The Ruin of the Roman Empire: A New History

There's an irony in the way James O'Donnell has organized his take on the transition out of - as opposed to fall of - the Roman Empire. He sets up sections organized around three significant rulers of the era, from the late 400s to the early 600s - Theodoric, Justinian and Gregory - and weaving them in and out of his sections to make the case that you can't simply declare an end to empire with the end of the roster of emperors (which in the western empire is usually taken to be AD 476). O'Donnell's point is that, before and after those hard dates, life has pretty much tended to go on, and in more shades of gray than we generally acknowledge. This is a highly useful history, not so much for the detailed narrative as for the perspectives. O'Donnell's story telling is plenty lively, but the real value here comes in putting the era into perspective. Long after there were no more Roman Emperors in the west, or even in the east, many people thought of themselves as carrying on the tradition. Rome itself was reduced to a minor city well before the empire is thought to have "fallen," and the oft-described barbarians were themselves heavily Romanized by the time they took over large slices of the empire. Read this and be prepared for a change of perspective on history, and not only on late antiquity.

Excellent read, sometime in love with his own quirky type of address, one has the suspicion the writer sacrifices a balanced view to the turn of a witty phrase. But the research and the revision of history contradicting a Gibbon-type Fall of the Roman Empire is fascinating and convincing.

For a couple hundred years after Gibbon's time, the common wisdom was that Rome's empire in the West finally fell to overwhelming and violent barbarian invasions during the 5th century CE (although the precise date and the underlying causes were much disputed). In the 20th and 21st centuries a newer theory gained much ground, claiming that Rome did not fall but merely transitioned from a more or less unitary classical culture to a very decentralized early medieval world over perhaps 200 years (and with migrations rather than invasions). According to this view, the new rulers in the West were well-assimilated into the Roman polity and perpetuated its culture. James J. O'Donnell, author of this book, is a firm adherent of the "no fall" school, but with something of a twist. He believes that there was a fall, but one that came in the 6th century CE and later and at the hands of fellow "Romans," sent from the imperial capital of Constantinople. Justinian I's attempt to recreate a united empire under his rule by dispossessing the "barbarian usurpers" in the West and in Africa, says O'Donnell, was not only misguided but catastrophic for both West and East. It resulted in the complete ruin of the City of Rome, the fragmentation and devastation of all Italy and the fatal crippling of all of Roman culture in the rest of Western Europe and North Africa. In the East Justinian's policy uselessly sacrificed large amounts of limited (indeed, irreplaceable) resources in pursuit of a hopeless dream while diverting imperial attention both from areas essential to the empire (the Balkans) and from critical problems (the rising power of Persia). Justinian enjoys few modern admirers and Justinian-bashing is nothing new in historical writing. But O'Donnell has some additional charges for the indictment. O'Donnell believes that an empire (such as the Roman) centered around the Mediterranean is "artificial" while one linking the Fertile Crescent to lands both to its east and west was more natural and certainly more desirable. O'Donnell seems to believe that such a multiethnic empire had at least the potential for promoting a common polity and culture across the entire Eurasian landmass, thus promoting the possibility of future harmony for the whole human race. O'Donnell also assails Justinian for a foolish religious bigotry. He used this benighted zeal to impose a single form of Christianity in the place of the many that had existed before him and in his own time. In his time the varying forms of Christianity sprang primarily from disputes over the precise nature of Christ: Wholly human, wholly divine or mixed. Justinian believed that a viable state was not possible if there were competing religious systems within it. He therefore set out to extirpate those beliefs that conflicted with the one that he had chosen as correct. This was a goal both within the empire that Justinian took over when he came to the throne and for the Western lands that he was trying to rec

Most people who have read anything at all about the classical world know that Alexander the Great defended the West from Persian barbarism, that the Roman Empire collapsed because it was attacked by more barbarians, and that Justinian I was the greatest of all the Byzantine Emperors because he held back the barbarian tide. James J. O'Donnell, a classical historian, refutes these commonly held beliefs in a solid work of scholarship that is a delight to read. O'Donnell divides his book into three parts: Theodoric's World deals with the life and times of King Theodoric, a monarch whose antecedents were from the various tribes who moved into the Roman Empire, but who came closer than many other rulers to actually restoring the Western Empire. Justinian's World examines the Byzantine Empire and the reign of the emperor usually regarded as its most successful, and finds it wanting in many respects. While Justinian is usually praised for having restored the Empire, O'Donnell presents much evidence that his ceaseless wars (usually fought by others while he remained safely in his palace) actually weakened his empire. Gregory's World examines the reign of Pope Gregory the Great and illuminates much of the shadowy years of the end of the western empire and the rise of Roman Catholicism. O'Donnell writes vividly and elegantly, including as befits a classical scholar many long and stately sentences with multiple subordinate clauses. He has an eye for a revealing anecdote and an enviable ability to write intriguing character sketches that describe complex personalities of the ancient world in just a few paragraphs. Most enjoyably, he is able to come up with some unusual comparisons, as when he calls the Frankish culture of ancient Gaul the Tex-Mex of the day. He also has a refreshing reluctance to take himself or his subjects too seriously. I do not know of many other serious historians who could take a moment to refer to his beanie baby collection without it sounding incongruous or precious! I especially enjoyed O'Donnell's look forward from the ancient world to the present day when he traced the consequences of the fractures between Europeans, South Asians, and Central Asians from the classical era to our own time. This is an excellent example of historical writing at its finest. Both professional and amateur historians will enjoy it and find much within it to ponder.

As the song has it, "Just a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down." Appropos of this book, a shovelful of bias makes the history go down. The book is essentially a review of the Roman Empire (or its remnants) in the sixth and early seventh century -- a very important and often neglected transition between the ancient and the medieval world. The author, James O'Donnell, is exceptionally learned, well-credentialed, and has all has facts straight as far as I can tell. He writes an exceptionally readable history of what often makes for boring or obscure history, but he does it by being deliberately partisan, tendentious, and funny. He makes the following exceptionally provocative claims: (a) that the rump of the Western empire under Theoderic and the Ostragoths was really only a continuation of the old Western Empire in new clothes; (b) that the Western Empire did not "fall" in the fifth century, but was ruined by Justinian's "conquests" in the sixth; (c) that Theodoric and the Ostragoths were more "Roman" than the Byzantines who "re-conquered" Italy in the mid-sixth century; (d) that Theodoric was one of the greatest men who ever lived; and (e) that Justinian, as an imperial disaster, ranks somewhere between Stalin and Bozo the Clown. In actuality, historians are deeply divided in their evaluations of the principal personages who dot O'Donnell's pages, and the historical conclusions which abound in them. Some think Justianian was a great man, some think he was a mixture of great successes and great failures, and some think he was ultimately a failure -- though none that I am familiar with rate him as low as O'Donnell. After all, some of Justinian's achievements, such as his sponsership of the codes and digests which bear his name, and his construction of Hagia Sophia, had a long-term, beneficent effect on European history. But even here, O'Donnell makes an important point -- virtually all the things Justinian accomplished, he accomplished as a precursor of European history, not as a savior of Roman history. A person less sympathetic to Roman history than ODonnell (Sciavoni, for example) could even argue that Justinian did the West a favor by helping to clear away the detritus that was Rome. But I will say this for O'Donnell's book -- and this is why I rate it so highly: it is compulsively readible. More balanced treatments, such as Vol. I of the Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. I or A.H.M. Jones' "The Later Roman Empire," are more responsible and ultimately more informative. But what good is a responsible treatment to the layperson if it puts him to sleep in the process of reading? O'Donnell will never do that. So I recommend reading O'Donnell, laughing with or at him, and then, when you want a more scholarly consensus where O'Donnell is being provocative or intemperate, compare his conclusions with one of the drier but less wild-eyed books on the subject. Incidentally, I have edited this review. For some reason, in my i