The Ruin of the Roman Empire Read online

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  Ruin

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  OF THE

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  Roman

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  EMPIRE

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  james j. o’donnell

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  This is Ann’s book

  contents

  Preface iv

  Overture

  1

  s

  pa rt i

  t h e ode r ic ’s wor l d

  1. Rome in 500: Looking Backward

  47

  2. The World That Might Have Been

  107

  s

  pa rt i i

  j u s t i n i a n ’s wor l d

  3. Being Justinian

  177

  4. Opportunities Lost

  229

  5. Wars Worse Than Civil

  247

  s

  pa rt i i i

  gr eg ory ’s wor l d

  6. Learning to Live Again

  303

  7. Constantinople Deflated: The Debris of Empire

  342

  8. The Last Consul

  364

  Epilogue

  385

  List of Roman Emperors 395

  Notes 397

  Further Reading 409

  Credits and Permissions 411

  Index 413

  About the Author

  Other Books by James J. O Donnell

  ’

  Credits

  Cover

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  preface

  An American soldier posted in Anbar province during the twilight war

  over the remains of Saddam’s Mesopotamian kingdom might have been

  surprised to learn he was defending the westernmost frontiers of the an-

  cient Persian empire against raiders, smugglers, and worse coming from

  the eastern reaches of the ancient Roman empire. This painful recycling

  of history should make him—and us—want to know what unhealable

  wound, what recurrent pathology, what cause too deep for journalists and

  politicians to discern draws men and women to their deaths again and

  again in such a place. The history of Rome, as has often been true in the

  past, has much to teach us.

  The reign of Caesar Augustus consolidated and secured Roman domi-

  nation in the lands around the Mediterranean. For 200 years after he died

  in 14 CE, the prosperity and the pomposity of the empire were wondrous

  to behold. Then, through a long series of lost opportunities, blunders, and

  wars, Augustus’s heirs first showed that they could sustain their inheri-

  tance in time of crisis, then worked to release their world from ancient

  confrontations, and then in a tragic reversal bludgeoned into dust the op-

  portunities Rome had created. This book tells the story of the central,

  tragic episode, when the mighty Roman empire, unable to understand

  itself or its world, chose to be true to its past ambitions and accomplish-

  ments and so brought itself to ruin. The figure of the emperor Justinian

  looms over the ruins, a figure mighty for his accomplishments, yet tragic

  for the calamities that his reign both saw and spawned.

  The stories I weave together here will be unfamiliar to most readers.

  Specialists will disagree with at least some of what I venture and debate it

  v

  s Preface

  heatedly, as they (and I) should. Nonspecialists should expect some sur-

  prises. Because I mean to tell a fresh story with old materials, I have also

  tried to recount the whole of it for the benefit of the reader who knows

  none of it.

  There are borders and boundaries being overrun and reinforced on

  every page of this book, so it may be relevant to admit that I was born

  about five miles outside the outermost boundary of the Roman empire

  in Germany; grew up within a few miles of the U.S.-Mexico border in El

  Paso (attending high school in a structure built by Jesuits hiding out from

  an anticlerical revolution in Mexico); once owned, in the farthest west

  of Ireland, a farm that my ancestors acquired when they were on the run

  from the British after the battle of Kinsale; and have other family reasons

  for knowing a lot about the history of Ukraine, the nation whose name

  means “borderland.” Is it personal bias or scholarly judgment that makes

  me say that great capitals and bustling cities are all well and good, but that

  the constructive and creative energies of humankind are often best seen

  among the mixtures and minglings of peoples at the margins of nations

  and empires? I leave it to my readers to decide.

  I have meditated and written this book in some unusual places, on

  travels to every continent save one, in the intermissions of my unscholarly

  duties as provost of a great university that has long understood itself to

  have a global responsibility. Because my professional role now makes me

  think in very concrete terms about shaping institutions to serve a more

  democratically understood humankind, it was doubly important to ex-

  plore and tell this story, not just for readers, but also so that I can do my

  own job better.

  Overture

  The night sky changes every night yet never seems to change, as the sea-

  sons bring the same stars in the same constellations on the same day of the

  year, age after age. The sky defines the calendar, for the stars never fail.

  For many thousands of years, until the smoke and light of human fires

  and human ingenuity began to plunder the night of its glory, the order

  and regularity of the stars surveyed and guided civilized life below.

  The anomalies of the night offered hints. The planets (the word

  comes from the Greek for “wanderers”) followed paths just unpredict-

  able enough to challenge the mathematical abilities of generations, until

  Copernicus found a simpler model. It was easier to believe that the plan-

  ets were the chariots of gods—for gods were notoriously whimsical and

  footloose—than to study the ancient mathematical models. Watchers

  below easily gave religious readings to other occasional anomalies of the

  night. Comets, shooting stars, the shimmer of the aurora borealis—all

  were safer to ascribe to divinity than to a blind material order. For us, the

  silence and darkness are beautiful, the stars a beautiful adornment; for

  the ancients, the night was terrifying and familiar and mysteriously well

  ordered.

  Sitting beneath these stars and thinking in these ways, civilized hu-

  mankind went about its business without grasping what evidence the

  skies bore against its habitual ways of thinking. Unable to measure the

  vast distances that separated the heavenly bodies patent before their eyes,

  they took the dimensions of this planet—or, rather, of Eurasia and north-

  ern Africa—as the measure of space. Incapable of grasping the evidence

  of the skies as a sign of the great age of the world and the long revolu-

  2 s the ruin of the roman empire

  tions that bring us our flickering moment of consciousness, they mea-

  sured time by the span of human memory and the stories of a few dozen

  generations.

  Small wonder that they understood their world so poorly. Small

  wonder as well that even when we know better in principle and when

  we can grasp the age and reach of the universe, we still fail to explore

  and explain this world on a scale expansive enough to make it genuinely

  intelligible. Science measures boldly the unimaginably large and small

  of the cosmos, the breathtakingly fast and unspeakably slow movements

  of bodies. History struggles to contain those universes in its imagination

  while observing in minute detail as well. Historians struggle to think of

  human experience in a way both congruent with the experience of mor-

  tals and expansive enough to offer real explanation.

  The sky of the Greeks and Romans, carrying the names of their gods

  and heroes in arbitrary patterns of stars, still passes over our heads at

  night. The Great Bear and Little Bear circle each oth
er at the top of the

  sky, while Orion and his dog go hunting in the fall. They will do so long

  after all of us now alive are gone, long after all our descendants have

  destroyed themselves with nuclear fission or automotive exhausts. The

  ancient communities that put those names on the sky have already disap-

  peared or altered beyond recognition, and yet they continue to shape the

  world in which we live.

  This is a book about changes on earth below that left ancient heroes

  marooned in the sky, stripped of their celestial powers. If we can under-

  stand those changes—and what has not changed—we may have a better

  chance of avoiding calamities of our own.

  We will begin with a man who thought that the world below the stars

  was flat.

  Cosmas the Voyager

  The two visitors, skillful and knowledgeable merchants, found the obelisk

  and the throne facing west, away from the sea. They stood at the gate of

  the city of Adoulis, a trading town on the Red Sea coast of what is now

  Eritrea. The land’s distinctive products were ivory from elephants, horn

  from rhinoceroses, and tortoiseshell. Both obelisk and throne pointed up

  into the mountains, toward the great city of Axum, more than 100 miles

  Overture s 3

  away in what was already called Ethiopia. Their inscriptions honored the

  Hellenistic king Ptolemy III Euergetes (“Benefactor”), by then dead for

  about 750 years. Ptolemy had probably never come this far south, but these

  lands still paid tribute—you could call it a tax, or you could call it protec-

  tion money—to Egypt when they were not at war with the Egyptians.

  The throne was cut from a single piece of gleaming white marble. The

  visitors were surprised to see this, because they knew of such stone only in

  the Mediterranean, from the island of Proconnesus in the Sea of Marmara

  near Constantinople. The throne’s base was square, with four delicate col-

  umns at the corners and one more supporting the seat at the center. The

  obelisk was carved of basalt on a square base and stood behind the throne.

  Both objects were inscribed in Greek.

  The manuscript illustration we have of the scene (a copy of an original

  from an eyewitness) makes it hard to get at their sizes, but the throne was

  perhaps human-size, and the obelisk not out of scale with it. In a future

  era, Mussolini would take another of Axum’s obelisks from Ethiopia to

  Italy to stand as a token of his imperial aspirations in Rome. A few years

  ago its fragments were disassembled and returned to Ethiopia.

  Mountainous Axum was a venerable Christian city by then (the 520s

  CE), and if any place on the planet could ever reasonably claim to be the

  home of the Ark of the Covenant, Axum would be it. Ellatzbaas, king of

  the Axumites, was as Christian as his ancestors had been for a century at

  least, though his brand of Christianity was falling out of favor elsewhere

  and would gradually lose touch with most of the Christian worlds in the

  years to come. Now Ellatzbaas prepared to descend from his capital 7,000

  feet above sea level and go to war across the Red Sea against the Him-

  yarites, dwellers in what is now Yemen. Fastidious in preserving and pro-

  claiming royal glories, he sent to Adoulis to have the inscriptions on the

  throne copied for him and placed at the gates of Adoulis. This required

  craftsmanship and intelligence and led Asbas, the governor there, to ask

  our two traveling merchants to do the copying for him.

  They were Menas, who later became a monk in Sinai and died there;

  and Cosmas, who came from Alexandria. From their visit, Cosmas kept

  his own copy of the inscriptions, and he included them in his descrip-

  tive twelve-volume book about such places. The two travelers also found

  sculptured images of Heracles and Hermes on the back of the throne and

  disagreed over their symbolic interpretation. They represented power

  4 s the ruin of the roman empire

  and wealth to the merchant who would become a monk, but Cosmas

  thought they stood for deeds and words instead. Merchants like Menas

  and Cosmas traveled to Adoulis because they knew that sellers brought

  incense down from the mountains there and that one could buy it at a

  good price to transport across and around Arabia to Roman and Persian

  markets. This was good business, supplementing what Yemen produced

  across the water.

  Cosmas returned to Alexandria to write his stories, and that’s why we

  know of him. Christian Topography, his lavish illustrated book, is some-

  thing that only a man of substance and wealth could have produced, and

  it survives in three medieval copies. One, made in Constantinople in the

  ninth century, now resides in the Vatican library; two others were made

  in the eleventh century. The one from Cappadocia, deep in Asia Minor,

  has migrated to Sinai in Egypt; the one from Mount Athos, that monas-

  tic metropolis west of Constantinople, is in Florence’s Laurentian library.

  What they share is an abundance of illustrations, all going back to Cos-

  mas’s original, pictures that supplement the wonders he sought to describe

  in words. The Florentine manuscript bears the name Cosmas added in a

  later hand, so that’s what we call him, but most medieval readers knew

  him only as he wanted to be known: as “just a Christian,” anonymous

  and devout. His contemporaries, though, found anonymity to be precious

  and polemical, a sign of a man taking sides in the religious quarrels of the

  time.

  Cosmas and his comrade were both sophisticated, experienced trav-

  elers, yet Adoulis still felt like the end of the earth to them. We can see

  instead that it was more accurately the center of the human universe; that

  when they were there, it was a cockfighting pit of geopolitical rivalry. The

  Himyarite realm lay not far away across the strait of Bab el Mandeb. At

  the narrowest point of the strait, just where it squeezed the passage down

  to the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea was no more than twenty miles wide,

  with an island midway across. Himyar was an ancient land, variously con-

  tending for control with nearby Saba (the biblical Sheba) and with the

  Ethiopians across the water. From of old, the land there was fertile, its

  richness enhanced by the fabulous Marib dam, a third of a mile long and

  rising fifteen feet above water level, feeding a system of canals that ensured

  a regular, reliable water supply to the region. Inscriptions, not necessarily

  legendary, say it was built in the seventh century BCE, but the dam was un-

  Overture s 5

  doubtedly renewed, expanded, and strengthened as time passed and craft

  grew. There was a serious dam break in 450 CE, and Cosmas may not have

  known when he wrote his story in the late 540s that another also occurred

  in 542. The last, and most catastrophic, occurred in 570, and with it came

  the end of agricultural prosperity and Himyarite domination.

  At the moment of Cosmas’s visit to Axum, however, the Himyarite

  nation was still formidable. Its kingdom was Jewish in a world where

  Christianity was more and more the officially sponsored religion, even at

  the fringes of empire. (To be fair, however, the label “Jewish” may over-

  state its resemblance to other communities that venerated the books of

  Moses.) In 518, one skirmish between Ethiopians and Himyarites led to

  something like a civil war between Christians and Jews in Yemen, during

  which there was an anti-Christian pogrom by the leader Yusuf Ashaar,

  nicknamed Dhu Nuwas (“the man with a ponytail”). He concluded the

  conflict with a massacre of Christians in Najran in the early 520s. One ac-

  count alleged that Dhu Nuwas ordered 20,000 Christians thrown into pits

  of boiling oil for refusing to convert to Judaism. Under this man with the

  ponytail, the Himyarites savored a fleeting, doomed independence.

  Then Ellatzbaas launched his invasion from Ethiopia, beginning with

  a solemn Mass in Axum cathedral, followed by the blessing of a fleet of

  seventy ships from Adoulis, and ending by establishing a puppet regime in

  Himyar that he controlled.

  Ellatzbaas didn’t act entirely on his own. Behind him lay the support