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Veteran Member
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: In the torture chambers of Pinochet's Chile
Posts: 2,112
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I posted a new book review up on Amazon [Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome...]
I just poster a book review up on Amazon of Bryan Ward-Perkins scholarly new book The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization. What do you think (and can change grammar and spelling when it finally gets posted, so please feel free to correct me).
Quote:
Bryan Ward-Perkins’ book The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization is an important book for an important time. There has been a recent turn in the way historians understand the period of late antiquity- approximately from the reign of Emperor Theodosius in the late 4th century to the rise of Islam in the 7th and 8th - from the traditional understanding of the time, that Rome fell and their was a massive decline in art, science, and living standards throughout the entire Roman world fell drastically, to a new understanding that late antiquity was not the “fall� of Rome (“fall� and “decline� are such nasty words), but instead this was a time of “transformation�, “growth� and “cultural vibrancy.� It’s almost as though the age of PC liberalism had been extended backward 2000 years and onto a brutal time cultureless, savage barbarians, religious fanatics, helpless, impoverished peasants, and a failing Roman Empire. Could it all be a myth?
Bryan ward-Perkins thinks so. Through a sound analysis of the archaeological record and focus on the military and economic related texts from the time (such as the much-ignored Procopius) it becomes clear that Rome did indeed fall. Bryan is easier on the Eastern empire, saying that its decline did not start completely until around 600 thanks to the Arabs, though he does admit there is evidence of decline in the 5th century and that the Eastern Empire, too was under constant attack. As he says of the alternative view, “This is a much more beguiling vision of the past than mine, with its distribution of maps of peasant settlements, and its discussion of good- and bad- quality pottery.� Although Perkins admits his overview of the subject might be drab and even boring to some, in truth he doesn’t give himself enough credit. Although late antique pottery doesn’t sound too interesting, Perkins does a great job of relating it to Roman life, showing just how widespread luxury was under Roman rule and how sparse it was after.
In the end, he takes issue with to groups for “rosy-fiing� the history of the fall of the Empire: European Unionists who seek to sugar-coat the image of the Germanic barbarians in the interests of European unity, and religious scholar & Christian partisans, to whom the “Dark� Ages were the age of faith, and not so “dark� at all. On the political, he slams the French and the Germans for trying to smooth out their historically rough relationship (usually featuring France on the receiving end of the big stick) between the two countries through revisionists scholarship. The two countries share a common ancestry in the Franks, the Germanic people who united parts of what we would call France and Germany under Catholicism (as opposed to the Arianism of their comrades the Goths, Sueves, Alans, etc.), and from whose ranks the heavily-praised Charlemagne sprung. The Germans and French have attempted to glorify this ancient relationship in the interest of international unity, creating a Carolingian Renaissance that exists nowhere but in their own heads. The Germans are still kind of sore over the spanking they took in WWII, and subsequently received for the Holocaust, and so they must not have to deal with the additional shame of killing (Perkins calls it “assassinating�) the Roman Empire.
On the religious front, Perkins sums up the thesis of his objection to the sugar-coating of history for and by the Christian Church with a quote from Catholic writer Christopher Dawson “To the secular historian the early Middle Ages (oldspeak for “late antiquity�) must inevitably still appear as the Dark Ages, ages of barbarism… But to the Catholic (or, thanks to ecumenism, the Christian in general) they are not dark as much as ages of dawn, for they witnessed the conversion of the West�. Perkins takes issue with this whole line of thinking. For one thing, Dawson doesn’t tell us how the West was converted, through laws against pagan religion, mob violence, military intervention against non-believers and heretics, burned down synagogues, and the destruction of the previous culture. As Perkins points out, new Late Antiquity-style historian like Peter Brown are quick to inform us of late antique religion’s flexibility and thoughtfulness, while ignoring its much more pronounced intolerant and fundamentalist bents. We are too quick to focus on what half-starved monks scribbled in between their prayers and foraging for food, ignoring that “most people in the past, like people today, spent the majority of their lives firmly in the material world affected less by religious change than by their standard of living.�
Finally, his book serves as a warning of what this type of revisionist scholarship can do by getting rid of messy words like “decline� and “fall.� It could be a grave mistake. “Romans before the fall were as certain today that their world would continue forever substantially unchanged. They were wrong. We would be wise not to repeat their complacency.�
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12-17-2005, 10:14 AM
