Date:    Sun, 25 Jan 2004 22:44:20 -0500
From:    Office of The Provost 
Subject: Wie es eigentlich gewesen war
To:      CLASSICS-L@LSV.UKY.EDU

(Second of three messages)


I should like to address again briefly here the state of play in
scholarship about 'barbarians' in late antiquity.  David Lupher rightly
upbraids me for not mentioning Pat Geary's latest book (sheer absence of
mind), but I also commend Pat's earlier *Before France and Germany*, which
can be used as a textbook and captures the realities of life on one part
of the Roman frontier very well indeed.

To James Pfundstein's post of a few days ago, I hasten to say that I do
not doubt nor does any late antique scholar doubt that in many ways and in
many places and at many times, forms of social and political and
economical organization that had displayed a greater degree of coherence,
prosperity, and stability lost those characteristics, or transitioned from
one such state to a very different one, in the course of the period after
200 CE/AD.  What challenges scholarship is to be precise about what
happened when and where, and to make sure that we continue to learn from
new discoveries and arguments.  Some, but not all, of those events had to
do with encounters with 'Germanic' peoples but to say that 'Rome' had an
encounter with 'Germanic cultures', however agreeable to the ears of
German scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
(e.g., Ludwig Schmidt, author of *Die Ostgermanen* et al.) is to
exaggerate impardonably.

Some of the things that I have learned in the course of the last thirty
years on these topics are:

        Different parts of the Eurasiafric world experienced very
        different trajectories of social, economic, and political change
        in this period.

        The category 'barbarian' is very unhelpful in attempting to
        understand these events.

        Those who chose in that period to use that category in defense of
        the "Roman empire" did harm by doing so as well as good.

                Here is the relevance that *I* see to 9/11.  A focused,
                disastrous, shocking attack happened.  How should those
                attacked and their partisans react?  Attack 'barbarism'?
                Speak of a 'clash of civilizations'?  Address the
                specifics of that attack?  How to treat people who were
                not involved in the attack but are thought to sympathize
                and perhaps consider emulation?  My position is pragmatist
                rather than ideological.  When our government does its
                best work, in my view, it is pragmatist (and it has done
                some very good work in this line); when it does its worst
                work, it demonizes the enemy, angers those it need not
                anger, and takes a high ideological line.  My allusion to
                Cavafy and Coetzee was to indicate that in our time as in
                410, the presence of 'barbarians' was 'a kind of solution'
                - i.e., gave a focus and direction to the culture's
                internal narrative regardless whether that was a good
                thing.

        If we were to ask when in the ancient world *after* the Antonines,
        human beings were safest and most prosperous, I would propose the
        years 514-519 CE/AD.  At that time, the 'barbarian' terrors of the
        fifth century had been addressed and resolved, by remarkably
        different strategies.

                In the east, the 'barbarians' who had seized a large
                measure of power in the first half of the fifth century
                had been displaced by a military line of emperors from
                Isauria.  Now Isauria was a tough piece of country in
                those days.  Ammianus a century earlier hadn't thought
                much of the folks down there:  banditry a particular local
                skill.  But the Isaurians post-450 were useful
                counterweights to the 'barbarians', and under the emperors
                Zeno and Anastasius, Constantinople regained control of
                its domains.  In the same period, the theological wars of
                the last century were brought to an end with Zeno's
                Henotikon and Anastasius' careful diplomacy to bring east
                and west together after the Acacian Schism in 514.  There
                was reasonable peace on all frontiers.

                In the west, the 'barbarians' who had seized a large
                measure of power in the first half of the fifth century
                had been succeeded by others who had brought, from 490
                onward, a remarkable measure of stability and revived
                prosperity to Italy (under the Ostrogoths -- this is the
                age of Constantinople-reared Theoderic), Gaul (under the
                Franks -- this is the age of Clovis), Spain (Visigoths),
                and even Africa (the Vandals ran a problematic regime, but
                by the late fifth century, they were the established
                order).

                Then in 519, the senior military official Justin became
                emperor, bringing with him his nephew and heir Justinian.
                Who did in the Roman Empire?  If you need a villain, it's
                Justinian.  He botched the eastern frontier, botched the
                Balkan frontier, overextended himself with a lunatic
                scheme to reconquer Africa, Italy, and even Spain
                (luckily, he had little impact in Spain), and then,
                grossly overextended, saw his world ravaged by the plague.
                By the time he died in 565, Italy had been crippled and
                laid open to Lombards and others, Africa likewise (Islam
                would take a while to arrive), the Balkans were out of
                control (here is the place for the book I referred to in
                my talk by Florin Curta on the Slavs:  there's exciting
                stuff being done in Balkan history these days), and
                Heraclius half a century later would expend all his
                resources in stabilizing the eastern frontier against the
                Persians -- only to discover (and Walter Kaegi's new book
                is good on this) that the Arabic Muslims would prove too
                much for him.

        No question there were lots of folks standing around inside and
        outside the Roman limes talking Germanic talk to each other.  But
        the idea that they came in genetically branded clumps of
        "Visigoths", "Ostrogoths", "Vandals", "Rugians", "Sciri", and the
        like is what has turned out, in the last generation's scholarship,
        to be very far from true.  Figuring out how each *active* clump came
        together, got active, understood itself, and moved around requires
        us to pay attention to the individual cases, not the big slashing
        arrows on the map.

That's a sketch, but I hope suggestive.  The last thing to say is that the
histories of Britain and Ireland, of the Rhine frontier, of the upper
Danube frontier, of the lower Danube frontier, of the Mesopotamian/Syrian
frontier, and eventually of the frontiers of Arabia, Egypt, Africa, and
Spain (as Islam progressed) have very little in common.  To generalize
what was inside as the Greco-Roman world and to generalize the outside as
'barbarians' is to make the same category error scholars make when they
speak of 'pagans'.  To think that all the events on all those frontiers
coalesce into a single coherent narrative is simply to make a mistake.
When Gibbon made it, it was a wonderfully illuminating and interesting and
important narrative, and we continue to learn much from it.  But we need
to get beyond it.

'Pagans':  SW opines:  "Since 'pagans' ought to be banned, we really do
need some common term for those polytheists who refused to accept any of
the 'Christianities.'"  No, we don't.  (1)  After 391 AD/CE there weren't
enough of them to count:  imperial suppression was quite effective.  See
Charles Hedrick's fine book on how the grandchildren of the 'pagan'
ringleaders (if they were that) were rehabilitated in the 430s by their
ostensibly Christian progeny.  That lots of non-Christian religious
practices persisted, many of them practiced by people who'd been baptized
and went to Christian churches on Sunday, is another matter.  (2) Before
391, there were scads of people not converting to Christianity (about the
way I'm not converting to Rosicrucianism - that is, it's true I'm not, but
it's hardly a constitutive fact in my life), and they had lots of
different reasons for refusing, did so in a lot of different ways, and
were engaged in religious practices of their own, thank you very much, and
the ones in Scotland and the ones in Arabia didn't have much in common at
all.  'Pagan' makes sense as a term of Christian theological opprobrium,
not as a historical category.  (Sorry, most specialists are have heard
enough O'Donnell on 'paganism'.  David Lupher had helpful URL's with
things like references from the list archives.)

'Rome':  the idea that history is well and faithfully done by following
'Rome' through its myriad evolutions is both powerful and flawed.  Imagine
the TV show that would run an animated series of maps with bright blue in
the middle for Roman territory, and think how that blue blob would morph
through the centuries.  Note that by the most conservative reckonings, no
territory that was 'Roman' in 200 BCE/BC was Roman by 476.  But the blue
blob would still be there, by most accounts, centered on Anatolia, and
morphing cheerfully onwards for another thousand years.  (Query:  would
Charlemagne's or Otto's territory get to be blue?  It usually doesn't in
western civilization narratives.)  We all know the strengths and uses of
doing that history.  But to write the history of, let us say, Isauria from
600 BCE/BC to 600 CE/AD would get a very different narrative, provide a
perspective that would alter our view of Mediterranean history, and have
every bit as much claim to be taken seriously.  Better still to write the
history of Egypt or Syria or Africa that way.  The view for which I argued
in my address is that the attentive study of the history of differentiated
places, peoples, and ideas is the current and next task for history of the
late antique world.  It's an exciting time to work in the neighborhood.

Jim O'Donnell