{"id":4028,"date":"2006-04-09T22:01:13","date_gmt":"2006-04-09T22:01:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com.108-166-28-151.mdgnetworks.com\/wordpress\/?p=4028"},"modified":"2013-04-01T22:03:19","modified_gmt":"2013-04-01T22:03:19","slug":"collapse-of-a-hyperpower","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/collapse-of-a-hyperpower\/","title":{"rendered":"Collapse of a “Hyperpower”"},"content":{"rendered":"

A review of\u00a0The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians<\/em>\u00a0by Peter Heather and\u00a0The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization\u00a0<\/em>by Bryan Ward-Perkins.<\/h1>\n

by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n

The New Criterion<\/em><\/p>\n

A<\/span>fter September 11 and the acrimonious war in Iraq, America was castigated as the world\u2019s sole \u201cempire,\u201d \u201chegemon,\u201d or \u201chyperpower.\u201d A series of books, especially in Europe, not only lamented the overweening power of the United States, but gleefully predicted our imminent collapse. The fate of Rome was the obvious and frequent imperial referent, the subtext of any such comparison being that an inwardly decadent America was no match for its poorer, more numerous, and zealous enemies: the Islamists would simply kick in an already rotten door.<\/p>\n

\n

Despite occasional revisionism, the story of Rome\u2019s fall was pretty much universal until recent times. After some five centuries of imperial domination from the Sahara to the Rhine, and from the British Isles to Mesopotamia, the Western empire collapsed in the late fifth century, specifically when its last emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed in 476 by the German tribal leader Odacer, after a near century of enervating attacks by Visigoths, Vandals, and Huns.<\/p>\n

Except for occasional crackpot efforts of eccentric German scholars who championed the barbarians as untainted forefathers of the racially pure and superior modern German\u00a0Volk<\/i>, most accepted the general picture of decline. An exhausted global empire was so plagued by financial corruption, a bankrupt elite, and rural depopulation that few citizens joined the army. Fewer still knew what fifth-century Rome stood for, much less whether it was any longer worth defending.<\/p>\n

That was the general picture we were all taught in graduate school. Few bought into the classic antithesis of Edward Gibbon (reenergized forty years ago by the great Oxford historian A. H. M. Jones) that the incorporation of Christianity as the state religion of Rome by Constantine in 312 was the real beginning of the end. In Gibbon\u2019s view, the growing church substituted the pacifist Sermon on the Mount creed for classical civic militarism, while emptying the state treasury to support literally millions of useless clerical drones, monumental new churches, and ecclesiastical lands that brought no financial return to the empire.<\/p>\n

This entire question of steady decline until abrupt fall, however, was always clouded by a few bothersome facts. First, the eastern Greek-speaking half of the empire centered at Byzantium survived countless enemies for almost another 1,000 years, suggesting that whatever was wrong at Rome was apparently not wrong enough to make the entire empire collapse. And second, barbarians and Christians were both firmly established nearly two centuries before 476. Why and how, then, did the empire survive both the Church and the Germanic hordes for so long?<\/p>\n

In the new revisionism of the postmodern era, the answer was more existential: Rome never really \u201cfell\u201d at all. Rather it benignly \u201cevolved\u201d into what we might now see as something like a proto-European Union in a steady continuum, as Gaul morphed into France, Britannia became England, and so on. As early as the 1970s Peter Brown and others sought to codify this benign evolutionary thesis into the formal field of \u201cLate Antiquity,\u201d in which it was taboo to think of an abrupt erosion of culture or civilization, much less to prejudge shaggier peoples across the Danube and Rhine. Instead, as Brown put it, the historian should be able to write about the period between 250\u2013800 \u201cwithout invoking an intervening catastrophe and without pausing, for a moment, to pay lip service to the widespread notion of \u2018decay.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, \u201ctransformation\u201d and \u201cevolution\u201d were the politically correct terminologies, not \u201cdecay,\u201d \u201cfall,\u201d or \u201ccrisis,\u201d value-laden misconceptions that wrongly implied that what followed Rome was somehow far worse. Now, however, the reaction to the reaction has set in\u2014but sometimes with conclusions that may be just as antithetical to the old notion of civilization lost.<\/p>\n

O<\/span>xford University Press has recently published two new interpretations of the fall, with obvious lessons for the present purported crisis of Western civilization. Both books are in agreement that there was most certainly a sudden end to Rome in the late fifth century that markedly changed life in Western Europe, but otherwise they are entirely at odds in both tone and analyses. Peter Heather\u2019s effort is the more fully documented and better written book, but also the more disturbing in that it ultimately comes to distressing conclusions about the value of what vanished\u2014something never lost sight of by the clearer-eyed Bryan Ward-Perkins.<\/a>[1]<\/a>\u00a0In a concise, often cranky essay, Ward-Perkins seeks to demonstrate through literary, epigraphical, and archaeological evidence, first, that the prosperity and security of millions was abruptly lost, and, second, lost due to the invasions of less sophisticated, more warlike parasitical tribes who finally broke culture\u2019s door and destroyed a millennium of civilization\u2019s hard work that took millions of lives and left the survivors forever poorer.<\/p>\n

The evidence he presents is at times overwhelming and consistent anywhere we look. Writers as diverse as Bishop Leo of Rome, the late-fifth-century Saint Severinus of Austria and Salvian, a priest near Marseille, all describe a collapsing world of constant invasion, loss of security, wide-scale rape and murder, with civilization retreating to fortified enclaves, beset by those who wanted its wealth, but nothing of what initially created it.<\/p>\n

But the story is not just literary. Archaeology reveals that there was a drastic drop-off not only in luxury items such as silver and gold jewelry or buildings in mortared brick and stone, but also in mass-produced daily ware that once had been fabricated cheaply and efficiently at central factories and shipped all over the Mediterranean\u2014to the benefit of millions who were given valuable consumer goods at affordable prices.<\/p>\n

After the fifth century, however, not only were there fewer clay products, but their quality eroded as well. Numismatics likewise confirms the dismal picture: small change\u2014mostly copper coins of lesser denominations\u2014became scarcer as complex trans-Mediterranean transactions were abandoned and trade reverted to a more primitive and local barter system. Epigraphy tells the same monotonous story. Also, graffiti markedly declined, since, as literacy devolved to a small ecclesiastical elite, fewer Romans knew how to read or write.<\/p>\n

Ward-Perkins is a materialist, interested in proving the concrete record for the fall rather than in explaining its root causes. He only briefly suggests how and why there was not enough money to equip a mercenary army against a horde of various barbarian enemies in the late fifth century. Yet he is still unequivocal in what this collapse meant for everyday people of the time\u2014and its lessons for us today:<\/p>\n

The end of the Roman West witnessed horrors and dislocation of a kind I sincerely hope never to have to live through; and it destroyed a complex civilization, throwing the inhabitants of the West back to a standard of living typical of prehistorical times. Romans before the fall were as certain as we are today that their world would continue forever substantially unchanged. They were wrong. We should be wise not to repeat their complacency.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Peter Heather\u2019s much longer and more comprehensive\u00a0Fall of the Roman Empire<\/i>\u00a0agrees with some of Ward-Perkins\u2019s conclusions. Although the East survived because its more defensible borders (the Dardanelles and Black Sea) provided a buffer to the northern barbarians\u2014and evolution made Byzantium into something ultimately un-Roman\u2014there was most surely a calamitous end to Roman life in the late-fifth-century West. Its causes, as Ward-Perkins likewise maintained, were barbarian invasions across the Danube and Rhine.B<\/span>ut there all agreement ends. Heather thinks that we have it all wrong in looking at the problem solely from Roman eyes, since there was not all that much different going on in Western Europe in the fifth, than, say, in the second or third century. Instead, in our ethnocentrism, we have entirely ignored the radical revolution in the so-called barbarian north.<\/p>\n

To Heather, we have missed the significance of two unprecedented events. The invasions of 376 and 405\u2013406 are not to be attributed to periodic incursions by tribal Tervingi and Greuthungi, Vandals, Alans, and Suevi. Those inroads were merely epiphenomena of a much larger and far more serious thirty-five-year-long mass migration caused by the advance of the Huns westward and southward, a gigantic demographic shift that drove other barbarians scurrying ahead into Roman territory\u2014putting enormous pressures on tenuous Roman defenses along the Rhine and Danube.<\/p>\n

These initial incursions led to subsequent decades of unrest where frontier territory was insidiously lost, taxes disrupted, populations scattered, and, perhaps worse from the Roman perspective, accommodation and appeasement\u2014rather than genuine efforts of assimilation\u2014became the standard mechanism for provincial elites to deal with Hunnic inroads. So after this initial haymaker, Rome never quite recovered and was laid low by the final Visigothic knock-out punch in the late fifth century. As Heather sees it, overweening Roman imperialism, its insensitivity to \u201cthe other,\u201d its inability to integrate and empower the newcomers who might have offered needed fresh ingredients for new Roman citizens, all this at last created a perfect storm of sorts where almost anyone not Roman, according to his station, found a unity of common purpose in destroying the oppressor. As Heather puts it:<\/p>\n

The west Roman state fell not because of the weight of its own \u201cstupendous fabric,\u201d but because its Germanic neighbours had responded to its power in ways that the Romans could never have foreseen. There is in all this a pleasing denouement. By virtue of its unbounded aggression, Roman imperialism was ultimately responsible for its own destruction.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So there we have it: two gifted historians, through quite different methodologies, come to surprisingly similar conclusions that the Western empire fell to foreign aggression from barbarian tribes in the late fifth century. To Ward-Perkins this was all a horror and a lesson for Western civilization today to remain vigilant. But to Heather, the fall was a result of unbridled Western \u201caggression\u201d and thus something that was ultimately \u201cpleasing.\u201dOstensibly both these erudite books are about the past, but their quite divergent interpretations perhaps tell us far more about the divide between ourselves than they do about the crisis of the Romans.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Notes<\/strong>
\nGo to the top of the document.<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

    \n
  1. <\/a>The Fall of the Roman Empire. A New History of Rome and the Barbarians<\/i>, by Peter Heather; Oxford University Press, 576 pages, $40.\u00a0The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization<\/i>, by Bryan Ward-Perkins; Oxford University Press, 258 pages, $28.\u00a0Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n
    \n

    \u00a92006 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    A review of\u00a0The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians\u00a0by Peter Heather and\u00a0The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization\u00a0by Bryan Ward-Perkins. by Victor Davis Hanson The New Criterion After September 11 and the acrimonious war in Iraq, America was castigated as the world\u2019s sole \u201cempire,\u201d \u201chegemon,\u201d or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[87,775],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-12Y","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11548,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/does-make-x-great-again-ever-happen-in-history\/","url_meta":{"origin":4028,"position":0},"title":"Does \u2018Make X Great Again\u2019 Ever Happen in History?","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 3, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness The short answer: Sometimes. Here\u2019s one example. By 527 A.D., the Eastern Roman Empire at Constantinople seemed fated to collapse like the West had a near century prior. The Persian Sassanids were gobbling up Byzantine lands in the east. Almost all of old Rome\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Roman Empire"","block_context":{"text":"Roman Empire","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/roman-empire\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1832,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/why-did-rome-fall-and-why-does-it-matter-now\/","url_meta":{"origin":4028,"position":1},"title":"Why Did Rome Fall–And Why Does It Matter Now?","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 14, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Count the Ways A German scholar twenty years ago listed, I recall, some 210 reasons for the collapse of the Western Empire. Readers, you have heard many of them, plausible and otherwise \u2014 corruption, civil strife, Germanic barbarians, Christianity, lead in the pipes of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "February 2010"","block_context":{"text":"February 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/february-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4982,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-funny-sort-of-empire\/","url_meta":{"origin":4028,"position":2},"title":"A Funny Sort of Empire","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 27, 2002","format":false,"excerpt":"Are Americans really so imperial? by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online It is popular now to talk of the American \"empire.\" In Europe particularly there are comparisons of Mr. Bush to Caesar \u2014 and worse \u2014 and invocations all sorts of pretentious poli-sci jargon like \"hegemon,\" \"imperium,\" and \"subject\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "November 2002"","block_context":{"text":"November 2002","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2002\/november-2002\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13720,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-culturalist-immigration-from-ancient-rome-to-the-us-border\/","url_meta":{"origin":4028,"position":3},"title":"The Culturalist: Immigration from Ancient Rome to the US Border","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 10, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Art19 and Just the News https:\/\/art19.com\/shows\/the-victor-davis-hanson-show\/episodes\/ffb51e92-865c-4588-94f1-6101b6439e36 Join Victor Davis Hanson and Sami Winc as they discuss immigration in the late, declining Roman Empire and the current chaos on our border.","rel":"","context":"With 3 comments","block_context":{"text":"With 3 comments","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-culturalist-immigration-from-ancient-rome-to-the-us-border\/#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6134,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-glue-holding-america-together\/","url_meta":{"origin":4028,"position":4},"title":"The Glue Holding America Together","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 27, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"As it fragments into various camps, the country is being held together by a common popular culture. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online By\u00a0a.d.\u00a0200, the\u00a0Roman Republic\u00a0was a distant memory. Few citizens of the global\u00a0Roman Empire even knew of their illustrious ancestors like Scipio or Cicero. Millions no longer spoke\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Popular Culture"","block_context":{"text":"Popular Culture","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/american-culture\/popular-culture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10896,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/can-countries-make-themselves-great-again\/","url_meta":{"origin":4028,"position":5},"title":"Can Countries Make Themselves Great Again?","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 18, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Wednesday, January 17, 2018 Originally Published on Hoover.org in Defining Ideas Is Donald Trump\u2019s slogan \u201cMake America great again\u201d mere campaign rhetoric in the tradition of Barack Obama\u2019s \u201chope and change,\u201d George H. W. Bush\u2019s \u201ca kinder, gentler nation,\u201d and Ronald Reagan\u2019s \u201cIt\u2019s morning in America\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Defining Ideas"","block_context":{"text":"Defining Ideas","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/defining-ideas\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4028"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4028"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4029,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4028\/revisions\/4029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}