Irrational Fears Taken from a Constructed Past: Rome and its Barbarians

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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.

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.

Trajan's Column:

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