Thought and Memory

Tag: Roman Empire

The City Which Had Taken the World

The fall of Rome, Byzantium, and the kingdoms that came after

On the fifteenth of October, 1764, a young Englishman sat among the ruins of the Capitol in Rome while barefoot friars sang vespers where the temple of Jupiter had stood. It was there, Edward Gibbon later wrote, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first came into his mind. Twelve years later the first volume appeared, and the last came out in 1788. The question that occurred to him on the Capitol has been argued ever since.

The last shelf ended with Rome unable to keep itself in the West. When Alaric’s Goths sacked the city in 410, Jerome heard the news in Bethlehem and wrote that the city which had taken the whole world was itself taken. Yet the question is not only why Rome fell, but how much of it fell, and when. The empire in the East lasted another thousand years, and in the West the church, the Latin language, the bishops in the old cities, and a good deal of the law outlived the emperors. This shelf holds the books that ask what was lost and what was kept.

This is the fourth shelf of the library described in Why Build a Library. It opens with the book that set the question, follows the Western empire to its end, gives a group to the historians who still dispute what that end was, and then turns to the two places where Rome survived: Constantinople, and the barbarian kingdoms of the West.

The Question Gibbon Asked

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon

Six volumes, from the age of the Antonines to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, written in the most commanding prose of the English eighteenth century. Gibbon summed up his own work as the triumph of barbarism and religion, and his fifteenth and sixteenth chapters explain the rise of Christianity by natural causes alone while bowing politely to Providence. This shelf reads the evidence the other way: the faith Gibbon counted among Rome’s destroyers is what carried its inheritance through the fall, as the last group of books on the shelf shows. Every later book on this shelf is in some way an answer to him, and none has replaced him. The unabridged text is the thing itself; for a reader who will not get through six volumes, David Womersley’s one-volume Penguin abridgement keeps the best of it.

How the West Was Lost

The Sack of Rome by the Barbarians in 410, 1890, by the French painter Joseph-Noël Sylvestre, born in Béziers. Goths haul down a Roman statue with ropes while its marble city looks on. The picture shows the fall as Gibbon imagined it, but the kings who followed spent the next centuries trying to stand where that statue stood.

The Later Roman Empire, Ammianus Marcellinus

The last great Latin historian was a Greek from Antioch and a staff officer who had served on the eastern frontier and marched with the emperor Julian into Persia. His surviving books cover the years 353 to 378, and he writes as a soldier who saw much of what he describes. His history ends with the battle of Adrianople, where the Goths destroyed an eastern Roman army and killed the emperor Valens, the first blow from which the West did not recover. The Penguin selection, translated by Walter Hamilton, is the place to start.

The Invasion of Europe by the Barbarians, J. B. Bury

Lectures given at Cambridge by the editor of Gibbon, published in 1928, the year after his death. Bury follows the Goths, Vandals, Franks, and the peoples after them from their first crossings of the frontier to the kingdoms they founded inside it, and he is careful about what the sources can and cannot tell us. He wrote that the collapse of the West was the result of a series of contingent events rather than of any general cause, which makes him a sober counterweight to the grander theories elsewhere on this shelf.

The Roman and the Teuton, Charles Kingsley

Cambridge lectures of 1864 by the clergyman and novelist, who reads the fall of the West as a work of Providence. His Teutons are “great boys,” brave and greedy, who broke a Rome already rotted by its own vices and were then taught by suffering and the Gospel until they became Christendom. The lectures run on past the end of the Western empire through the Goths and Lombards, and they close on “The Strategy of Providence.” The book is a better guide to how Victorian England understood itself, as heir of the Germanic conquerors under a guiding God, than to the fifth century, and read beside Bury and Heather it shows the difference plainly.

The Fall of the Roman Empire, Peter Heather

The best modern narrative of how the West was lost, published in 2005. Heather argues that the empire was not dying of internal decay when the barbarians arrived, but was brought down from outside: the Huns drove the Goths and others across the frontier, and the new groups inside the empire cut away the tax base the Western government needed to fight them. He tells it as a story, with battles, emperors, and generals, and it reads faster than a book of its weight has any right to.

Whether It Fell at All

The World of Late Antiquity, Peter Brown

A short, illustrated book from 1971 that changed how a generation of historians saw the years from about 150 to 750. Brown refused to treat them as a decline, and wrote instead of a world being transformed: of holy men and monks, of a Christian culture taking shape in Rome’s cities, and of an empire in the East and new powers in Persia and Arabia. His “late antiquity” became the name of an academic field, and the book remains the most persuasive case that something was being made in these centuries, not only lost.

The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, Bryan Ward-Perkins

An archaeologist’s answer to Brown, published in 2005. Ward-Perkins looks at pottery, roof tiles, coins, and even the size of cattle, and finds that across the West the material standard of living fell further and faster than in any comparable collapse he knew of, in places to below where it had been before the Romans came. Its argument is that the fall was real, violent, and a catastrophe for ordinary people, and that nothing is gained by pretending otherwise. Read it straight after Brown.

Mohammed and Charlemagne, Henri Pirenne

The Belgian historian’s last book, published in 1937, two years after his death. Pirenne argued that the Germanic kingdoms left the Mediterranean world largely Roman, and that the real break came in the seventh century, when the Arab conquests closed the sea and turned Europe north toward the Franks: “without Mohammed, Charlemagne would be inconceivable.” Later archaeology has shown that trade was failing well before the Arabs came, but the question Pirenne posed about when the ancient world ended has never gone away, and his book poses it more sharply than any other.

The Rome That Did Not Fall

The emperor Justinian with his court, clergy, and guard, mosaic in the church of San Vitale, Ravenna, completed about 547. The mosaicists are unknown. Justinian ruled from Constantinople and probably never set foot in Ravenna, but his armies had taken the city back from the Goths, and here the Roman emperor stands again in an Italian church, carrying the offering for the altar. Photo: Petar Milošević, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire, Judith Herrin

The Roman empire in the East lasted until 1453, governed from a Christian capital founded by Constantine, and its people called themselves Romans to the end. Herrin’s book, built from short chapters on single subjects, from the walls of Constantinople and Greek fire to icons, eunuchs, and the empress Irene, is the best introduction for a reader who has never given Byzantium a thought. It makes the case that this empire shielded the West for centuries and handed it much of what it later called its own.

History of the Byzantine State, George Ostrogorsky

The standard one-volume political history of the empire for most of the twentieth century, by a Russian-born historian who worked in Belgrade, first published in German in 1940 and translated by Joan Hussey. Ostrogorsky follows the state itself: its emperors, armies, taxes, and the system of military provinces that let it survive the Arab conquests. It is dense and unadorned, and it is the book to go to once Herrin has made the subject interesting.

The Secret History, Procopius

Procopius was the official historian of Justinian, the emperor who tried to win back the West and very nearly did. In his public histories he praised the reconquest of Africa and Italy and the building of Hagia Sophia. In this book, which he could not publish and which was found in the Vatican library more than a thousand years later, he describes Justinian and the empress Theodora as demons in human form. It is malicious, often unbelievable, and indispensable, and like Curtius on the Greek shelf it teaches that an ancient source must be read as an argument.

What Survived in the West

The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius

Boethius was a Roman senator and consul who served Theodoric, the Gothic king of Italy, and set out to translate all of Plato and Aristotle into Latin. Accused of treason, he was imprisoned and put to death around 524, and he wrote this book while waiting to die. In alternating prose and verse, Lady Philosophy visits him in his cell and teaches him that Fortune’s wheel turns for every man and that the only good which cannot be taken away is God. Alfred the Great put it into Old English and Chaucer into Middle English, and through this one book much of the mind of ancient philosophy passed into the Christian Middle Ages.

The Baptism of Clovis, about 1500, by the painter known as the Master of Saint Giles, who worked in Paris and was probably trained in the Netherlands (National Gallery of Art, Washington). A thousand years after the event, the painter set it in a church of his own day, because by then the kings of France counted their line from this font. Gregory of Tours is the reason anyone knew it happened.

The History of the Franks, Gregory of Tours

Ten books by a Gallo-Roman bishop of Tours, written in the later sixth century, which are nearly all we know of the first Frankish kings. Gregory tells of Clovis, whose Catholic baptism set the Franks apart from the Arian Goths and Vandals and won them the bishops of Gaul, and then of his grandsons’ murders, feuds, and treacheries, in a Latin he himself thought rough. He also shows, without meaning to, how much of Rome was still standing in Gaul: the cities, the bishops, the saints’ shrines, and the Latin he wrote in. It is the eyewitness account of what came after Rome in the West.

The Long-Haired Kings, J. M. Wallace-Hadrill

Seven essays on the Franks by an Oxford historian, published in 1962, including a chapter on how to read Gregory in the light of modern research. Wallace-Hadrill explains the kingship of the Merovingians, whose long hair marked their royal blood, the bloodfeud and the law that tried to contain it, and the relation between the new kings and the Roman Gaul they ruled. Read it after Gregory; it turns his chronicle of crimes into a picture of how a barbarian kingdom actually worked.

The Inheritance of Rome, Chris Wickham

A history of Europe from 400 to 1000, from Ireland to Byzantium and the caliphate, published in 2009. Wickham insists that these centuries be read on their own terms rather than as a waiting room for the nations of later Europe, and he follows the Roman inheritance through the Frankish, Gothic, Lombard, and English kingdoms down to the Carolingians and beyond. It is long and demanding, and it is the best single account of how the Roman West became medieval Europe.

The Inheritance

What the fall of Rome handed on was the distinction between a state and a civilization. The empire in the West ended, but what it had carried did not end with it: the church kept its bishops and its Latin, the monks kept the books, the law outlived the lawgivers, and the barbarian kings who took the provinces were soon baptized, and spent the next centuries trying to become Roman. In the East the empire itself survived, and kept the name of Rome for a thousand years. Gibbon thought he was describing a fall; the books on this shelf show that it was also a handing over. The next shelf turns north, to the Celts and the Anglo-Saxons, and to the island Rome had given up first.

October 15, 2026
The City on the Tiber

Roman epic, history, and moral philosophy

In 146 BC a Roman army took Carthage and burned it, and the Roman commander, Scipio Aemilianus, stood watching the city of Hannibal burn and wept. He repeated Hector’s lines from the Iliad: a day will come when sacred Troy shall perish, and Priam and his people with it. Standing beside him was his friend Polybius, a Greek, who asked what he meant. Scipio answered that he feared the same would one day be said of Rome.

The last shelf ended with the Greek inheritance passing into Roman keeping, and that scene shows the transfer under way: a Roman general quoting Homer to a Greek historian over the ruins of Rome’s greatest enemy. Rome is where the inheritance first became conscious of itself as one. The Romans knew they had come late, read the Greeks as their masters, and set out to equal them in their own tongue; Virgil wrote a Roman Homer, and Cicero a Roman Plato. What they added was what the Greek cities never managed: the means to hold what they had won, by law, by arms, and by a hard sense of what a citizen owed.

This is the third shelf of the library described in Why Build a Library. Nearly every book on it was written in the Roman world, most of them by Romans. It opens with a single modern book on what the city was built on and with the poets’ account of its founding, then follows the Romans through the conquest of the Mediterranean, the fall of the Republic, and the empire that replaced it, and closes with what they thought a man should be.

What Rome Was Built On

The Ancient City, Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges

Published in 1864 by a French historian, and still the boldest attempt to explain the classical city from its roots. Fustel argued that Greek and Roman institutions grew out of an older religion of the household: the sacred fire on the hearth, the cult of the family dead, and gods who belonged to one family alone. Property, inheritance, marriage, and citizenship all follow from it in his account, and the city itself appears as a federation of families before it is a state. Later scholarship has found his single primitive religion tidier than the evidence allows, but no book better explains why the Romans held their ancestors, their households, and their gods to be one thing.

What the Poets Made of It

Aeneas’ Flight from Troy (1598), by the Italian painter Federico Barocci, born in Urbino. Aeneas carries his old father out of the burning city with his son and wife beside him, and in Virgil the father carries the household gods. Three generations and the family’s gods leave Troy together. That is the whole of Virgil’s piety, and the religion Fustel de Coulanges found at the root of the Roman city.

The Aeneid, Virgil

Virgil wrote Rome’s answer to Homer on purpose. The first six books are an Odyssey, the wanderings of the Trojan Aeneas after the fall of his city; the last six are an Iliad, his war to found a new home in Italy. Its hero is not Achilles, who chooses glory for himself, but pius Aeneas, who carries his father and his household gods out of burning Troy and gives up love, rest, and his own wishes to the destiny of a people not yet born. Virgil died in 19 BC with the poem unrevised and asked that it be burned; Augustus refused, and Europe read it as its own epic for the next eighteen centuries.

Metamorphoses, Ovid

Fifteen books of transformation, more than two hundred stories running from the making of the world out of chaos to the deification of Julius Caesar. Most of the myths are Greek, but for most of Europe’s history this was the book through which readers met them: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Titian, and Bernini all took their Daphne, Actaeon, and Pygmalion from Ovid’s Latin. Where Virgil wrote the poem of duty and the founding, Ovid wrote the poem of change and desire, in the same reign. He had nearly finished it when Augustus exiled him to the shore of the Black Sea, and he closed it by predicting that wherever Rome’s power reached, he would be read.

How Rome Took the World

The Histories, Polybius

A Greek statesman, taken to Rome as one of a thousand hostages in 167 BC, set out to explain to his countrymen how Rome had brought nearly the whole inhabited world under its rule in less than fifty-three years. He became the friend of Scipio Aemilianus and stood beside him at Carthage, and he writes as a soldier and a politician, insistent on causes and on firsthand knowledge. His sixth book finds the secret of Rome’s success in its mixed constitution, with consuls, Senate, and people each checking the others, and that argument passed through Cicero and Montesquieu to the framers of the American Constitution. Only the first five of his forty books survive whole, but he is the hinge between the Greek shelf and this one: a Greek historian whose subject was Rome.

The Oath of the Horatii (1784), by the French painter Jacques-Louis David, born in Paris, now in the Louvre. Three brothers swear to their father to fight for Rome against three champions of Alba Longa, while the women of the house, bound by marriage and betrothal to both sides, collapse in grief. The story is Livy’s; the oath is David’s invention. He painted it for Louis XVI, and within a decade the Revolution had taken it as an emblem of republican virtue, which is what Livy said history was for.

History of Rome, Livy

Livy wrote the history of Rome from its founding in 142 books, of which 35 survive: the first ten, from the arrival of Aeneas in Italy to 293 BC, and twenty-five more from the war with Hannibal to the conquest of Macedon. His preface says the use of history is to set before the reader examples to follow and to shun, and his early books are where Europe learned Romulus, Lucretia, Horatius at the bridge, and Cincinnatus at his plow. He wrote under Augustus and said plainly that the oldest stories were closer to poetry than to record, and he told them anyway, because they showed what Rome believed itself to be. The books on Hannibal are history in the full sense, and the fullest narrative of the Second Punic War that survives.

How the Republic Was Lost

Catiline’s Conspiracy and The Jugurthine War, Sallust

Two short books by a partisan of Caesar who governed Africa, grew rich there, and retired to write about the moral decay of the Republic. Catiline’s Conspiracy covers the plot of 63 BC to seize the state, broken by the consul Cicero, and closes on the Senate debate in which Caesar and Cato argued over the fate of the conspirators. The Jugurthine War tells how a Numidian king bought senators and generals for years, and how the war against him raised Marius, the first of the generals whose soldiers looked to him rather than to Rome. Sallust’s diagnosis, that conquest brought wealth and wealth brought ambition and avarice, became the standard Roman account of the Republic’s fall, and the man who made it was a fair example of it.

The Landmark Julius Caesar, Kurt A. Raaflaub, ed.

Caesar’s own account of the conquest of Gaul and of the civil war that made him master of Rome, together with the shorter accounts of his Alexandrian, African, and Spanish wars, written by his officers and continuators. He writes of himself in the third person, in plain and rapid Latin, and the plainness is the art: no war memoir has made its author’s judgment look so inevitable. Of all the ancient histories, this is the one that most needs the Landmark’s maps, since Caesar’s narrative is a march from river to river and siege to siege across country a modern reader cannot picture, and the specialist appendices supply much of what Caesar chose to leave out. Read beside Sallust and Syme, it shows the end of the Republic from the inside, written by the man who ended it.

The Roman Revolution, Ronald Syme

Syme, a New Zealander at Oxford, published this in 1939, and the shadow of the dictatorships of his own day falls across it. His subject is the passage from Republic to monarchy between 60 BC and AD 14, and his method is to trace the families, factions, and personal followings behind the constitutional language, which he treated as a screen. His Augustus is a party leader who took power by violence and kept it by restoring the forms of the Republic while emptying them. Written in a hard, compressed style learned from Tacitus, it is the modern book on Rome that has mattered most, and the corrective to the account Augustus gave of himself.

What the Emperors Made

Agricola, Tacitus

Tacitus’s short life of his father-in-law, a governor of Britain who served Rome well under Domitian, was recalled, and died in quiet. It is the best way into Tacitus, because his great theme is already here: how a good man keeps his virtue and his dignity under a tyrant. It also holds the speech Tacitus gives to Calgacus, a Caledonian chief before battle, the sharpest indictment of Roman empire ever written, put by a Roman into an enemy’s mouth: they make a desert and call it peace. Britain is the setting; Rome is the subject.

Ancient Rome; Agrippina Landing with the Ashes of Germanicus (exhibited 1839), by the English painter J. M. W. Turner, born in London, now in the Tate. Agrippina brings home the ashes of her husband, the general Rome loved and Tiberius was suspected of having poisoned; Tacitus tells the story in the Annals. Turner moves the landing from Brundisium to the Tiber and sets the grief beneath a city blazing with gold. That is Tacitus’s own point: the splendor and the murder belong to the same regime.

The Annals, Tacitus

The history of Rome from the death of Augustus in AD 14 to the reign of Nero, the last and greatest work of the greatest Roman historian. What survives covers Tiberius, part of Claudius, and most of Nero; Caligula is lost, and the text breaks off in AD 66. Tacitus promised to write without anger or partiality, and then wrote the most damning portrait of absolute power the ancient world left: the servile Senate, the informers, the treason trials, and the slow corruption of men who knew better. It also holds one of the earliest Roman references to Christ, in its account of the Christians Nero burned after the great fire of Rome.

The Histories, Tacitus

Written before the Annals, it took up the story from AD 69, the year of the four emperors, and carried it through the reign of Domitian. Only the first four books and part of the fifth survive, covering little more than a year and a half, but no stretch of Roman history is told at such pace: emperors raised and murdered by their armies, Rome fought over in its own streets, the Capitol burned, and a revolt on the Rhine. Tacitus draws the lesson in his first book: the secret of empire was out, and an emperor could be made somewhere other than Rome.

The Twelve Caesars, Suetonius

Lives of Julius Caesar and the first eleven emperors, through Domitian, by a court official who served as Hadrian’s secretary and wrote with the imperial archives at hand. Suetonius arranges each life by topic rather than by year (family, career, public acts, habits, appearance, death), and he keeps the gossip, the omens, and the vices that Tacitus disdained. That makes him the weaker historian and the more vivid portraitist, and much of what everyone thinks they know about Caligula and Nero comes from him. Read him after Tacitus, as the view from the palace corridor.

How a Roman Should Live

On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, Cicero

Cicero’s answer to Plato’s Republic and Laws, written in the 50s BC while the Republic he describes was coming apart. On the Commonwealth is a dialogue set among Scipio Aemilianus and his friends, and it defends the Roman mixed constitution as the best form of government, defining a commonwealth as a people bound together by agreement on justice and a common interest; it survives only in pieces, but its closing Dream of Scipio, in which the dead Africanus shows his grandson the smallness of earthly glory, was read throughout the Middle Ages. On the Laws sets out the doctrine of a natural law, right reason common to gods and men, from which every just law of a city derives. Augustine argued with Cicero’s definition of a commonwealth in The City of God, and the Christian doctrine of natural law grew from the second book’s root.

On Duties, Cicero

One of Cicero’s last books, written in 44 BC as a letter to his son, then a student at Athens, in the months after Caesar’s murder and the year before Cicero’s own. It asks what a man owes to his country, his family, and his fellow men, and argues that what is right and what is useful can never truly conflict. For centuries it was among the most widely read books of moral philosophy in the West: Ambrose rewrote it for the clergy of Milan, and it was among the first classical texts to be printed. It is the best single statement of what the Romans meant by duty, and of what a gentleman was expected to be.

On the Nature of Things, Lucretius

A long philosophical poem from the last years of the Republic, setting out the teaching of Epicurus in Latin verse: the world is atoms and void, the soul dies with the body, and the gods, if they exist, take no interest in men. Lucretius wrote it to free his readers from the fear of death and of the gods, and he argues with a passion and a power of description no other Roman philosopher matched. It stands on this shelf as the dissent, the strongest ancient case against everything Cicero and the Stoics believed about providence and duty. It nearly vanished, surviving the Middle Ages in a handful of manuscripts until one was found in a monastery in 1417, and every later argument for a universe without purpose descends from it.

Discourses, Epictetus

Epictetus was born a slave in Asia Minor, owned by a freedman of Nero, and once freed taught Stoic philosophy in Rome until Domitian expelled the philosophers; he spent the rest of his life teaching in Greece. He wrote nothing. The Discourses are his lectures as taken down by his student Arrian, the same Arrian whose history of Alexander stood on the last shelf. Their teaching is hard and simple: distinguish what is in your power from what is not, care only for the first, and bear the rest as the will of God.

Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

The private notebook of a Roman emperor, written in Greek and meant for no one else, much of it in camp on the Danube during the long wars against the Germanic tribes. Marcus reminds himself, again and again, to do his duty, to bear what comes, to remember that he and all he rules will soon be dust, and not to be turned into a Caesar, dyed in the purple. It is the Stoicism of Epictetus put to work by the most powerful man in the world, and its sincerity is the reason it is still read. He was the last emperor of the age Gibbon called the happiest in the history of mankind, and he left the empire to his son.

The Inheritance

What Rome handed on was the means of keeping an inheritance. The Greeks made the forms; the Romans carried them, wrote them into law, and spread them along roads and frontiers from Britain to the Euphrates, and Latin remained the language of the Western church, of law, and of learning for more than a thousand years after the last emperor in the West. Rome handed on its own example as well: a republic that conquered the world and lost itself in the conquering, and an empire that kept the peace by emptying the republic’s forms. Its moralists left a standard of duty that the Church would baptize rather than discard, and the faith that outlasted the empire traveled the empire’s roads, carried by a Roman citizen named Paul. But Rome in the West could not keep itself. The next shelf turns to the fall of Rome, and to what survived it.

October 3, 2026