Caius Maxentius

Another cause often cited is the severe disaffection of the common citizen -- many just wanted the oppressive state off their backs. Historian Morton Smith says, "Inevitably, the peasansts came to hate both the government and the rich. Their hatred manifested itself in many ways. Sometimes, seizing upon ecclesiastical quarrels, they supported whichever faction opposed the government. In Africa, Spain and Gaul, peasants repeated supported political revolts. In Africa and Egypt, many peasants joined the marauding tribes along the fringes of cultivated land; these tribes became so populous that considerable military forces failed to contain them. "Even when they remained on the land, the peasants violently resisted the tax collectors; the collectors, in turn, made ever more use of torture. By the end of the fourth century, collectors commonly had to be backed up by military force...Military expenditures rose, and taxes with them. This situation made effective resistance to the barbarians impossible. Large landowners and city authorities did not dare give arms and training to the peasantry. They preferred to risk an invasion by a few barbarians rather than a general peasant revolt. When the barbarians did break in, the peasants either took the opportunity to revolt and plunder for themselves, or joined the invaders; they rarely did anything to resist them. "Not that they were unable to resist. For example, the barbarians had no difficulty overruning Spain, but the forces send to drive them from the country had less trouble with them than with peasant revolts. Moreover, when the Goths finally established themselves, their violation of a local martyr's shrine led to a popular uprising in which they were defeated. Had there been any such popular support for the Roman government, it is inconceivable that the barbarian tribes, which normally numbered about 20,000 fighting men, should have overrun Italy, France, Spain and North Africa and dominated a population of about 10 million. The Roman Empire in the west fell only because most of its subjects would not fight to preserve it." This gives quite a different picture to the usual scenario of "overwhelming barbarians swarming the countryside." Maybe the empire fell because the people simply came to oppose the state's oppressive machinations.

This is a fascinating question. It dovetails with the question of who considered themselves Romans, when and why. What was implied by the phrase, "I am a Roman?" This must have changed dramatically over the centuries. It went from meaning that one had the Roman franchise, could hold public office and vote; by the fifth century and after, Christianity was an important part of what was implied by such a statement, and the Republican traditions had mostly faded away. Obviously, the Roman identity was strongly adopted in the Greek lands of the empire, but it doesn't seem to have been so strongly taken up by the Jews or the Egyptians, who did not fight much against the Arabs in the seventh century, and seem to have been fine with discarding Roman citizenship. Isn't this a bit like saying that Queen Elizabeth II is as English as Henry VIII if not Edward the Confessor? English, yes, but in very different ways. Edward would scarcely recognize Elizabeth's England, and wouldn't even speak the same language. The Byzantines could point to continuities with the earlier Empire, but how different was their idea of Romanitas from that which people had during the high Empire? I would expect that there had been a lot of revision and change.

I agree, and Adrian Goldsworthy points out that during the fourth century, it made sense for army units to be smaller, since pitched battles against the barbarians were relatively rare. The functions demanded of the army were more often oriented towards counter-raids, ambushes and smaller-scale operations, since the barbarians were rarely trying to engage the Romans in large-scale winner-take-all battles.

...directly to known Roman families? I've often wondered if names like Giuliani indicate some connection to the Julii or Juliani. Are there any proven family lines, or is there just too little in the way of records during the Dark Ages to trace lineage?

Is anything known about how the scutum was decorated? The patterns with gold wings and thunderbolts against a red background are commonly depicted. How uniform or consistent was it? Were all the shields painted by hand, or did they have some time-saving technique for mass-producing them?

It seems to me that a right-handed soldier would find it easier to draw his sword from the left across his body. Why did Roman legionnaries (at least till the third century AD) wear their scabbards on the right? Was there any advantage?

Had the Empire not faced such a massive challenge from the Arabs after Heraclius's victories over the Persians, I think it might have had the necessary breathing time to regain its strength and prosperity. I doubt that the Byzatines could have retained their hegemony in Egypt and Syria/Palestine for much longer -- the peoples of these regions had been living under Greco-Roman supremacy since the days of Alexander the Great (and were glad to shuffle it off), and they disagreed greatly with Catholic and Orthodox views on religion -- but if not for the Arabs, perhaps some kind of Greek nation with its capital at Constantinople would have been passed down to the present day. That's a big "if" though -- Islam obviously answered some kind of sociological need for millions of people in the near East, and if it had not ignited a big change in the cultures of the region, something else might have. If the Arabs had not arisen as a great power in the seventh century, what would this have meant for the Turks? They may well have migrated West anyway, and disrupted Byzantine stability.

I don't understand what different it would have made if the move hadn't been made -- the Latin Empire of Constantinople and Nicaea were not allies. The Nicaean Empire would have been threatened on two fronts whether they took Constantinople or not.

Ursus, I'd love to hear what some of these are.

Billius Bobbus III Porphyrogenitus

Where are the Picts?! My Scottish pride is wounded!

With regard to number 3, almost every book I read that has pictures of Roman architecture and engineering that stresses that "this bridge" or "that aqueduct" are still serving some kind of practical purpose today, so it's not a long stretch to assume that some of the infrastructure continued to be used for some time after the end of antiquity, is it? With regard to number 2, many aspects of the Roman civilian and military bureaucracy remained after the fall of the empire (admittedly, many of these were late Roman inventions, not from the High Empire). The Roman command system of the duces and comites became the "dukes" and "counts" of medieval times. There are examples of the Franks and Arabs continuing to use the tax collectors, record keepers and other bureaucrats left over from the late Roman/Byzantine administration. I don't think it's fair to say that all these things simply vanished.

Maybe if Nicaea had remained separate, it would have sped up the end of the Byzantine world. From the Turkish perspective, the enemies would be divided and antagonistic to each other (Nicaea, the Latin Empire of Constantinope, Epirus, the Slavic states). "Divide and conquer" -- worked for the Turks as well as it worked for the Romans. What was the demographic balance like? Did the Empire of Nicaea have a sufficient population base to withstand the Turkish advance? It seems unlikely.

Thanks -- it looks like a very interesting book!

I wonder how differently the Romans perceived historical time, in comparison to us? We've seen sweeping changes in technology and lifestyle in the past few generations. My grandparents remember a time before planes and before cars were common. Go back 300 years from our time, and technology is much more primitive, and social organization is quite different. In contrast, if a Roman of Trajan's time were to think back to the time of the Scipios, the technology wouldn't seem that different. The government had changed, and the territorial extent of the empire had changed, but would the Roman of the 2nd century AD see the Punic War era as more primitive/less developed, or just older? Would that 300 year span seem as historically remote to him as a 300 year span seems to us?

Syagrius is listed as the last magister militum in Gaul, and remained the Dux in control of the area until Clovis, king of the Franks, defeated him at Soissons in 486 -- ten years after the deposing of Romulus Augustulus. The barbarians actually referred to him as "king of the Romans" until he was defeated. He fled to Alaric II in search of protection, but was sent to Clovis in 487 and put to death. So ended the last bit of Gallo-Roman political power in Gaul. It seems a bit like the Empire of Trebizond, which survived for a while after the fall of Constantinople, a slice of the old empire which stood briefly for a while after the lights went out in the capital. Thought this was an interesting footnote.

Actually, my question is even broader -- what happened to the peoples of Thrace, Illyricum and Greece after the Slavic and Bulgar migrations? Maps show the Slavs penetrating right onto the Peloponnese. I also read once that the "ethnic" Greeks in modern Greece (though the language survived) demographically declined during the Middle Ages and were largely supplanted by the Slavs. Does anyone know if this is true? Were the existing populations (pre-500AD) of the Balkans and Achaean penninsula killed off, did they flee, did they merge with the migrating populations?

I've just been reading Treadgold's The Byzantine Army 284-1081, and he argues that the outcome after Manzikert reflects about 40 years of neglect of the Byzantine Army. Under Basil II, the army had been well-organized and the theme system was working well, but the government didn't maintain the army at this level in the ensuing reigns. Treadgold describes the events after Manzikert as making no sense in military, demographic and geographic terms -- the Turks somehow penetrated all the way to Nicaea while a number cities in far east of Anatolia didn't fall. He says that the only way this could have happened is if Anatolia was very irregularly and sparsely defended. I guess the point is, Manzikert revealed the decayed state of the Byzantine military at this time. Maybe the battle was the disaster that was already waiting to happen.

I'll go with Appius Claudius Caudex, who got the conflict with the Carthaginians going, and helped start Roman expansion beyond Italy. You also gotta love the colourful nickname "Caudex" (the blockhead).

Thanks for these replies! I didn't know about this -- is modern pronounciation roughly the same as ecclesiastical/Catholic Latin? I'm mainly curious about the ancient pronounciation. That would be very helpful. Thanks!

There are a bunch of words and names I've read, but never heard. Does anyone know how they're pronounced, and what syllable gets the emphasis? In particular: aedile, mos maiorum, Odovacer/Odoacer, Stilicho, Cassivalaunus. With certain plural words, like "frumentarii" is the last syllable an "ee" sound or is it "ee-eye?"

The more I read, the more I tend to agree with the transformation-of-the-culture theory instead of the decline-and-fall. I think it's hard to separate out a lot of the things discussed above, because they all contributed in concert to Rome's changing situation. I'd add that Diocletian's measures to decentralize power, expand the bureaucracy and divide society into functional orders did a lot to change the nature of the Roman state, and this decentralization continued well into early Medieval times. Secular power devolved into smaller and smaller spheres, and the over-government provided by the imperial Roman state became increasingly expensive and eventually irrelevant, at least in the West.

I agree that Latin can't be said to have died out, but in terms of "when" the Italian vernacular became significantly divergent from the written forms of Latin (that of scholars and the church), I've read that the seventh century was the time when this divergence really accelerated. Following the 6th-century wars between the Goths and the Byzantines, and later the Lombards, Italy's urban infrastructure was so badly damaged, most of the cities withered, and literacy became increasingly uncommon. Writing does much to standardize a language, and without much literacy, regional vernacular dialects tend to evolve more quickly. There are inscriptions from northern Italy dating from the 9th century that speak of an Italian vernacular as being distinct from Latin. That's what I've read, anyway.

Does it have something to do with the way the Romans "Romanized" Western Europe vs. how the Greeks Hellenized the Near East? Is there a fundamental difference? Did the Greeks jealously guard admittance to Greek language, culture and politics? It seems that the Romans were much more open to granting citizenship to outsiders (if only gradually), which may explain how Latin entered the vernacular of places like France and Spain. But I remain fascinated (as per my previous thread on England and Romania) how some areas, subject to relatively brief rule, are permanently transformed linguistically, while other places ruled for longer lose their Latin and Greek almost completely. It's particularly interesting in places like Western Asia Minor, where Greek cities existed from almost a millenium before Christ, and remained in the Greek linguistic sphere of influence as Byzantine cities up until the 13th century. Turkish has taken over completely in these areas. Why didn't Greek remain, or at least get more equally hybridized with the language of the newcomers?