The Fall of the Roman Empire (25 page)

The other leading universities of the West were at Mediolanum (Milan) and Carthage. Carthage, however, had serious student troubles, about which Augustine reminisces, though he himself seems to have played a somewhat unhelpful role among the silent majority.

. . . I was at the top of the school of rhetoric. I was pleased with my superior status and swollen with conceit. All the same, as you well know, Lord, I behaved far more quietly than the 'Wreckers', a title of ferocious devilry which the fashionable set chose for themselves. I had nothing whatever to do with their outbursts of violence, but I lived among them, feeling a perverse sense of shame because I was not like them.

I kept company with them and there were times when they lived up to their name. Without provocation they would set upon some timid freshman, gratuitously affronting his sense of decency for their own amusement and using it as fodder for their spiteful jests.. . . 'Wreckers' was a fit name for them, for they were already adrift and total wrecks themselves.

Nevertheless, the university of Carthage maintained a higher academic standard than almost any other institution.

Gaul possessed famous municipal schools of grammar and rhetoric, among which those at Lugdunum (Lyon), Vienna (Vienne), Burdigala (Bordeaux) and Arverna (Clermont-Ferrand) were outstanding. During the Constantinian epoch Gallic education enjoyed a considerable renaissance, and an edict of 376 propounded an elaborate system of state-controlled education throughout the country. In the following century, which was the great age of Gaul's poets, its schools still continued to exist, although the political disturbances of the time caused them to show signs of decay, so that teaching tended to become conventional and superficial.

Indeed, a barren worship of convention was now all too frequent in colleges of every sort. Nor had anything whatever been done to remedy the characteristic failing of Roman education, which was its narrowly literary and oratorical character. The neglect of science and technology to which this curriculum testified was singularly incapable of meeting the continually recurrent crises of the age. Empty, pedantic classicism was the order of the day, and the system went on turning out cultured graduates who possessed a talent for verbal felicity and valued superficial expression but were totally lacking in practical constructive ideas.

Constantine, far from adjusting educational institutions to meet the new attitudes of a Christianized Empire, gave a vigorous stimulus to the old outworn system by deliberately assuming its patronage. Although not a highly literate man himself, he spoke fervently in support of the classics, without feeling the smallest obligation to broaden their scope. And even Valentinian I, who came from a non-Roman milieu and disliked the upper class, did nothing to reverse this conservative trend.

On the contrary, throughout the entire fourth century, there was a significant resurgence of the historic literature and oratory. 'If we lose eloquence,' declared the rhetorician Libanius, 'what then will there be left to distinguish us from the barbarians?' Yet the circle of people who maintained this civilization had shrunk considerably, as the middle class, which had hitherto played a prominent part in it, gradually faded away. In consequence, the basically aristocratic nature of the traditional Roman culture reasserted itself, and its pursuit became limited to a comparatively small number of pagan noblemen and Senators, whose cultural and literary attitudes remained singularly uniform.

The letters they wrote to one another, couched in a language meaningful only to a few persons of refinement like themselves, display elegance and nostalgic charm, but have been justly pronounced to be as accomplished and as jejune as the visiting cards of the mandarins of Imperial China. Sadly memorable examples of this sterility are provided by the epistles of Symmachus. Ausonius'
Mosella
is a charming poem of natural description, but his remaining works mostly justify the poet's own admission, ‘I know that my readers will yawn over my poor verses. Such is their usual fate, and they deserve it.' Claudian's poems, which greatly influenced medieval Latin verse, attain a higher level, displaying a competent fluency of diction and versification. But the inscription on his statue in the Forum of Trajan at Rome, dedicated 'to one who has combined a Homer's music with a Virgil's mind', is wildly overstated.

Typical products of the period were thirty-page summaries of Roman history, for people who did not have the time or patience for more. The fifth-century writer Martianus Capella, on the other hand, wrote a lengthy allegorical treatise, which was once again employed as a model in the Middle Ages. Its dry-as-dust, though quaint, pedantry is adequately suggested by its title
On the Wedding of Mercury and Philology,
and by the choice of the Seven Liberal Arts as Philology's bridesmaids.

Macrobius' academic symposium the
Saturnalia,
perhaps written at about the same time, includes a mass of varied and obscure material, which throws much light upon the current antiquarian revival. But although the
Saturnalia
possesses a melancholy interest as the determined bulwark of dying academic classicism, it is by no means a literary masterpiece.

Sidonius, again, is equally informative about the Roman Empire. His letters and poems, however, are woolly, bombastic, artificial and turgid - as the English historian Thomas Hodgkin remarked, he is a conceited member of a foolish mutual flattery society. But Sidonius was at least a powerful believer in the dignity of the literary profession, and at the end of his life he wrote rather impressively: 'Now that the old degrees of official rank are swept away - those degrees by which the highest in the land used to be distinguished from the lowest - the only token of nobility will henceforth be a knowledge of letters.'

Sidonius and many other leading cultural figures lived outside Rome, and outside Italy. Although the Emperors of the time rarely visited the ancient capital, residing instead at Mediolanum (Milan) and then Ravenna, the influence of the Eternal City, where the Senate was still located, remained gigantic, and even increased. It had already been called eternal by the poet Tibullus, half a millennium earlier, and the coins of rulers of many epochs repeated the same glorious epithet. Even the transient Priscus Attalus, protege of Alaric the Visigoth, depicted the goddess Roma seated in traditional martial guise, with the proud, romantic, unconsciously ironical, inscription 'Unconquered, eternal Rome' - 'INVICTA ROMA AETERNA'.

When Attila, confronted by Pope Leo i, decided to withdraw from Italy, the motives that deterred the Huns from attacking Rome may have included not only practical considerations but the superstitious fear the city still inspired. And even after the German Odoacer had seized control of Italy, and the Western Empire was no more, the vacuum of sovereignty was filled by the romantic ideology of eternal Rome. No longer the governmental centre of the world which had taken its name, it had become, nevertheless, the symbol of that world in a new and significant manner, denoted by the use of the term 'Romania'.

When first used in the fourth century, this designation stood for the Roman Empire in the political sense, and then it came to denote the whole heritage of Roman culture in the Latin West, in distinction from Gothia, Francia, Alamannia. Emperors who had originated in far distant provinces, and who had scarcely even set foot in Rome, nevertheless passionately stressed their authentic Romanism, and even humbler provincials at last came to speak of themselves as 'Romans', although they, too, may never have been near the place at all.

At higher levels of culture and society, the city's appeal received fanatical literary expression. Ammianus, who left the Greek East and went to Rome to write a Latin history, described the fascination of the
urbs venerabilis
in solemn terms. Claudian, too, hailed the antique capital with heartfelt praise, admiring, above all, the universality which had been its greatest gift to history. In 416-17 another poet, Rutilius Namatianus, offered a further striking eulogy. The real Rome, only lately, had succumbed to the barbarian captor Alaric. But Rutilius discerned a Rome of a higher reality, which could never fail.

No man will ever be safe if he forgets you;

May I praise you still when the sun is dark. To count up the glories of Rome is like counting

The stars in the sky. . . .

Sidonius, who came from a part of Gaul which prided itself on its Latin civilization, saw Rome as the 'apex of the universe, fatherland of liberty, sole commonwealth of the entire world'. And in his panegyric of the Emperor Majorian, he personified the city-goddess in the following fulsome and imposing terms:

Rome, the warrior-goddess, had taken her seat. Her breast was uncovered, on her plumed head was a crown of towers . . . She had a sternness ready to rebuke exaltation, her modest mien only makes her more terrible.

Sidonius and his fellow-Christians were still quite at ease with this pagan personification, and indeed Leo I, traditionally believed to have been the first Pope who came from the old Italian countryside, praised the see of St Peter in the sort of language pagans were accustomed to use about the Capitoline Gods.

And yet there was endless argument among Christians about the extent to which they were entitled to dwell upon this classical heritage. Tertullian had taken the extreme view that it was sinful for a Christian to teach the pagan authors at all. That was not official; nevertheless, there was a considerable awareness that one must not give in too completely to the allurements of the pagan classics. Jerome dreamt that God upbraided him for being a Ciceronian (wherein the Almighty paid his literary background a somewhat excessive compliment). Augustine, too, contrasted
your
Virgil with
our
Scriptures. Nevertheless, he felt it appropriate to recall that even the ancient Israelites had been allowed to 'spoil the Egyptians' and take captive women as concubines: so he too was entitled to take what he could from the pagan writers. Paulinus of Nola felt the same. You should not be too greatly bemused by the classics, he advised, but nevertheless it was permissible for you to exploit them for your own Christian advantage.

These same writers who venerated Rome - pagans and Christians alike - display a strong tendency to see every contemporary event in terms of
previous
Roman happenings. In order to ram these comparisons home, they call continually upon a wide range of precedents, taken from the entire gallery of the glorious past. When, for example, the Romans are defeated by the Visigoths at Adrianople, Ammianus at once compares the disaster to German invasions nearly five hundred years earlier. The events of past and present are continually juxtaposed and juggled together.

Claudian plays just the same game, persistently and elaborately relating his contemporary heroes to their alleged historical forerunners - Horatius on the Bridge, the Scipios, Cato, Brutus, and so on downwards into Imperial times. Sidonius is another writer who pours forth a veritable torrent of antique precedents. Indeed, even Salvian, in spite of all his distaste for the conservative establishment, nevertheless remains a tremendous eulogist of times gone by.

Contemporary Emperors, too, employ just the same sort of language in their edicts. The legislation of Majorian, for example, specifically invokes the praises of the laws of ancient times. And, indeed, the nomenclature of these rulers still retains its ancient ring. Majorian himself was called 'Julius' after Caesar who had died exactly five hundred years before his accession: and the very last Emperor of all was both Romulus and Augustus. 'These names', remarked J. B. Bury, 'meet us like ghosts rearisen from the past days of Roman history.'

Such was the atmosphere in which the scholars of the period spent their time actively unearthing and preserving the ancient masterpieces of Latin literature. 'If we have any discernment,' advised Macrobius, 'we must always venerate antiquity.' His advice was scarcely needed. No age had ever looked backwards with such passion.

Yet this admiration for the past led directly to catastrophes, since it conspired to prevent anything being done to avert them. For when Ammianus compared the Visigoths to the German invaders of half a millennium before, his whole point was that those former Germans, perilous though they seemed at the time, had nevertheless been successfully driven from the Empire. Moreover, he explicitly attacked anyone who maintained that such parallels with present times were not perfectly satisfactory.

. . . Those who are unacquainted with ancient records say that the state was never before overspread by such a dark cloud of misfortune, but they are deceived by the horror of the recent ills which have overwhelmed them. For if they study earlier times or those which have recently passed, these will show that such dire disturbances have often happened.

So the battle of Adrianople, which had resulted in a crushing Visigothic victory, was nothing really serious to worry about. And other writers, too, speak in almost exactly the same terms.

Now, to interpret this as praiseworthy courage in the face of adversity is inadequate. For such an interpretation would ignore the fallacy inherent in Ammianus' view. The fallacy lay in the real difference that existed between the ancient events and the recent disaster. For the German invasions defeated by Marius had not been fatal to Rome, and had never threatened to be fatal. The degree of magnitude had altogether changed: the blow represented by the battle of Adrianople was a peril of quite a different order, and the symptom of a plight far more desperate than had ever been threatened before.

The current situation, as described by Ammianus himself without the benefit of hindsight, would have seemed to make it clear that this was so. He reveals the Emperors constantly engaged in checking German breakthroughs at one point after another along the frontier: Adrianople had surely made it clear that, unless some novel, large-scale remedies could be found, the collapse of Roman control in many provinces was close at hand. That is to say, Ammianus' optimism could only be in the slightest degree justified if he were able to point to some plan for averting this collapse. But this was not within his powers.