Story of Alexander

But that one was critical. Though they knew the story of Alexander, the Romans never really learned his lesson. The fatal flaw of the Roman empire—if we must think empire is a good thing—was that it had for-gotten how to be imperialist. It had no strategy for north, south, or east, and when from any of those directions enemies arose who understood the Romans and their achievement full well and better than the Romans understood their rivals, then the Roman venture faltered.

The prosperity and peace of the Roman empire were unmistakably good things, however one assesses the price that was paid to achieve them. It is reasonable to lament their passing, or at least to wish that more could have been preserved. In the absence of strategy or vision, though, Rome had few unexploited advantages left.

The city of Rome

The city of Rome, once Justinian’s wars did their worst, never rebounded to more than a shadow of itself, rising in the time of the Renaissance from long misery as a malarial swamp, then settling from the Renaissance until the present for being a showplace—that is, a tourist trap. To be sure, in the irony of history, the final lesson that societies learned from Rome was a variant on Tacitus’s quip about making its emperors somewhere else. The long-term lesson now was that “Romes”— new Romes—could themselves be made someplace else, no longer just on the Tiber. Nowhere west of Tibet have we seen, since late antiquity, the emergence of great powers with wide territorial ambitions that weren’t imitating Rome in one way or another.

Constantine was the first to imitate it, with his parody of the seven hills plunked down on the Bosporus, and the Arabs would make Damascus and Baghdad Romes in their own time. To the northeast, Kiev would become the third Rome and Moscow its rival, the latter clinging to the word czar (which is merely Caesar heard at a distance) to the end of its ambitions. The Frankish king Charles, whose spin doctors persuaded us to call him Charles the Great (Charlemagne), and the later Frankish monarch Napoleon, sought restoration of empire on various pretexts. Charlemagne thought empire was his for the taking because the throne in Constantinople was inappropriately held by an impossible pretender; Napoleon, observing the panoply and politi¬cal disunity of the last days of the Holy Roman Empire, compelled it to dissolve in 1806 to make way for his own imperial pretensions. Each of these rulers of the Franks made sure that Rome’s religious power—in the person of the reigning pope, who crowned him—would underscore the legitimacy of his role.

Monks to be sure

Monks, to be sure, found themselves in communities more often than not, and a social expectation developed that only the holiest could be allowed to live on their own, entirely detached. They were the ones most willing to expose themselves to public view by enacting a visible role, or the ones most willing to retreat entirely and genuinely from human contact. Others were expected to remain in houses with fellow monks and place themselves under some supervision.

Long influence

One sixth-century monk whose views would have long influence, an Italian from the hill country southeast of Rome, began his set of rules for monastic life by sternly insisting on stability—that is, on regular residence in one place under a particular authority. He had stinging rebuke for the monks he called “sarabaites” and “gyrovagues”—the kind who went about on their own, begging for sustenance, and offering contact with their presumed holiness promiscuously to one and all. Such a vigorous rebuke must mean that the practice was common, and one man’s fraud is another man’s saint. To see those figures as atypical and necessarily either virtuous or vicious is a mistake. We should instead see and admire their instability and their ability to elude the nets their society would set out to control them, even when monasteries themselves began to wield such nets.

In different parts of the Christian worlds, monks took on different appearances and had different fates. In Egypt, they were by now long settled in desert fastnesses not far from the cities of the Nile, and they also thronged the cities, particularly Alexandria. The financial resources that went into the churches, and that grew as churches acquired property, were the underpinnings of the communities, the implicit tax that sustained unproductive hands. The urban oppressed poor of classical antiquity were now joined by the urban privileged poor, these monks. A monk might be poor by choice, but he had little risk of starving to death. The monasteries in town and outside it were hotbeds of spiritual authority, which some would call charlatanism. Wanderers and the renegades might be reined in not by sage teaching but by their own desire to settle down and share the power of great monks and great houses.

Preoccupied by dreams of Romanness

What must it have been like to be in the Italy that suffered these waves of war back and forth for seventeen years? Many people, away from the beaten path, were spared direct experience of savagery and loss, though even those who saw no battles saw soldiers and worse coming to seize what they needed by the brutal informal taxation of wartime. Famine in Emilia and Etruria in 549, Procopius tells us, left men desperate enough to grind acorns into a kind of wheat and bake bread from them, and there were rumors of cannibalism.10 A few people, most of them probably among the wealthy elite whom we know, preoccupied by dreams of Romanness and very likely power, may have wished or even schemed for a Justinianic invasion, but none can have taken any satisfaction in the melancholy sequence of events that unfolded or in the devastation of society and landscape that came afterward. No good thing came from this war. Most people simply suffered, dreaded, and hoped for release.

Totila risked a pitched battle

Belisarius was gone by the time it ended, and Totila was dead. Unable to resist the temptation to achieve a lasting victory, Totila risked a pitched battle at Busta Gallorum in 552, and there defeat and death caught up with him. Procopius gives us a rousing picture of the wild war dance the king performed on the threshold of battle, but for a man whose whole experience of war had come fifty years after Theoderic’s settlement in Italy, anything that risked attracting such a parody must have been a gesture rather than a living tradition, like a modern army officer carrying a sword with his dress uniform. The Amalization and gothicization of the army and regime in Italy during Theoderic’s last years could have encouraged such posturing, but the almost instantaneous evaporation of Gothic culture in Italy when the war was finally over suggests how little could now be credited to barbarian vitality.

The eunuch general Narses had replaced Belisarius a few months before Busta Gallorum, coming from the Balkans, up the coast from Salona, making his way to Ravenna by June 552 with an army of 30,000. Fresh troops, they faced Totila and defeated him. Only a fragment of resistance faded away into the lands north of the Po, there to go to ground and disappear. Procopius says the Goths were expelled, but his successor in the writing of semiofficial history, Agathias, says not. It may have made no difference.

Military occupation was now the formal means of Roman governance in the land that had known the oligarchic liberty of the Roman republic. Narses would remain in Ravenna off and on until 568, and Byzantine rule would continue there until the eighth century, always based in the cowards’ capital—marsh-girt for defense—with a port nearby offering the most direct boat route to Constantinople. (Narses’s departure coincided with the Lombards’ arrival in Italy, leading later generations to tell an improbable story about Italians who were unhappy with his rule complaining to the emperor Justin II, and Narses retiring in a snit to Naples as a result. It is just as likely that Narses thought the Lombards would make useful soldiers and so invited them in, then lost control of them customized tours balkan.)

A quarter century

Justinian’s response to the victory—after a quarter century on the throne, at the end of a dispiriting decade—was to try, ever the man of legal codification, to define and shape the society he controlled by writing a prescriptive text. In this case, the text was legal, not ecclesiastical: the “Pragmatic Sanction,” issued in 554 .

The document is not without fantasy. It annuls all of Totila’s acts, a dangerously destabilizing decision, tearing open wounds that would otherwise have begun to heal. Those who had sold property under duress in Totila’s time could now recover it by refunding the price they had collected for it. It restored exiles, prisoners, slaves, and indentured farmworkers to the status they had enjoyed before Totila, on the assumption that the state of affairs in the early 540s, after Belisarius’s first victory, was legal and Roman.

Scapegoating of Christianity led to outrage

His blindnesses, moreover, were significant, not least his inability—for he published his first volumes in the same year Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations—to grasp the main lines of economic argument that need to be spun around these societies in order to understand their development. In his own time, his scapegoating of Christianity led to outrage, but his scholarship defeated objections. Not until the last two generations did scholars rehabilitate priests and barbarians alike, not to whitewash, but to recognize that simplistic solutions always mislead. “They were, those people, a kind of solution,” the poet Cavafy said ruefully of barbarians who failed to materialize and could not play the role of scapegoat assigned them.

The myth has two things wrong with it. First, this expansive multiethnic and long-lived community of nations had little do with anything Roman. The most prominent citizens of the Roman empire in its most prosperous times lived far from Italy (mainly in the cities of the east) and owed their wealth to many factors, of which the brutal imposition of the Roman peace was only one, and not indispensable. To make sense of the economic, social, cultural, religious, and even political history of, for example, Asia Minor in the second century CE requires various kinds of competence and broad specific knowledge. It’s narrow and limiting to connect the urbane people and societies of that period and place with a community that had its base in a trading post at a crossing of the Tiber River 900 years earlier. But because men and women in the second century believed the story of Romulus and Remus and how that trading post became a great city and founded a great empire, they made it true and relevant—at least to some extent.

Second, the traditional story offers a single narrative point of view, one focus, and a sole omniscient narrator who identifies with an empire seen at the scale of empire itself. The historian who chooses the Roman empire for his topic will inevitably under-imagine the distinctiveness of local cultures and places in that world. Even worse, looking at the history of the Roman empire makes it easy to neglect points of view beyond the ken of the Roman elite. We lose the perspective of provincials, soldiers, women, slaves, businessmen—everyone who lived outside the Beltway, so to speak. Much of the best and most exciting scholarly investigation of our time has plunged with relish into Rome’s provinces and sought out its many and various peoples.

Here’s an example: in the late fifth century, the Isaurians at last fell under Constantinople’s political control. But to judge by the brightly colored maps we post on classroom walls, Isauria, in southern Asia Minor, had long been part of the empire. Because it was mountainous, sparsely populated, and off the beaten track, and so had long been a marginal outpost from which a few soldiers or adventurers might occasionally emerge, there couldn’t have been much “Roman” about it. Isaurians first show up in the Roman empire’s lore more than sporadically when they are the stereotypical heavies in narratives of the fourth and fifth centuries— “barbarian” in every way except that they found their homes inside rather than outside the empire’s borders. Then suddenly their chieftain, Tara- sicodissa, famous for having no kneecaps and thus being able to run faster than ordinary men, ascended the imperial throne. By promptly taking the reassuringly and traditionally Greek name of Zeno, he guaranteed that he would disappear into the imperial lists unremarked, as he wished. Within a generation, Isauria was quietly paying taxes and we hear no more of Isaurian bandits and brigands. The Roman empire had just gotten there a few centuries late stoletov bulgaria tours.

Eurasian landmass

No empire is an island, least of all one in a dead-end corner of the Eurasian landmass. The forested, mountainous, but well-watered and fertile land of the remote western peninsula that trapped all the migrating peoples who moved into it was only a small part of a great stage on which many others interacted. Travel east from Rome’s Rhine through land progressively less promising, skirting your way through the marshes of Poland, shying away from the northern winter toward the plains of Scythia not yet turned into farmland, and go on into the steppes of western and central Asia, and you’ll have seen a little of the neighborhood that Rome lived in.

Rome, to be sure, still holds our imaginations. The ancient Greeks appeal easily to lovers of beauty and tragedy, but also to flinty-eyed political hawks who prefer to relive Persian, Peloponnesian, and Alexandrian wars. The traditional middle ages call to sentimentalists who admire virtuous primitives, and the Renaissance endures for Whigs of all generations with their self-glorifying provincialism.

Huns and Persians draw few modern enthusiasts. Meanwhile, the allegiance that several generations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German scholars expressed to the “Germanic” invaders of the Roman empire (the Goths, Vandals, and Lombards, above all) has largely collapsed, toppling under the weighty disgrace of German nationalism following World War II, and undone by more keenly skeptical scholarship. But classical Rome lives for moralists, those people who always know exactly what other people should be doing.