recent; and we are not merely creatures of the nineteenth century. All contemporary accounts of the Late Antiquity have their Byzantine, medieval, Renaissance, or Enlightenment layers. The long process of recollection and analysis is, even yet, inescapable - indeed, we should not feel obliged to escape it. Few of our judgments would be intelligible or convincing if we did not acknowledge how much our legacy sustains, without compromising, the freshest account of scholarly inquiry.
World History
