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I was made aware of this article “Dequoi meurent les civilisations,” by Jean-Paul Brighelli, le Point 08/08/2015.
For the sake of argument let’s translate a summary.
“While the theme of immigration is
increasingly being required, Brighelli (the author) has read ‘The Last Days [of
the Roman Empire],’ which discusses the fall of the Roman Empire in the West.”
I am not quite sure as to whether
Brighelli’s review of Les Derniers Jours-
La Fin de l’Empire romain d’Occident (Michel de Jaeghere, Belles Lettres,
26.90 euros) indicates Mr. de Jaeghere’s point or selectively choses to focus
on the issue of the barbarians. Having not read Les Derniers Jours- but being relatively well-informed on the issue
of the Fall of Rome- I will address Brighelli’s article, not de Jaeghere’s
book.
The argument Brighelli puts forth is
this: Caracalla’s edict gave roman citizenship to all inhabitants, therefore
recruitment in the army was decreased, therefore barbarians, who, while
Romanized “to the extreme” would nevertheless cause the frontier to crack. As
Brighelli discusses, Romans stopped having children, unlike the barbarians; the
wealthy retreated in their latifundias, leaving towns deserted and in need of
foreign labor; schools were no longer open to everyone but the privilege of the
wealthy. Let’s just end the argument here.
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| The Rhetor And Teacher Libanius |
I cannot address ALL of the points. There is little to no
evidence of the retreat of the elites in their latifundias in the fourth
century. The elites were active culturally, economically and politically
(Jones, The Later Roman Empire from
1954 provides a good overview. Recently, Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle 2014 Alan Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome 2013, in French, Carrié and Rousselle, L’Empire Romain en Mutations 1999).
Schools were NEVER part of a program of the education of the masses. Literacy
was low, yet it seems that there is evidence of a more widespread “functional
literacy,” namely that individuals could decipher inscriptions without being
able to read Homer (Harris, Ancient Literacy
1989; in French, Mireille Corbier, Donner
à voir, donner à lire 2008). Hence, from the golden age of Rome to its
fall, nothing really changed in terms of the inclusiveness of education (on
late antique education, Edward Watts, City
and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria 2006, see also Cribiore, The School of Libanius in Late Antique
Antioch 2007).
What’s more interesting is the causal
link between the edict of Caracalla and the collapse of Rome. According to
Cassius Dio, “he made all the people in his empire Roman citizens; nominally he
was honoring them, but his real purpose was to increase his revenues by this
means” (Cassius Dio, History 78.9).
According to Brighelli, the expansion of citizenship rights led to the
barbarization of the army. The inhabitants of the empire, now citizens, decided
to stop serving the state.
The process that began with the death
of Marcus Aurelius, and outlined at length in modern scholarship, describes
quite the opposite phenomenon. The local elites increasingly participated in
government. These men were “equestrians,” or wealthy locals. Through a career
in the army or in the bureaucracy, they could acquire a senatorial status through imperial favor. The Roman Empire became
governed, not by the senators in Rome (and it really hadn’t since the end of
the Civil Wars in B.C. 27), but by men from the provinces. Secondly, the
expansion of the bureaucracy under Diocletian (284-303) increased the number of
positions available for personal advancement. Imperial service, rather than
local service, became the preferred choice of the local elites (if one is to
trust the bitter rhetor and councilman of Antioch Libanius). That is to say,
the history of the aftermath of the edict of Carcalla is not one of decay, but
one of incorporation in all segments of society.
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| Trajan's Column: |
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A more important point, which
thankfully did not escape Brighelli completely (but mostly), is that barbarian
is an inherently perspectival term. The Roman Senate in the Republic was
limited to Romans, and expanded slowly to include the provincials. When Caesar
reformed senatorial membership in B.C. 46, “urban humor blossomed into
scurrilous verses about Gauls newly emancipated from the national
trouser”(Ronald Syme, Roman Revolution 1939). In other words, the Gauls were
once barbarians. And Rome endured to have an emperor from Spain, another from
Africa, one from Arabia and quite a few from the Balkans.
Which leaves us with a definitional
problem: what is a barbarian? Guy
Halsall summarizes the problem quite well: “Much discussion of barbarian
settlement is heavily technical, making considerable and precise use of Roman
vocabulary and assigning constitutional significance to such terms. However,
close inspection of the sources reveals that the situation was much less
clearly defined.” Dediticii- barbarians who surrendered-, laeti- captured
barbarians-, and foederati- barbarians who made a treaty for settlement- are
various forms of barbarians. In many ways “the usurpers Magnentius (350-353)
and Silvanus (355) were […] sons of barbarians. Had they not rebelled or found
themselves on the wrong side of the imperial authorities- whereupon their
barbarian antecedents were emphasized-, there would be no reason to see them as
other than Roman” (Guy Halsall, Barbarian
Migrations 2007). Thus a barbarian is a situational construction, which
mostly involves a comedic aspect (the Roman emperor of Gaul Tetricus was made
to wear the traditional Gallic pants when he was paraded in Rome as a defeated
enemy by the emperor Aurelian).
And as a follow up question: how can we
tell that an individual is a barbarian? In 1984, Yves-Albert Dauge demonstrated
that barbarian is also a term for criticism used sometimes to describe emperors (Yves-Albert Dauges, Le Barbare 1981). The barbarians, indeed,
is the enemy of Rome, but that enemy can be anybody. Archaeologically, it is
even harder to define what a barbarian is. Issues of language, religion, custom
or law are difficult to unearth archaeologically, especially since, according
to Brighelli, these barbarians are Romanized (thus spoke Latin, were
Christians, and pretty-much behaved like Romans). Thus, the proposition that
Roman population decreased while barbarian population increased is a completely
untestable hypothesis.
What’s at stake is the problem
that “[de Jaeghere’s work] gives us a
terrifying mirror.” What exactly is that mirror? That inclusion leads to ruin?
That European culture, by opening its doors to immigrants, is going to die?
What is, in fact, European culture? Who gets to define it? The danger in
reducing the fall of Rome to a problem of immigration misleads the reader into
making false assumptions about this society’s future (and about border control
in the Roman world). Roman history does not indicate that incorporation was a
problem, quite the opposite. If failure there is (and I don’t think there is)
it was different. To ossify a system in such a way that prevents assimilation
or denies integration can only be doomed. The increase of “knights” into the
Roman state in the third century, the integration of local elites from all
corners of the empire, allowed for greater participation in the Roman world of
localities in the Roman World. In the fourth century, the Roman aristocrat(s)
who wrote the Historia Augusta called
the Syrian prince Septimius Odaenathus (who lived in the third century) restitutor orbis (the savior of the
world) for his battles against Persia.
I am critical of Brighelli’s article,
not just for the poor caricature he presents of the empire (which has nothing
to do with his status as a journalist), but also for his lack of wherewithal
regarding appurtenance to a “European culture.” In a Democracy, the
relationship of one being to another being cannot be enshrined by the privilege
of an individual or a body of individuals to decide appurtenance to a culture;
and its logical afterthought, to deny opportunities and participation in a
system on account of ever-changing definitions of identity that seek to exclude
more than they seek to include.
To me, Brighelli demonstrated, once again, Professor Drake’s
sentiment that “we always learn the wrong lessons from History.”
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For Further ACTUAL Reading:
Halsall, Guy. Barbarian Migrations. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 2007
Kulikowski, Michael. Rome’s Gothic Wars. Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press 2008
