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Gibbon And Me

So you have peculiar situations where authors can report an unending sequence of facts which suggest an epoch of relative material scarcity and decreased social complexity who just won’t admit that judged by these metrics there was a downsizing. ~Razib I have a couple points expanding on my original response to Razib’s otherwise very good review of […]

So you have peculiar situations where authors can report an unending sequence of facts which suggest an epoch of relative material scarcity and decreased social complexity who just won’t admit that judged by these metrics there was a downsizing. ~Razib

I have a couple points expanding on my original response to Razib’s otherwise very good review of Ward-Perkins’ new book.  First, perhaps there are such people as Razib describes, but we would need to be specific about this.  Which authors actually say, “The cities shrank, everyone was poorer and trade weakened, but you cannot say that any of these things actually got worse in material terms“?  The entire argument revolves around which standards you are using to judge the civilisation.  Obviously when judged by material wealth, the scale and frequency of building, levels of trade, the size of the military, the vitality of civic institutions, etc., things got worse, especially after the 4th century and even more so in the sixth and seventh.  The curial class really did effectively collapse by the sixth century, both because the state made it an undesirable role to have and the function it fulfilled ceased to possess the significance that it once had; other institutions (the bureaucracy and Church mainly) were developing that proved more attractive to the leading men of the cities; reduced means and increased burdens made the responsibilities of the curiales harder and harder to meet.  I have no problem acknowledging that the curial class vanished and that this was a change for the worse if we’re talking about preserving the traditional form of the Roman city.  What I am not going to do is beat my breast and lament the departure from late Roman urbanism, since it is not really the purpose of an historian to approach things this way.  Besides, there’s more than one way to assess the accomplishments of a civilisation.  Arguably, given the reduced material conditions of the postclassical period the cultural production of the Mediterranean Christian world in these centuries should be regarded as even more impressive than they already are; these societies managed to produce works of enduring importance and, one might argue, greater value in much more straitened cirucmstances.  The point is not to get into some fruitless back-and-forth over whose period is better, but simply to insist that narratives that privilege one era over another have unhealthy distorting effects on the study of both periods and they cause scholars to constantly look for those things that “anticipate” the decline of the “‘higher” period rather than approaching the evidence less tendentiously.   

Second, it is more likely that the authors who stress change and transformation rather than speaking in terms of decline are historians primarily concerned with questions of meaning and social function, and so do not have much to say about the “relative material scarcity” except to acknowledge that it existed.  Consequently, the ways in which late antique society are not like its grand, paradigmatic classical forerunner are only interesting insofar as they actually illuminate the characteristics of late antique society.  It is better to understand why people lit a votive candle at a saint’s shrine than curse the “Dark Ages.” 

For good or ill (I tend to think it ill), institutional history today generally is in decline (though it has not yet fallen!), while narratives of “decline and fall” has everything to do with the decline and fall of institutions, whether civic, fiscal, political or military.  Narratives of decline and fall are inevitably focused on the state.  In these narratives, state-building is civilisation is progress.  In a similarly overwrought way, disintegration of the state equals barbarism equals general decay.  There is also more than a little of this applied to the progressive nationalist telling of American, German and Italian (and even early Chinese) history.  According to these views, you are presented with the following absurdities: the genius of American republicanism was somehow secured and made better after the War of Secession under such giants as Grant and Hayes; Leibniz, Goethe, Schiller and Kant were the products of an inferior culture because they lived before  unification; the Quattrocento was the product of a period of Italian decadence because there was frequent warfare between the cities; it was better that the Warring States period that produced Confucius, Mo-tzu and Laotzu, among others, gave way to the stifling centralisation of the Ch’in and the Legalists.  It would seem clear that state-centered narratives of progress and decline are deeply flawed, which is one reason why late antique historians have done all they can to get rid of such a model of the late Roman period. 

Ironically, Byzantine studies is one of the last holdouts for scholars focusing on institutions, even though by the standards of the older classicists Byzantine institutions are all degraded and sub-par (don’t even get them started on the monasteries).  There is always a danger that history will fall into these patterns because so much of the record comes from state records or chronicles and other sources that tend to privilege what the political leadership is doing.  Of course, there is some truth in any narrative tying state formation with advantages in terms of internal security and peace, and there is certainly great importance in understanding institutional structures of any society.  What late antique historians will keep insisting on, I think, is that they want to keep those things in a balance with the study of society, culture and religion.  If man does not live by bread alone, neither should we measure the worth of a civilisation simply or primarily by the continuation of the annona.

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