CHAPTER 13.—CIVILIZATION DESTROYS CIVILIZATION. 

For the next millennium, until the discovery of America, western Europe will be the focus of history. Other parts of the world will be doing things that are in many ways more interesting than what the Europeans are doing during that time, but they will not be making history properly so called.

Let us therefore pause for a moment to survey the shattered remains of the Roman Empire in the west in about the year 500. Everywhere we look, we see barbarian kings as acknowledged rulers. In Italy, the Ostro­goths have conquered; in Spain, Visigoths rule. In Gaul, the Franks have made themselves at home and are already beginning to think of naming the place France after themselves; but they have encountered some opposition from the Burgundians, who vote for calling it Burgundy. Across the Mediterranean, the Vandals have established themselves in the province of Africa and covered the public buildings with graffiti.

Anyone familiar with our school histories would say that we are looking at the begin­ning of the Dark Ages, but our school his­tories are wrong. The lights are still on. Given half a chance, the barbarians find that they enjoy civilization and can get pretty good at it. It will be the Romans themselves who ul­timately destroy classical civilization, because they would rather destroy it than let filthy barbarians have it.

If we take a closer look at Italy, we find that the whole peninsula is thriving. Rome is still the queen of cities; her ancient splendor has been restored, and quite a bit of new con­struc­tion is going on. Art and literature are flourishing; merchants are growing rich; travelers make it to their destinations unmolested. After the disasters of the 400s, it looks like a new golden age for Rome.

All this comes from the wise and just rule of Theodoric, the Gothic king who swept into Italy, got rid of Odoacer, and went on to rule fairly and well for a generation. Under his benevolent government, the old Roman bu­reau­cracy continued to function unimpaired, and decades of stability brought both economic and cultural recovery. Naturally, the Romans were seething with resentment against a barbarian king who had the temerity to govern their country better than they could govern it themselves. Oh, how they longed to be rid of these disgusting Goths, with their uncouth language and their Arian heresy and their just and competent government!

There is an old Roman saying about “the curse of an answered prayer” that would be very appropriate here.

As for the rest of the West, it is true that occasional waves of barbarians are still sweep­ing across the landscape. (Historians once believed that history was made up of a series of such waves, but modern historians have shown that history sometimes behaves as a particle as well.) On the whole, however, there is more stability in western Europe than there has been for a century, and there is good reason to hope that the lingering shadows will soon be dispelled by the strong light of civilization still beaming from Rome. (Historians usually resort to elaborate metaphors when they are not quite sure what they are talking about.)

Now we must turn our attention back to Constantinople for a moment. During the reign of Theodoric, the relationship of the Roman emperor to Gothic Italy was rather like the relationship of the British monarch to Australia: his face was on the money and his name at the top of the chart, but he was not expected to attempt any actual governing, and any active interference in western affairs would have been hotly resented. In 527, however, a new emperor named Justinian came to the throne. Almost immediately he began rubbing his hands together and declaring that he was going to get a few things done around here.

Justinian is the most unaccountable character in history. No other ruler has ruled so well and so poorly at the same time. He could slip away unscathed from the most disastrous failures, but his successes were absolutely ruinous. His most conspicuous failure, the riots that burned half of Constantinople, ended up giving us the Church of Holy Wisdom, one of the most inspiring works of architecture on the planet. His most conspicuous successes, on the other hand, destroyed civilization in the west and caused the astonishingly rapid Islamic conquests in the East. He added millions to the tax base and bankrupted the Empire. There was nothing the man could not accomplish. And as if his life were not confusing enough, the historian who gave us the most fawning pane­gyrics on Justinian’s virtues, and the historian who penned the most outrageous calumnies against him, are the same man—Procopius, who, like many a cubicle-dweller since, kept a little notebook in his desk to jot down what he really thought of his employer.

Having consolidated his position with the usual round of murders, Justinian took it into his head that he was going to restore the Roman Empire to its former extent. This was without a doubt the stupidest and most unrealistic idea a Roman emperor had ever had. It was clearly impossible. Since no one dared to tell Justinian that, he very nearly managed to pull it off.

It helped a great deal that he happened to have an extraordinary military genius at his disposal. Belisarius, Justinian’s master strategist, took Africa from the Vandals so easily that his mere name could stir terror in a barbarian heart. From Africa he went on to Italy. Luckily Theodoric had died and been succeeded by a pack of idiots, so Belisarius rolled right up the southern half of the peninsula with very little trouble. As he continued his steamroller march toward Rome, the Goths decided that the wisest thing to do would be to run to Ravenna, screaming like little girls all the way. They took the most popular Roman senators with them as hostages and left the Romans some simple instructions (“Don’t do anything we wouldn’t do”) that they hoped would prevent them from handing the city over to Belisarius right away. Then they left, and the Romans handed the city over to Belisarius right away.

Holed up in the relative safety of Ravenna, the Goths had time to reconsider their position. Perhaps it had not been such a good idea after all to let the imperial army take the greatest city in their realm without a fight. It began to occur to them that there were a whole lot of Goths, whereas the imperial army was just a few dozen Greeks—the kind of people who sat around on velvet cushions and talked about philosophy all day. Why had they retreated? What were they afraid of? This Belisarius wasn’t so tough. So they decided to go down there and take Rome back. First, just to make sure they would be welcomed as liberators, they killed all the hostages; then they came and besieged the city.

They might have taken Rome easily except for two facts: first, that Belisarius was directing the defense, and second, that the Goths were spectacularly bad at sieges. They seemed to think that the way to besiege a city was to sit around in the suburbs until they got bored, and then hurl themselves at the walls, whereupon the imperial defenders would pierce them with arrows and crush them with stones until the Goths had had enough. Some­times Belisarius would send out a sudden sally while the Goths were still sitting around in the suburbs, which was awfully un­sporting of him, since they were never ready for him.

Having failed to take the city by standing around and glowering, the Goths thought up an idea that taxed the limits of their strategic thinking: they decided to cut the aqueducts, depriving Rome of her water supply. This was good thinking as far as it went: Romans were used to having water, and they would surely start to grumble against Belisarius if they had to remain grubby and unwashed. So the aque­ducts were cut, and the water ceased to flow into Rome. Instead, it poured out by the millions of gallons into the land around the city, turning the Gothic camps into squishy, malaria-infested swamps. This was not quite the result the Gothic brain trust had envisioned, though it might have occurred to any child who had ever played with a garden hose.

The Goths held out as long as they could, but it really did begin to feel as though Belisarius was somehow besieging them from inside the city. Every time they tried another assault, the Romans would rain down bits of statuary and architecture, not to mention arrows, which the Goths didn’t like at all. Belisarius, meanwhile, held firm. It was true that the greatest city in the world was being disassembled piecemeal around him, but he had the true military genius’ contempt for collateral damage. The important thing was that he was winning.

Finally, after a year, the Goths gave up, and the grubby unwashed citizens of Rome thought they had seen the last of them. They had not. It took several more years of the most devastating wars the Italian peninsula had ever seen before Belisarius could report back to Justinian, “I have returned Italy to the Empire,” the way a teenager might hand you a steering wheel and a bent fender and say, “Here, I brought back your car.” And even then, while Belisarius was reporting in at the palace, the generals he had left to guard Italy were botching the job so badly that the Goths reconquered almost the whole province, including Rome, and it had to be re-reconquered, and re-re-reconquered, and so on.

By the end of the Gothic War, as the imperial side called it, Italy was a wasteland. The city of Rome had been reduced to a clot of squalid villages huddling amongst the ruins. The great country houses, with their libraries and art collections, were blackened wrecks. Almost everyone who could properly conju­gate a Latin verb was dead. But it was Roman soil again, so that at least was cause for cele­bration. And that happy state of affairs lasted for about an hour and a half until the savage Lombards, seeing that there was almost no one left to defend the place, poured into Italy to destroy what little was left of civilization there.

So much for the destruction of civilization in the heart of the West, one of Justinian’s two greatest accomplishments. Meanwhile, Justinian had not been idle in the East. As the visible head of Christendom, he had the responsibility of seeing to it that his subjects enjoyed all the benefits of Christian ortho­doxy. It would be nothing less than rank dereliction of duty for him to allow a single one of his subjects to hold any religious opinion that differed in so much as a single iota from the orthodox standard. Immortal souls were at stake! It was clearly his duty to launch a ferocious persecution against the wicked iotists. He did not ask himself whether it would be wise to make half the East long to be free of the tyranny of Constantinople: he simply saw his duty, and he did it.

That is why half the East longed to be free of the tyranny of Constantinople. And those oppressed millions would soon get their wish, leaving them a millennium and a half to contemplate the curse of an answered prayer.

The crossing tower of Lincoln Cathedral could be played as a quadruple-sub-contrabass recorder until 1549, when the spire collapsed during a particularly vigorous performance.

Wenderman’s Patent Concretophone enjoyed a brief fashion before the First World War, but the maker’s allotment of concrete went to the war effort, and the manufacture was not revived after the Armistice.

Excavations in the south of France have discovered artifacts indicating that Neanderthal man possessed a rudimentary form of concertina.

The piccolinelletto sounds thirteen octaves above the written score.

The Uniphone, which sounds only the note A flat, was designed by Dr. Emil von Schnapps as a therapeutic recreation for his tone-deaf patients.

Rolfe’s Bovine Organ toured the athenaeum circuit in the middle nineteenth century. Though well received, it proved excessively expensive to operate, as the oxen could not be reused.

CHAPTER 12.—BARBARIANS EVERYWHERE.

Throughout the long span of its existence, the Roman Empire was surrounded by barbarians. This was not so much a misfortune as a matter of terminology: it was pretty much inevitable once you defined everyone who did not speak Greek or Latin as a “barbarian.”

Some of these barbarians were harmless; but most of them were hostile, because the Roman Empire had a strong tendency to absorb any neighbor that lacked an inclination to fight vigorously. In practice, that meant that civilized nations with something to lose became Roman, whereas nomadic or half-settled tribes whose few possessions were portable were more inclined to pick a fight. Only in the east, where Parthians or Persians (depending on the era) maintained a substantial empire of their own, did the Roman Empire face equally civilized neighbors, which is to say neighbors who also had a large and expensive bureaucracy to support.

The Romans and Parthians (or Persians) had an ideal relationship from the point of view of both governments. There was usually some sort of fight going on between them, but it always ended with a treaty that put the borders back where they had been before the fight started, or at least pretty close. Both sides had cities they would rather not see destroyed and crops they were hoping to harvest, so there was a natural limit to the risks they were willing to take. Thus the various Persian (or Parthian) wars provided constant employment for the military on both sides without creating too much inconvenience for the average citizen. War of that sort is the engine of civilization: it keeps the citizens just fearful enough that they do not question the need for a large and expensive government, but it does not kill or impoverish enough of them to make a serious dent in the tax revenues.

On the other hand, the less civilized tribes that hovered on the northern borders of the Roman Empire had no governments to speak of, no tax base to protect; they were always in a good position to risk everything, because, if they lost, they could simply retreat and find somebody weaker to beat up on.

One of the differences between barbarism and civilization is that civilized peoples generally feel compelled to manufacture some excuse for war, whereas barbarians think it inexcusable not to be at war. This difference gives the barbarians a certain flexibility that the civilized nations lack. When a civilized nation decides to attack a neighbor whose destruction might prove profitable, it is necessary first to send embassies to the proposed enemy to tell him how rotten he’s been and to give him an opportunity to avert his own destruction by complying with certain conditions that have been deliberately made intolerable. The enemy’s refusal must then be received before the attack can be made with a clear conscience. Barbarians, on the other hand, need no other excuse than boredom to attack the nearest target. The fact that a neighbor exists is reason enough to fight him.

Thus the barbarians on the borders of the Roman Empire were always sweeping into unsuspecting provinces and killing everyone who had committed the dreadful crime of being there. Having made off with all the portable possessions of the provincials, as well as the cattle, women, children, and other livestock, they would sweep back into their impenetrable forests and get drunk. When they woke up a few days later with a rotten hangover, they would feel exceptionally grumpy and immediately start planning their next outrage against the Roman provincials.

In the time of Augustus, and for some considerable period thereafter, the barbarians knew that, if they tried any of those tricks, they would be soundly thrashed and sent to bed without supper by the invincible Roman legions. Natural selection therefore tended to favor the barbarians who attacked their barbarian neighbors rather than the Roman provinces. But during the Age of the Revolving Door, the legions were more often employed in propping up the latest would-be emperor than in thrashing the barbarians on the frontier. Meanwhile, the Roman citizens themselves lost their appetite for incessant civil war long before the imperial usurpers did, and service in the legions began to seem less an honor than an intolerable burden. So, on the one hand, the frontiers were often left unguarded as the legions went gallivanting off with some ephemeral emperor; and, on the other hand, the Roman provinces were depopulated by incessant civil war and its disastrous economic effects; and, on the third hand, the recalcitrant Roman citizens left gaps in the army that had to be filled with paid barbarian mercenaries. After a while, the barbarians outside the empire began to notice—for they were not entirely dim—that many desirable lands within the empire were nearly uninhabited, and that the provinces that were still wealthy and well populated were scarcely guarded, and that the parts that were still guarded were guarded by hired barbarians who might well be cousins or old school chums of the barbarians they were supposed to be keeping out. Thus a monotonous catalogue of barbarian invaders began to pour through the leaky frontiers, sometimes to plunder, but sometimes to stay.

Constantine brought some stability to the empire, which was bad luck for barbarians; but his successors were less stable than he was, giving the barbarians more and more opportunities to chip away at the empire. Theodosius—whose moderate competence was so refreshing that it earned him the title “the Great”—came up with a rather clever scheme for dealing with the more intransigent barbarian invaders: he declared them “foederati,” or allies, and pretended to have invited them to settle on the lands they had already seized anyway. In return for a certain annual payment of protection money, the barbarians agreed to pretend that the emperor had some authority over them; the emperor, for his part, agreed not to try to exercise that authority.

Theodosius was the last emperor to rule the whole Roman Empire. On his death it was divided between his two sons, Arcadius in the east and Honorius in the west. Of Arcadius there is little to say: he was merely another in a long line of moderately incompetent Eastern emperors. But Honorius is one of the most important figures in history. In fact, he is a great gaping black hole in history, one that nearly succeeded in sucking history itself into the depths of its inky nothingness. At the beginning of his reign, Honorius controlled the whole western half of the Roman Empire; by the end of his reign, the Roman Empire in the West had been reduced to the imperial palace at Ravenna and its associated parking lots. No other figure in history has ever made quite so little out of so much.

The key to Honorius’ personality is that he was a bit of a poultry fancier. He had no real interest in administering an empire, but he did sincerely love his fancy chickens. The city of Rome held no appeal for him, but he had a chicken named Rome of which he thought a great deal. Thus when Alaric led his great horde of barbarians into Italy and threatened to attack Rome itself, Honorius stayed in Ravenna and played with his chickens. When Alaric’s horde sacked Rome, someone brought Honorius the news: “Rome is destroyed!” “What?” the emperor sputtered. “She was just eating out of my hand an hour ago!” How relieved he was to learn that it was only Rome the city and not Rome the chicken!

Allowing Rome to be sacked was the career-topper in a long string of memorable accomplishments for Honorius. No other Roman emperor had ever managed it: the city had not been entered by a foreign foe for eight hundred years. We could hardly find another emperor who had had such an important effect on the history of the world: in fact, anyone who looks at the matter objectively would have to put Honorius near the top of the list of most important world leaders of all time.

After Alaric had sacked Rome, every barbarian and his dog wanted in on the action. Barbarian hordes washed across the landscape from east to west and from west to east again, sometimes splashing into each other. For a while Attila the Hun, so called because he was a Hun, cowed most of the other barbarian chiefs enough to make himself the master of an enormous barbarian empire. Attila ravaged provinces whenever he got bored, and demanded enormous payments from the Roman emperors for the privilege of having their provinces ravaged. Emperors cowered before him; or, rather, they cowered from a safe distance, sending disposable ambassadors whenever any more direct cowering was required. When Attila set his sights on the city of Rome, the emperor Valentinian III politely stepped out of the way; but the Bishop of Rome, Leo, paid a visit to Attila and whispered something in his ear that made him turn around and gallop back home. No one knows exactly what Leo said; but some historians, pointing out that Huns, unlike Romans, wore trousers, suggest that it may have been “Your fly is undone.” At any rate, it was clear to the general population, or what was left of it, that a bishop was now worth a great deal more than an emperor when it came to getting things done.

Attila died of a hangnail shortly after that, but the barbarians were everywhere, both inside and outside the empire. The Roman army was almost entirely barbarian, and the barbarian general Ricimer was placed in charge of the increasingly irrelevant business of choosing the Emperor of the West. Although in many respects a skillful general, Ricimer was indecisive when it came to emperors: his favorite today was a headless corpse tomorrow, and not one of his candidates lasted long enough to do anything memorable—nor would Ricimer have tolerated a memorable emperor. After Ricimer was killed, other barbarian chiefs took on the duty of nominating and executing emperors, until the only emperor left was a little boy with the impossibly ironic name of Romulus. In the year 476, the latest successful barbarian, a fellow called Odoacer or Odovakar (the man couldn’t spell his own name to save his life), decided he could do without an emperor altogether and offered Romulus an early retirement package.

This is the event that generations of schoolchildren have learned to call the Fall of the Roman Empire. But it did not appear to be any sort of fall at the time: it was merely another minor shuffling in the management structure. Instead of two ineffectual emperors, there would be only one ineffectual emperor now, the one in Constantinople. Odoacer put the face of the Eastern emperor on his coins and ruled Italy in his name. It was true that the emperor did not effectively control the West, but no emperor had effectively controlled the West for almost a century.

Nor was this “Fall of Rome” the beginning of the Dark Ages, as schoolchildren have also learned for generations. The Dark Ages began, not when the Roman Empire lost control of Rome, but when she gained it back.

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Next: Civilization Destroys Civilization.