This blog is usually political, cultural and religious in its focus, and scholarly and professional questions usually come up only tangentially. But there is an interesting shift in some of the thinking about Rome and late antiquity that is taking place that should be of more general interest and merits a few comments.

Just from the brief summaries of two new books on late Roman history that have come out recently, I sense that the scholarship is turning back to the model of decline and fall that late antique historians, especially cultural historians, have worked so strenuously to put in the background. Part of this was surely necessary, as the claim that Roman cities underwent “change” but not “decline” was simply a way of avoiding taking the real structural, physical and economic changes in account. It was also a way of protecting late antiquity against the charges of being a derivative and inferior age, charges from which it (and Byzantium along with it) has only just recently begun to escape.

With the increasing prominence of archaeology in general studies of late antique history, it has become much harder to ignore the physical shrinking of the Roman city and a fundamental transformation in its character. Prof. Liebeschuetz in The Decline and Fall of the Roman City sets forth the archaeological evidence that shows this very convincingly.

It is very right to recognise that the breakdown of the curial classes was part and parcel of the creation of the new Byzantine state and its Christianised society (as the exemptions granted to curiales for work in the civil service, clery and Constantinopolitan senatorial aristocracy sucked the lifeblood from traditional Roman urbanism, or, to put it less dramatically, transferred these resources to other goods), but to do this one has to take account of the real consequences this had for the cities, and these consequences were, at a structural level, largely negative.

If later Roman historians are now demolishing this and other aspects of the rhetoric of “transformation” in late antique history, answering Piganiol’s question about the death of Rome (assassination or natural causes?) with a definite, if not quite so blunt, “assassination” verdict (which, as far as the west was concerned, Jones had accepted long ago), it bears remembering why the rhetoric of “transformation” seemed compelling for many scholars over the last 40 years.

There were two good reasons why late antique historians took this approach. First, there was a real need to shore up the idea of the period from roughly 395-600 (or 284-717 or 306-622–the boundaries are always a bit fuzzy) as something other than its conventional, dismissive association with the idea of a general “Dark Ages” bequeathed to us by classicists and liberal historians for whom the collapse of empire and the consequent birth of Christendom were the great calamities of ancient history. Second, on a related point, inherent in modern classicism and the liberal slant given to it by Gibbon and others who shared his prejudice against Christianity is the conviction that not only did political institutions and economic life decline in this period, but also that late antique culture was basically inferior in every respect that mattered to classicists: the literature was worse, because there was less secular literature and reams of theological and hagiographical writing, and the religion supposedly less reasonable and more fanatical almost by definition. Changes of meaning were viewed through the same lens of decline, which implicitly devalued and belittled the cultural achievements of the Christian empire.

These judgements could not stand and, happily, have been fading for decades, almost certain never to return in their older, cruder forms. Unfortunately, in the enthusiasm to rehabilitate this period and its cultural transformation as things to be studied in their own right, and not viewed distastefully from the Olympian heights of the classical ideal, late antique historians overreached and rejected even thinking in terms of decline, because of the unfortunate legacy of that idea in the historiography. This has opened them up very easily to the powerful criticisms that Profs. Heather and Ward-Perkins are probably making, though I will have to wait to judge on just how powerful they are until I see them.