Solomonia Archive: The Fall of Rome -- Yesterday...Tomorrow

Wednesday, January 4, 2006

The Fall of Rome -- Yesterday...Tomorrow

Hat tip to Richard Landes for the pointer to this very interesting exchange at the Oxford University Press blog between two scholars, Bryan Ward-Perkins and Peter Heather, discussing the fall of Rome:

The Fall of Rome - an author dialogue

Of particular interest is this statement at the beginning by Peter Heather:

...Where I do part company with some revisionist scholarship, however, is over the argument that, because some Roman institutions ideologies and elites survived beyond 476, therefore the fall of the western Empire was not a revolutionary moment in European history. The most influential statement of this, perhaps, is Walter Goffart’s brilliant aphorism that the fall of the Western Empire was just ‘an imaginative experiment that got a little out of hand’. Goffart means that changes in Roman policy towards the barbarians led to the emergence of the successor states, dependant on barbarian military power and incorporating Roman institutions, and that the process which brought this out was not a particularly violent one...

Got that? Some scholars (not Heather) believe that the process of the fall of Rome to the barbarians was not a violent one, but was, if I understand this little snip correctly, one more of accomodation and process, which sounds to me suspiciously like an attempt to say that change is neither bad nor good, just change. Both Heather and Ward-Perkins take issue with this in the dialogue presented (worth reading in full), but one may be entertained in thought experiments positing that today's revisionists may in fact be seers of the future decline of modern Europe through a process of accomodation and quiet surrender...not with a bang but a whimper.

Posted by Solomon at 11:31 AM on Wednesday, Jan 4, 2006 | Comments (1)
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1 Comment

#1 Richard Landes | January 4, 2006 2:23 PM

as you say, "seers of the future..."
all we have to do is rephrase slightly:
Eurabia is an imaginative experiment that is getting a little out of hand...
meantime with scholars telling the public that the shift from the late roman empire to the germanic kindgoms was no big deal, it's hard to learn anything from history.
r