What is 'Late Antiquity?'

Series 1 Episode 23

Transcript

  Really, really interesting episode for you today,  and I'm going to admit right off the bat  that I don't know a lot about this subject  and I really, really should know more,  which is one of the reasons that I've created this episode in the first place.  And for this, we need a very particular expert  and I have chosen the best for you.  Would you like to introduce yourself, please? 

 All right. Hello, everyone.  My name is, in Dutch, (because I'm Belgian, from the Flemish side,)  Jeroen Wijnendaele, but having spent nine years abroad  in all kinds of different countries and universities,  I've learned Jerone Windale is a lot easier for most folks.  So I'm very happy if you want to refer to me by my other name.  I'm currently a visiting professor at Ghent University,  also supported by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung.  And my own expertise, among other things,  deals with the volatile cocktail formerly known as the Fall of Rome,  which basically served as a launchpad in wider interests  in political, social and military history of the late Roman Empire.  I'm also very happy to announce, as a bit of a scoop here,  that on behalf of Edinburgh University Press,  I'm about to launch a new book series.  It's called Edinburgh Studies on Late Roman History,  which is actually the very first of its kind internationally.  And I'm really happy to be hosted today by Alexandra,  because I think it's an interesting exercise to reflect on  what do we mean with late Roman, late antique?  Do words really matter?  

Yeah, and I think they do, and I don't know them.  So I'm very much looking forward to you teaching me everything I need to know. When I went to university, I don't think we did anything late antique.  Maybe a little bit of archaeology, but that was all, you know,  domestic, rural, that kind of thing.  Not so much the history, so I'm a novice on this one.  When we use the term late antiquity,  can you just tell me what dates that means?  

Well, I'm happy, I'm really happy also because  in the early Middle Ages, when I was an undergrad myself,  more than 20 years ago,  we were actually in a bit of a similar situation over here.  So I studied history, and then, of course,  you have all kinds of introductions to ancient, medieval, early modern,  et cetera, history.  And the ancient history module ran all the way from Homer to Justinian.  So that's like a really long stretch of time.  Yeah, that's huge.  Roughly from like the first millennium BCE,  all the way till the sixth century CE.  But the thing is, it's really hard to imagine.  When I tell this to my colleagues today,  right now it's a Ghent Center for Late Antiquity.  But when I was an undergrad, there was nothing there.  Our professors were very traditional Roman historians  or ancient Greek historians.  And in the old days, and actually this is true  for most of the 20th century, it was very simple.  You have ancient history, and you have medieval history.  And in the year 476, the Roman Empire collapses,  and then we deal with medieval history.  While there has been a lot of pushback  against that idea going back already in the early 20th century.  And I don't think it's a coincidence.  When you look at the field, the first people to observe,  maybe there's something more to this.  

Because in the old days,  and especially when we're talking about like,  let's say the Victorian age, for instance,  basically everything after Tacitus was not classics enough.  Then we're going to be talking about decline,  decline of the Roman world, decline of the ancient world.  In the early 20th century, we actually had art historians  who said like, actually, maybe decline isn't really  the best way to look at it.  Because even long after Tacitus, even long after the Principate,  the so-called early Roman Empire, you have magnificent art.  You can go, for instance, to the city of Ravenna in northern Italy.  You have a couple of lovely churches there with mosaics,  which are still a UNESCO World Heritage.  There are villas in Sicily from the fourth century of our time.  For instance, the villa in Piazza Armerina,  more famous maybe for the bikini girls playing,  the mosaics and all that.  But also with amazing hunting scenes.  And they thought there was a period here  which has its own particular splendor.  And they coined the term late antique to describe that.  Aha.  So I'm guessing then in that case,  it seems pretty obvious that any Roman living through this period  isn't walking around saying,  I'm living in the late antique period.  This is definitely a word that we have invented to describe it.  I'm pretty sure just like no crusader ever decided.  And now we're talking in the year 1200 of the Middle Ages.  Of course, we're dealing with modern conventions.  

But the question is kind of relevant to the larger topic like,  where do we draw our boundaries?  Because you asked me earlier like,  so what period are we actually talking about?  And this is also something colleagues are divided over.  It's easy if you start, let's say,  with the Roman Empire, right?  Nobody is going to really challenge you  if you say you have an early Roman Empire from Augustus  to let's say somewhere in the third century.  And then by the end of the third century,  you really come into a new world,  a new political system,  even new beliefs like the rise of Christianity.  That's all pretty simple.  But then like, where do we draw the boundary?  Like for when does Roman end, where does antique end?  And their opinions are heavily divided.  Well, for instance,  it's really kind of hard to claim that in 476,  the Roman Empire collapsed  because there's still an emperor in Constantinople.  There's still very much a Roman Empire in the East,  which will go on for another thousand years.  So it's kind of hard to say that in the fifth century,  the Roman Empire collapses.  But there are political structures in the West  fading away.  But even when political structures fade away,  that doesn't mean that suddenly people go like,  light switch on, light switch off.  The lights have to go off lads,  we're in the dark ages now.  Even decades, even decades,  after the end of Western Roman emperorship,  when there are no longer emperors in the West,  which I think is the best definition  for what we would call the fall of Rome.  People still believe that they are living  in a Roman world.  When you have, for instance, new,  for lack of a better word, kingdoms,  like in Gaul, for instance,  you have a Gothic kingdom,  you have a Burgundian kingdom.  When these kings issue law codes,  it's basically a simplified,  a streamlined version of Roman prevention law.  And it's still for the name of the emperor  in Constantinople, because they're like,  well, we are living in a Roman world, right?  We still have the emperor in Constantinople,  who's our emperor.  

The comparison I like to make is with the Commonwealth,  because even today in Canada, New Zealand, Australia,  well, the British monarch is still the head of state  in these countries,  even though all intents and purposes,  they are independent.  So something similar is going on there.  So people in academia at some point decided  the fifth century probably is not the end of antiquity.  If you look at the sixth century, for instance,  whether it's the arts, like I mentioned with Ravenna,  whether we're talking about,  well, how do people actually live?  When we talk, for instance,  about economy and goods used,  there is still like a lot of Mediterranean wide  trade circulating.  It is still possible,  especially the closer you are to the Mediterranean,  whether it's North Africa, Southern Gaul, Spain,  to have that kind of like Roman lifestyle,  mainly benefiting the elites, but still.  Then the big question is like, so when does it end?  And here our opinions are valid.  I, for instance, deliberately use the word late Roman  for my series,  because there's still a certain cohesion to it.  Even as late as the year 600,  the emperor in Constantinople not only controls  the Eastern half of the empire,  there are still large parts of the West  that belong to this world,  whether it's like parts of Italy,  North Africa, Southern Spain.  You could even say, as the Romans would say,  the Mediterranean, it's Maare Nostrum, it's our sea.  It's still very much a Roman controlled sea.  But then in the seventh century,  things change massively,  especially the rise of Islam and the Arabic conquests,  which cut away two thirds of the former Roman empire  in the Near East and North Africa.  And meanwhile, in Western Europe,  this is for me the real kicker.  Can we still really call it antiquity in Western Europe?  Even regardless of politics,  when for instance, when we look at defined antiquity,  I mean, in most of the Western world,  we usually start with ancient Greece and Rome.  

And okay, at that point you can wonder  how further can we push these boundaries?  When you look, for instance,  at the kind of language people use,  the kind of belief system,  certain habits also fade away.  And let's not forget one of the pillars  of Greco-Roman civilization,  if we may call it that, is the city.  I mean, this is very much a city-based society.  Doesn't matter that a large part,  maybe the largest part of the society  is living on the countryside.  All the kinds of ideas we associate with that,  the production of ideas, the production of writing,  it's still very much city-based.  But cities really wither away,  not just in the West,  even in the Balkans and even in Asia Minor.  To the point, the only part of this former Roman world  where we could say there is still  an ongoing continuity of antiquity,  it would be the Near East.  Under the first Arabic caliphs of the Umayyad dynasty,  there's a lot of continuity.  And that's also why people at some point decided,  maybe we should integrate this  in a larger Late Antique world.  So for anyone thinking that the period Late Antiquity  starts at XCE and it ends with YCE,  it really depends on where in the Mediterranean  you're talking about, which historian you're talking to.  

So it sounds like it's a really complicated concept.  There is no easy answer.  

There's, I think, the reason why I chose  Late Roman is for cohesion.  And I would go from the third century  to the seventh century.  I think most people will be okay with that.  And you could use these same chronological markers  for a lot of the Late Antique worlds.  For me, there's a clear difference  between what kind of domains you're working on.  I don't think it's a coincidence.  The term Late Antique was already used  by these art historians at the start of the 20th century.  There was a Belgian historian, Henri Pirenne,  in a little book called,  Mohammed the Prophet, he means,  and Charlemagne, the Frankish emperor  of the late eight, early ninth century,  who already pointed out,  when we're thinking about the old ideas  of the end of the ancient world,  for instance, with the so-called barbarian migrations  or invasions in the fifth century Western Roman Empire,  does it really mean, is it the end of antiquity?  Pirenne would have said, no,  because what have they really changed?  Most of their outlook, in a certain way,  is still pretty Roman,  whether it's in the kind of elite culture  they try to mimic, whether it's in their legal thoughts.  And it's especially an Irish scholar  who's spent a lot of his career in the US as well,  Peter Brown, who made Late Antique  into a new kind of paradigm.  And we have to be grateful to him for that,  because at least he managed to gather people  around the table.  What do I mean with that?  Before Late Antiquity was a paradigm,  you had scholars in all kinds of different fields  working on this, whether they're archaeologists,  historians, but also, for instance,  theologians, patristics, because this is a period,  and this is also something  that Brown would center his thought upon.  This is a period where you see the rise  of the great monotheistic religions,  Christianity, Islam, even Judaism,  which still is going to one of its final phases  of reform.  And he says, even regardless whether you agree with him  or not, it brings a kind of cultural unity to it,  because it's not like, again, in the old idea  that these religions are fundamentally opposed  to one another.  There's a lot of dialogue.  There's a lot of exchange.  And dialogue and exchange is also something  that Brown is really good at.  So you gather the art historians,  the archaeologists, the philosophers,  and so you broaden the dialogue.  The idea that, no, it's the end of the ancient world.  Now the medievalists can have it.  Well, early medievalists would say,  well, we're more looking at Northwestern Europe,  Britain, Gaul, Germany, the low countries.  And then in the past, you would have to say,  let's say, Byzantinists,  people who only look at the Roman Empire  in the East for another thousand years.  How about we gather everyone around  and we'll have a dialogue about this?  

I think it's interesting  because one of the things that I've learned  very, very quickly is the idea  of putting various historians and archaeologists  into silos has not been particularly useful.  So it sounds like this is really a wonderful way  of bringing everyone together to learn more  about a period that I think maybe gets ignored  in a lot of particularly early university education.  Most historians that I know only vaguely start  to engage with late antiquity  after they've done maybe masters  and suddenly remember, oh yeah,  a couple of centuries exist.  Let's talk about them.  

I think that is fair to say  because depending where you are,  whether it's the US, whether it's Australia,  where I actually did my first teaching experience,  you need to be lucky to squeeze it in  if you have a very broad ancient history module,  but it's not just in teaching.  An anecdote I like to share,  there used to be an Oxford Encyclopedia.  I think, I could be wrong,  but I think it's the Oxford Encyclopedia  of the ancient world from 1986 or 1988, definitely 1980s.  And so the final chapter was more called an epilogue,  which goes from Diocletian to Romulus Augustus,  like 200 years from roughly 284 till 476.  And the epilogue was called  on taking leave of antiquity in 20 pages  as if they couldn't leave fast enough.  So that kind of mindset  was pretty much dominant for a very long time.  I think it's fair to say,  regardless of publications,  regardless of the conferences,  if I can only look at Western Europe,  it's only in the past 20 years  it's really being put on the map.  

I mean, that's wonderful for any students listening  by the sounds of it,  if there's a period where you can start to write  and research where you're doing original work,  this sounds like a really fertile area of research  for any potential students.  So let's talk about the period of late antiquity,  because it sounds like a huge period of change.  Can we start talking about  where this kind of change started?  Am I right in thinking  that the crisis of the third century  had something to do with it?  

I think that's a very fair observation.  Some people would push it back even a little bit earlier,  but I think eventually,  the crisis of the third century is at least  what people would use to make a difference  between the early Roman Empire,  sometimes called the Principate,  and the late Roman Empire.  And I think there's a very symbolic way  of make that, to identify that mark,  sadly a little bit too current events-wise.  In Southern Iran,  there's a gigantic rock relief  for the Persian Shahanshah,  the king of all kings,  Shapur I,  where you see him accepting the surrender  of various Roman emperors.  In the year 260,  for the first time ever,  a Roman emperor was not only defeated in battle,  he was even captured alive  and taken away into enemy territory,  never to be seen again.  And this is the point  where it almost looks like the Roman Empire  is gonna fall apart.  You have breakaway regimes in Gaul and Britain.  You have the former trade city,  so to speak, Palmyra,  who starts organizing Eastern defenses  ostensibly in the name of Rome.  Meanwhile, there's incursions  and civil wars left and right.  A lot of emperors in this period  barely last for a few years.  And to really top it off,  there is a plague,  there is a pandemic,  which already started a decade earlier.  So I don't think it's a coincidence  that especially in this period,  people start asking themselves,  maybe the traditional gods have abandoned us.  

Aha, okay, interesting.  The crisis of the first century,  it lasts about half a century, right?  

Depending who you ask,  but then again, that's fair to say  for so many topics of ancient history.  But yes, if you look at the breakdown  of imperial regimes,  it's really kind of unsettling.  Even the question like,  who is actually the Roman emperor?  Because you have rivals,  you have people challenging existing emperors.  This is what people would call usurpers.  To the point, I just tried to make a body count.  Who tries to make a claim to imperial power?  And if you try to count  so-called legitimate emperors and rivals,  I came up with about 50 for this 50-year period.  Yeah, it's astounding.  

So it's a little bit Game of Thrones.  

 Yeah, yeah.  

Awesome.  I mean, I love Game of Thrones,  so it sounds like I'm gonna have fun with this episode.  So it sounds like quite a cutthroat period then  if you've got all of these people vying for power.  I'm assuming there are battles and assassinations  and all kinds of plots?  

I mean, I don't wanna dwell too much  because it's only one aspect of a wider period.  But it also says something about  what kind of power bases people use.  Because in the old days, it's very simple, right?  But you have Augustus,  you have the Julio-Claudian dynasty.  Well, he's the first to start the line.  There's a dynastic line.  These are among the wealthiest  and most influential families in the city of Rome.  But you can just use the concept of emperorship  to trace how elites change over time.  I mean, something I always like to point out to students  and the wider audience when I do outreach,  these little villages at the River Tiber  that became the city of Rome  could never have become the dominant power in Italy,  never mind the dominant power of the Mediterranean world  if they were willing to set up these alliances,  incorporate other communities  into their own power structures.  And this is something that really makes the Roman Empire,  because the Roman Republic towards the end,  even when they have a Republican governing body,  they have a Mediterranean-wide empire.  Something I wouldn't say that makes them unique  in Eurasian history,  but really sets them apart  from a lot of the other contemporary societies,  this willingness to incorporate elites  that originally did not belong to their own society.  And for instance, you see that with emperorship yourself.  Starts with the Julio-Claudians.  You have to wait a century in the larger scheme of things.  It is not a short amount of time,  but after a century,  you get your first emperor born outside of Rome.  That's Vespasian.  Then a generation later,  you have your first emperors born outside of Italy,  people like Trajan, for instance.  If you then wait another century,  you have your first emperor  who doesn't even belong  to the traditional senatorial elite.  He's maybe a man who will become slightly more famous now  since Denzel Washington portrayed him in Gladiator 2.  There's this Macrinus guy.  He belongs to the equestrian orders,  not so rich, but still rich enough order.  And then you get towards the very end  of the third century,  when this crisis basically gets resolved  by a man named Diocletian.  It tells you something about how the world has changed.  Then we're talking about a man  who came from a very humble origin.  It was even rumored his father was a freedman,  a former slave.  So it tells you something like how,  even at the very top of society,  the highest office has suddenly came into reach.  

So when we're talking about this period, the crisis,  and you're talking about change politically  and who can access power,  what does this mean for the average person  in the Roman empire?  I mean, you mentioned the plague.  That's something that they have to deal with.  But does all this political turmoil  drag them into having to fight wars  that they may not have had to fight  if it hadn't have been so different  all of a sudden for everybody?  

That's an interesting question because here as well,  I think a lot of depends where you live.  If you were living, let's say, in North Africa,  and with that, I mean,  what they would call the Maghreb,  like Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco,  the coastal Roman provinces,  you will have seen very little warfare in this period.  Same is true for the Iberian Peninsula and even Britain,  which has relatively spared for most of the civil wars  and most of the incursions of this period.  Britain is actually flourishing in this period.  But even when you're spared from civil war,  when you're spared from external invasion,  you're still living in an empire.  And especially with emperors coming and going,  somebody needs to pay for all of this.  Somebody needs to pay for the army.  So taxation is a very much a reality.  And especially when things get tough,  this is for instance, where something like a plague  can make a world of a difference.  There are huge debates about  what kind of demographic impact are we talking about?  But even at the most conservative estimate,  if even only 10 to 20% of your population dies,  that's 10 to 20% less people who can till the land,  who can pay taxes, who can serve in the army.  Of course, that is gonna put pressure on the system.  So when you get towards the end of the third century,  Diocletian, working on precedence from his predecessors,  basically comes up with a new governmental system,  much more bureaucratic,  with an even stronger centralization  when it comes down to the basic thing of like,  how do we get taxes?  And this is something that will have a huge impact  on the rest of society.  I mean, I'm guessing that Diocletian coming into the role,  he's spent several decades watching  various people vying for power being assassinated.  It's got to be quite a big task to take this job on.  Diocletian definitely wanted power.  I'm gonna spare you the details of how,  because there's all kinds of interesting stories around it.  But the best way I can describe it,  what I think was the true genius of Diocletian  is that he turned a problem into a solution.  In that sense, in the grander scheme of things,  what are the greatest threats to a reigning emperor?  It's usually not the barbarians living on the other side  of the Rhine and the Danube.  Persia, an imperial superpower,  is pretty much out there,  but the biggest threat will always be  somebody who tries to become emperor themselves  and will try to take out the reigning emperor.  Now, Diocletian has understood  in the old system that we had,  let's say there's a major crisis.  Let's say there's a major crisis with Persia.  So the emperor takes several legions with him,  goes to the east,  spends a lot of time fighting with Persia.  But what then happens, let's say,  if there's also frontier disturbances  in Northwestern Europe, let's say the river Rhine,  and the army there is basically waiting for instructions,  they feel unsupported,  what are we gonna do about that?  Maybe that might inspire the local governor  to make a bid for emperorship themselves.  

Now, Diocletian realized the regions  have gotten used to taking care of their own  during the crisis period.  I mean, in Gaul, you had separate emperors for 15 years.  Palmyra, for more than a decade,  was able to take care of the Near Eastern defenses.  So basically, he realized we live in a bit of  kind of an inward-outward empire.  Power has shifted to the frontiers.  There are aristocracies there,  there are armies there.  Maybe we need to come up with a way  to turn that into a system,  cater to the needs of the frontiers.  I mean, I'm Belgian.  For me, this sounds very normal,  but anyone living in a strongly federalized country  will realize basically what Diocletian did.  I like to say Diocletian's late Roman Empire  is a federalized Roman Empire.  Because you get multiple emperors,  basically, the Diocletian solution is like,  if usurpers are a problem,  well, I'm gonna basically allow it.  In that sense, there's gonna be multiple emperors,  but they're gonna be of my choosing.  So basically, he institutionalizes imperial shared rule,  collegial rule, but he gets to decide.  So people used to think then,  well, then clearly you have a separation  of the Roman Empire in different empires,  and that's not really what it is.  Constitutionally, there's only a single Roman Empire.  It just has multiple governments.  

Just for instance,  and I think this is true for the United Kingdom as well,  you will have a government for Wales, for instance,  but the last time I checked,  there is no independent Welsh state.  It's still part of the United Kingdom.  There's something similar going on.  There's something similar going on  with the late Roman Empire.  You may have an imperial court with its own emperor,  let's say in the city of Trier in modern Germany,  not too far away in the great scheme  of things of the river Rhine.  The emperor there has his own court.  He has his own bureaucracy.  He has his own army,  but it's still the Roman world.  It's still the Roman Empire.  So what was the tetrarchy  and how was it designed to function?  So basically Diocletian starts very modestly.  He begins with appointing a year after he's in power,  co-emperor, a colleague,  and they both have the title of Augustus,  the title which we could equate with,  let's say senior emperor.  And then a couple of years later,  about eight years later or so,  they both get an assistant,  a junior or vice emperor whom they call a Caesar.  And people have coined this the tetrarchy,  which based from the ancient Greek  means the rule of four men.  The system works as long as Diocletian is in power.  And then he does something remarkable,  which no other emperor had done before him.  You would have to go back to the Roman Republic  with a man called Sulla.  He abdicates.  After 20 years, he abdicates.  The system was supposed to work like this.  Okay, the junior emperors,  because he forced his co-ruler to step down as well.  The junior emperors become now senior emperors,  and they get new junior emperors, Caesars.  And then it becomes very Game of Thrones  because some people are like,  I have a son,  why didn't he begin to become emperor?  And the tetrarchy will not live very long after that.  And it ends with one man called Constantine,  who wins the Game of Thrones.  But interestingly enough, Constantine,  even though we've had a period  of roughly two decades of civil war,  unlike the crisis of the third century,  the Roman empire does not like fragments,  does not end up in anarchy.  Even when you have civil wars going on in the interior,  the rest of the empire keeps functioning.  The neighbors cannot exploit these civil wars to invade.  Somehow the system also,  like Diocletian's revolutionized late Roman government works.  And even Constantine,  when he ends up being the main emperor surviving,  decides it's gonna remain a system of collegial rule,  with that difference being,  they're gonna come from my family.  So my sons will be sharing the burden of government  over the entire empire.  And from then on until the end of the fifth century,  shared rule over the Roman empire is basically the norm.  

Okay, that's a huge change.  You've mentioned Constantine  and I want to mention another change,  which is one of religion.  Going back to Diocletian briefly,  I mean, he was pretty well known  for his persecution of Christians.  So why does he hate Christians so much?  And is his persecution of Christians  particularly stronger than previous persecutions?  

So this is also an interesting sign  or an interesting symptom of the crisis  of the third century.  I may have mentioned it earlier,  like people questioning  whether the gods have abandoned them,  because everything I've been saying so far  are pretty secular explanations.  But that's of course not how people  understood their contemporary world.  Religion was a very serious thing in the Rome world,  in the Rome Republic, in ancient Greek poleis.  So when you get to this middle of the third century,  not coincidentally,  the emperor who is in charge when the plague breaks out  is also the same emperor  who will require all his subjects  to basically perform traditional rites  to sacrifice to the gods for the wellbeing of the state.  So when the first persecution of Christian happens,  it's not a targeted persecution.  It's not, oh, these are the Christians,  we're gonna hunt them down.  It's basically people realize  that Christians will refuse to participate  in these public rites.  And to be fair, you cannot really blame them  because there's something called the 10 commandments.  There's monotheism, you can only believe in one God.  So it's a bit much to ask them to participate in that.  Now, in reality, of course,  Christianity had been around for 250 years or so.  In reality, we know there's a lot of like,  there's a modus vivendi.  Most of the time people can get along  and there are ways to,  well, to quote pirates of the Caribbean,  sometimes the code are just mere guidelines.  We know bishops, for instance,  who will publicly acknowledge already around the year 200.  And of course, there are many Christians  serving in the Roman army.  That is a reality of life.  Now, the thing how it goes with like these  empire wide sacrifices,  these empire wide traditional rite,  this emperor wide like appeasing the gods.  We actually have documents  that people would get like a receipt,  congratulations, you did your citizenship,  you did your duty,  here's a receipt that you did what was asked of you.  We have martyr accounts.  These are Christian sources  who make it very clear that sometimes  the local governor is confronted  with a Christian who refuses to sacrifice.  And there's almost kind of like a theatrical,  a kind of almost even like a comedic element to it,  where the governor will say like,  you know, I will turn my back  and you will pretend that you have sacrificed  and we'll call it quits, right?  And the Christian refuses.  And the governor like, okay, right,  clearly you did not understand me well, right?  So I'm gonna turn my back  and the Christian keeps refusing and refusing  until the governor has had it with them.  And then maybe has them evicted or executed.  Pick your choice.  

So it sounds like paying lip service  would have been the easier option  that they're just refusing. 

 Now, the thing is like, people will die.  I don't wanna turn this too farcical.  People have died, people have died for their belief.  This was a reality,  but we should not take it as the norm.  And even in the fourth century, in the early fourth century,  that we know there are councils, Christian councils,  where some of the bishops like take a very skeptical view  on some of these people who are hell bent,  excuse the word, on becoming martyrs.  Because like, then there's a thin line like,  okay, are you trying to demonstrate  that you're some sort of superior Christian  or do you just have a death wish?  Because then there's a thin line,  how much is this like performing your duty as a Christian?  Or is this just like going for a certain suicide?  Now, I'm not gonna dwell too much  on the differences with the later persecutions.  It's true, by the time you get to Diocletian,  it was especially his junior emperor  who really did not like Christians  and who really tried to go to the next level  in terms of persecution.  But it also says something about the belief system  of the Roman world.  I mean, the reason why,  and this might be very hard for us to comprehend,  by Romans, most traditional Romans  had such an odd view on Christians.  Like in their mind, these people were atheists.  And this sounds very difficult for us to comprehend.  I mean, how can Christians be atheists?  But if you look at how the traditional Roman  or the traditional Greek citizen  would have looked at religion,  they would have basically accepted.  Cicero actually says this literally  somewhere in his writings.  We have our religio, we have our religion,  just like other people have their religion.  People accept that there are multiple faiths,  there are multiple beliefs,  there are multiple gods.  And sometimes the Roman state  has even incorporated some of these foreign beliefs.  And then you have these people who are unwilling,  who are refusing to accept that other gods exist.  So that does set them apart a little bit.  

So we've got the persecution of the Christians,  but it's only a couple of decades after  that it seems like Constantine legalized Christianity.  Why the U-turn?  So this is an interesting question  because up until this day,  we can't really say for certain  whether Constantine actually chose Christianity himself.  Constantine is really almost like  a bit like an Augustus figure in that sense.  Religiously, he's a chameleon.  He takes on different colors,  depending on the circumstances.  We do know that already before the fourth century,  monotheism is becoming more popular.  For instance, there were also emperors who favored,  for instance, the cult of the invincible sun.  Aurelian would be a good example of that.  And we are pretty much certain  that both Constantine and his father  originally supported the solar cult.  You can also see it in their coinage, for instance.  But it's true, as his reign progresses,  Constantine starts favoring the Christians.  There is, of course,  the so-called famous toleration edict  that he and his fellow ruler in the East  proclaimed in the year 313,  which was already pretty much rubber stamping  what a previous emperor had done.  So Christians are tolerated again.  But then he seems to like up the ante.  For instance, we see him donating to the church.  We see him like granting tax concessions to the church.  And by the time he gets supreme rule  over the entire Roman Empire in the year 324,  a year later, he will convene  the very first ecumenical council,  meaning the very first council  that is supposed to represent the entire Christian world.  So it's clear that Constantine regarded himself  as some sort of like presiding figure  over the Christian world.  He even had his sons raised as Christians.  But on the other hand,  when, for instance, he chooses the city of Byzantium,  which is now modern Istanbul,  as a new imperial residence,  and I should stress residence.  There is no true capital  in the old-century Roman Empire  because you have multiple emperors  who sometimes have to be on different locations.  They're traveling around a lot with their court.  So they might reside in this city, Milan or Antioch,  or as Constantine did towards the end of his life  in Constantinople, his city.  When he basically relaunches the city,  he modifies it in his own vision.  He also not only constructs churches,  he also constructs temples for the traditional gods.  If you're a true Christian believer,  that seems something of an odd thing to do.  But we should also never forget,  regardless of Constantine's own religious beliefs,  he is still a Roman emperor  and Christians are a minority  in the grander scheme of things.  

When you look at Egypt,  sometimes which might be not so easy to contemplate  for people in the 21st century,  but regions like Egypt and Syria  were the most Christianized regions  of the Roman world in the 4th century.  For Egypt, we have a wealth of documentary evidence  in the form of papyri.  If you study these papyri,  for instance, for a census  when the government needs to know like,  who is living where?  Do we know anything about their religion?  In the decades between the toleration edict  and the first ecumenical council,  when there is clearly a tolerance  towards the Christian belief,  even in Egypt, the most, if not the most,  one of the most Christianized regions in the world,  only 18, one eighth, 18% of the population  would have been Christian.  That is a minority.  Of course, Constantine is not gonna go full on  Christian all the way.  He still needs to take into consideration  the rest of the empire is not there yet.  So how long does it take for an emperor,  is it Constantine for a start,  to say we are making this the state religion?  That's an important question  because Constantine is often regarded  as the emperor who turned Christianity  to the state religion.  He did not.  And like in this kind of setup,  there's no way he could have gotten away with that.  But he is the one you cannot understand  the process of the Christianization of the Roman state,  not the world, but the state without Constantine.  He really kickstarts that revolution.  And when you get to an epic called Theodosius,  60 years later, roughly,  then we can clearly see in the law codes,  this is the only accepted religion of state.  And that is a surprisingly fast evolution.  We're talking about a couple of decades  and the expression trickle down  has been abused heavily in modern politics.  But this is something a process  when we're talking about the Roman government,  when we can say there is a trickle down process.  If you look at the governmental apparatus,  this is very important.  The late Roman Empire of Diocletian and Constantine  had a far stronger, far bigger bureaucracy  than the early empire did.  Well, one of the reasons was like,  well, we have a larger army.  There are less people after two plagues  because there also was one in the second century  in the empire.  We need a stronger control over resources  and we need to monitor things better.  Basically, we're gonna create more jobs  to take account of everything.  If people serving in the government notice like,  the empire is favoring this religion,  maybe it might be profitable for me as well  if I turn to this religion.  And you can see that process in the composition  of the emperor's entourage,  in the emperor's state ministers,  in the emperor's top generals.  There's only one exception to this rule.  And this is a man called Julian,  who officially started life as a Christian,  but always deep down preferred the traditional gods.  And when he is emperor,  for a very short amount of time,  he starts promoting the traditional religions again.  Then you see also the people in his entourage  switching again to the traditional gods,  even if they've had a previous Christian background.  This sounds very cynical,  but this is also very much the reality  of politics at the highest level.  Of course, for the rest of society,  this takes much longer.  It's not a coincidence that the term  that Christians actually come up with  to describe the unconverted people  living outside of cities,  because Christianity pretty much started as a religion,  as an urban religion,  spread through Mediterranean draits,  springing forth from the Levant.  They use the term paganos, pagani,  people living on the countryside.  I don't want to call, I don't want to say yokels,  but it's not a term of praise.  But then again, bishops would have said,  well, these are the unconverted,  but there's still a chance we might convert them.  So a very interesting source for that are saints' lives.  For instance, in the end of the fourth century,  you have this saint called Saint Martin,  Martin of Tours,  and half of the saint's life is either him  fighting it out with the devil,  because he's an exorcist.  It's an amazing story.  The other half of him is like cutting down sacred trees,  trying to bring down temples  for people who are like,  actually, what is this guy doing with our gods?  Yeah.  And even as late, this is what I found very interesting.  If you take a region, this is the West, like modern Gaul.  But if you take the East, for instance, like Asia Minor,  we still have sixth century saint's lives.  So 300 years or so, well, more like 250 years  after Constantine starts favoring Christianity.  You still have saint's lives talking about  and how the saint started converting people  on the countryside in the interior of Asia Minor.  It's a process that took a very long time.  

So I'm thinking about people who live in the smaller towns  and as you say, the countryside,  and they've had these cultural institutions,  religious institutions for centuries.  And let's think about it properly.  Religion touches every aspect of life  in the ancient world, right?  So theater, religious.  Athletics, religious.  Everything's religious.  So the Olympics, going to see a play,  all of this has these religious connotations.  And all of a sudden, those in the upper echelons  are saying we should be going down the Christian route.  What does this mean for people's daily lives  that aren't in contact with power?  Are they being incentivized to convert?  Is there anything that those in power are trying to do  to kind of speed the process along?  

Well, here there's a huge difference  between theory and practice.  This is very amusing to read.  My colleague, Lucy Grig,  she's also on the editorial board of our new series.  She's published a lot on popular culture  towards the end of antiquity.  And there's a huge difference  between what the church expects people to do  and especially bishops in their cities  who are hoping this is how our congregation should act  and how also people really behave on the ground.  If I can just give one example,  in the city of Rome,  there used to be festivities around the Lupercalia  where it's like a bit like of the inversal  of social norms and expectations.  Like the common people can really go out there  and let go.  Even as late as the 70s.  So we're talking about a period almost a century  after Christianity has become the official state religion.  We're dealing with the city of Rome  where the Bishop of Rome  was one of the most important bishops  in the entire Christian world.  Even then the bishop is like raging,  like these people are still celebrating these festivities.  It's not very Christian.  But there's also, this is also very much true  about the aspirations the late Roman government has  and the reality on the ground.  For instance, there used to be the idea  that the late Roman Empire is a very totalitarian state.  I mean, if you look at the legislation,  you could get that idea.  It's easy to see why.  Diocletian and his successors basically dictate  everyone has a place in society  and everyone should respect their place in society.  For instance, if your father was a soldier,  you should serve in the army as well.  If your father was, I don't know, a smith,  you should become a smith as well.  So people think, oh,  this is kind of like a hereditary caste system.  If you're a farmer,  you're supposed to stick to your part of the land.  But then when you start studying these codes,  something you notice like five years later  and the emperor is issuing the same law again  and is threatening severe fines  if people breach these rules.  It's 10, 15 years later,  there's a new emperor who's issuing a law  on the same thing again.  So in reality, of course,  we're dealing with a pre-industrial state.  We're dealing with a pre-industrial world.  The late Roman government didn't have the kind  of apparatus that can control everyone's lives.  In reality, on the ground we know  there's actually a lot of mobility.  There are farmers who will go like,  well, actually, I just heard  there's this guy who used to serve in the government  and he's buying land here  and he's offering far better terms  than our current patron does.  So we're gonna go over to him.  So you can actually see ordinary people  sometimes have more agency than we used to think.  It's a harsher world.  I do wanna make that clear.  It's a harsher world,  but on the other hand, interestingly enough,  it is also the peak moment in antiquity,  at least from the Roman side of things,  of social mobility.  There are more opportunities  for people to rise up the ladder.  It's not just emperors like Diocletian  whose father may have been a freedman. 

 And this is, for instance,  like where the army is very important.  I mean, we should never forget  the Roman army was the biggest employer in the empire.  It was the largest consumer of economic goods  from across three continents  and it was the most expensive item on the state budget,  anywhere between at least one third  to maybe half of the annual imperial budget.  But the army also functioned  as a driver for social mobility.  We know cases of regular recruits  who rise all the way up to the rank of field marshal,  even people born outside of the empire,  the so-called barbarians.  This is a situation which would have been impossible  in the Republic or even the early empire.  

I'm gonna switch gears a little bit  because there's something that I am very, very fuzzy on.  So I imagine there's more people  than just me that's fuzzy on it.  What do we mean when we talk about  Western Roman Empire and Eastern Roman Empire?  Is there some kind of split at a certain point  and it just morphs into two things?  

This is a very popular idea that in the year 395  when the emperor Theodosius,  the same one who eventually put a stamp on it  that Christianity should become the state religion,  that when he dies, the empire splits  and is divided between his two sons.  But this is not how the late Roman Empire works.  In practice, as I've said,  there are multiple emperors with their multiple courts.  As the fourth century progresses, we really see,  there is tendency towards having an imperial government  for the West and an imperial government for the East.  In practice, they sometimes do tend to do their own thing  and especially as the fifth century progresses,  they sometimes seem to be acting  as independent governments.  But in reality, it's still one Roman Empire.  I mean, I'm living in Belgium  and I'll never forget the first time  I presented at a conference in Ireland,  first or second year of my PhD  and we had a keynote speaker,  a man called Ian Wood,  talking about the historiography  of the barbarian settlements.  And then he names all these big names  from the 18th, 19th and 20th century,  including of Belgian orders.  And there was one participant,  one member of the audience who asked,  you wonder what the deal is with those Belgians  trying to split up their country every weekend.  And I know where the joke comes from.  I mean, like world championship  in taking time to form a government.  Still, there's something similar going on  between with Western and Eastern Empire  because officially there's still one empire.  And especially for instance,  sometimes as happens in the fifth century,  when a Western emperor dies,  the Eastern emperor might decide like,  well, I'll put a candidate forward for the Western throne  because this is how it's supposed to,  this is how it's supposed to work.  There will be even a lot of moments of intense cooperation.  And one product of that is the so-called Theodosian code.  It is during the early fifth century  that the emperor Theodosius II in Constantinople decides  we need to make sense of all these edicts,  all these laws that have been issued over centuries.  There might be contradictions.  We need to streamline this.  As a token of Imperial unity,  the code was presented and proclaimed  on behalf of both emperors in both parts of the empire.  This is basically a way of stressing,  yes, we are still living in a Roman empire altogether.  But that message becomes of course a bit harder  if your Western twins start disintegrating  as it does in the fifth century.  

Okay, so from the beginning,  we shouldn't assume that it's diverging paths  necessarily just two sides of the same coin.  One side of the coin may be getting  a little bit more eroded than the other.  

I think that's very fair to say.  

So next question, because I don't know  whether this is a dirty word or not.  And I think it's important  that we use the correct terminology.  All of my older history books from when I was a kid  used the words Byzantine or Byzantine.  What does that word mean  and is it really an appropriate one to use?  

That's an interesting one for me  because I like the word Byzantine.  I think it sounds very cool.  I think it sounds very exotic.  I even taught a Byzantine history module  for seven years at Ghent University.  I have a lot of love for it.  And the first thing I usually tell my students  in class number one is like, right,  this is the Byzantine history module.  And after this,  I'm never gonna refer to them as Byzantines again.  Of course, there was a city of Byzantium  founded by the ancient Greeks.  And it is the city of Byzantium  that Constantine will choose  as a preferred Imperial residence,  which will become Constantinople.  But what is the problem?  As far as the contemporary people living there are concerned,  they are Roman.  And this is also the long lasting impact  of the Emperor Caracalla in the early third century  granting Roman citizenship  to all freeborn men across the empire.  If suddenly everyone is a Roman  and you're living in the Roman empire,  why wouldn't you regard yourself a Roman?  This is actually a remarkable achievement  when you consider ancient Greek self-superiority.  Even the ancient Greeks at some point  after the passing of time embrace their Roman identity.  They start referring to themselves as Romaioi.  And this is important because as time passes on,  the traditional word for a Greek like Hellenos  gets a religious connotation.  It's associated with the traditional worship  of the multiple gods and no true Christian  and the people in the Roman East at this point,  fifth, sixth century and beyond  regard themselves as true Christians.  So the word Byzantine would have been alien for them.  The only exception would be there are authors  who will have had a superb education.  And sometimes they will sparingly use the word  Byzantine only to refer  to the inhabitants of Constantinople  as a kind of a bit of like of showing off.  I know that once upon a time,  the city was called Byzantium  and I'll just call the inhabitants Byzantines.  So they never use the word for themselves.  It's only in the early modern period  starting in the late 15th century  that humanist scholars come up with this term  to basically differentiate.  And there's nothing really malevolent originally to it.  I mean, if Roman history is such a long span of time  from the archaic period,  do I really have to go all the way to 1453  when the Ottomans conquered the city of Rome?  And they'll decide, you know what?  They speak Greek, we're in the middle ages now,  let's call them Byzantines.  But interestingly enough, as time passes on,  there will be certain authors,  products of the enlightenment,  who will also like take a very denigrating view on this  because well, if you're enlightened philosopher,  these superstitious Christian people  duking it out over what kind of relationship  does God the Father have with Christ the Son  and does Christ have a human nature?  They have no patience for that.  And the long lasting impact of that  is interestingly enough still relevant today.  If you look at, for instance, modern dictionaries,  if you take a modern dictionary,  it doesn't matter whether it's an English one,  a French one, or a German one.  If you look at the word Byzantine,  regardless of describing the civilization,  you will also see connotations like sycophantic,  needlessly bureaucratic, you name it.  So it has had a long lasting negative impact.  But as far as the people concerned,  whether it's like fifth century, 10th century,  or even 14th century Greece,  they would have regarded themselves as Roman.  

So it sounds like it's a pretty loaded term.  Is there a better term  that scholars have turned to use instead?  

I would just call it Eastern Roman.  

There we go! 

 It's very convenient.  It still acknowledges that they're Roman  and they're just situated in this part,  either of the empire or the contracting empire.  Sometimes, even in the late Roman empire,  people make this distinction.  There is a document called the Notitia Dignitatum,  and it actually has two lists,  one for the Western part and one for the Eastern part.  And I use the word part explicitly  because that's how they define it.  They don't call it, this is the Western empire,  Eastern empire, no.  That is the Western part of the empire  and this is the Eastern part of the empire.  There's also a famous historiographer of this period,  Priscus.  He's amazing because he has given us  an eyewitness account of his visit  to the court of Attila, ruler of the Huns.  And he will sometimes also use Western Romans  to differentiate between which part of the empire  he is talking about.  So it sounds like it's two halves,  it's not two separate entities,  it's two halves that are supposed  to be working in tandem.  How well does this work in practice?  It's easier in the fourth century  when Roman power is uncontested  inside its own territories.  The fourth century empire was,  all things considered, a very stable empire.  It was also like a highlight of competent rule  by various individual emperors.  But when we get to the fifth century,  it gets messier.  It gets a lot more complicated  because we know by the end of the fifth century,  there's no longer gonna be a Western emperor.  There's no longer gonna be Western imperial structures  in most of the former provinces,  especially regions like Britain,  Northern Gaul, Spain.  It's incredibly messy.  But then of course the question is like,  how did we get there?  So before all of this happens,  we've got two halves of an enormous empire.  The borders are incredibly long.  

You've already mentioned about how large the army had to be  to maintain all of this.  Who are the enemies at the gates  that at this period the Romans are having to worry about  and where roughly geographically are they based?  

So traditionally Persia has always been there.  But Persia in the third century  gets a little bit of a palace revolution.  Before that you had the Parthians who were in charge.  And then in the early third century,  you have a new dynasty,  the Sassanid or the Sasanian dynasty,  who seemed to be far more militant  than the Parthians ever were in terms of dealing with Rome.  Honestly, I can't blame Persia.  I mean, Roman emperors in the second century  three times invaded what is now modern Iraq  and sacked the Persian capital of Ctesiphon.  I think after a while people are fed up with that  and think it's their time for retribution.  So Persia is definitely all the way up there.  Inside Europe, there seems to be like an important shift.  People whom I haven't really mentioned  who are also figure in the so-called crises  of the third century are new barbarian groups  for lack of a better expression.  People like the Goths, like the Franks,  like the Alemanni.  But here as well, Rome has itself to blame  to a wider extent.  I mean, you don't live for a quarter millennium  in the shadow of an imperial superpower  without picking up a trick or two.  Because sometimes people wonder like,  how do we suddenly get in this third century crisis  when these groups like, let's say like Franks,  they cross the Rhine, they pillage in Gaul,  they end up in Spain.  No groups before that were capable of doing so.  But then you have like these other groups  like in north of the Black Sea,  north of the Danube, like the Goths.  How were they able to invade the Balkans  and even defeat a Roman field army?  The literary sources are not gonna give you  any clear explanation on that.  But archeologically, we can see this world  has changed as well.  It's a, how shall I put this?  A very interesting case is Denmark.  And I know this might sound surprising  to people listening because Denmark was never part  of the Roman world, true.  It's pretty much out there, true.  In the past few decades,  archeologists have discovered in Denmark deposits,  like in bogs containing tons and tons,  well, tons is maybe a bit of an exploration,  but huge weapon supplies, Roman weapon supplies.  Even as early as last year,  for the first time,  roaming chain mail was discovered in Denmark.  But some of these deposits contains like  hundreds of spears,  dozens of swords and shields,  even equipment for horsemen.  So Roman arms seem to be circulating  far and wide beyond frontier.  That's one thing.  We also know, we see in some communities  that have been excavated,  you see a bit more of like social stratification.  What do I mean with that?  When you look at certain halls  and you can take the word seriously,  it's like these are bigger structures  for leaders with their own armed groups.  So you definitely see the rise of armed retinues.  These things already existed,  let's say in the times of Julius Caesar,  but there seems to be even intensification going on.  Why is that happening?  Well, I mean,  there are a couple of structural explanations for that.  For instance, the age of Roman expansion  is pretty much a product of the Roman Republic,  especially in its middle and later periods.  Under Augustus, you can see the final push  with Egypt in the Balkans,  Northwestern Spain.  But after Augustus,  the time of expansion pretty much comes to an end.  And of course,  one of the big advantages for the Roman society  and the Roman state of conquest  is like massive influx of slaves.  

Slaves are of course,  an important engine of your economy.  But what do you do when this age of conquest stops?  I mean, Romans are very creative people  and you could come up with all kinds of schemes  to incentivize your slaves to produce more children.  You can give reward systems  with like freedmanship and all that.  But there's also,  but slave trade is still very much a reality.  And we know that slave trade was reaching out  widely beyond the frontier.  Even as late as the late fourth century,  we have attestations of Roman slavers  crossing the Rhine to basically make deals  with local communities.  Now for 250 years,  if the frontier is more or less stable,  but you know, there are Roman markets  and they were willing to pay a fine price  for human capital, so to speak.  This encourages communities living on the other side  of the Rhine and the Danube to basically to wage war.  Like, I mean, if they defeat another community,  they can sell off their defeated neighbors  for a good profit.  So that's already one thing.  We also know that there is a slight population increase.  Again, you don't live a quarter of a millennium  next to your imperial superpower neighbor.  And like, oh, Romans have very good  agricultural techniques.  We know at some point, some of these are incorporated  into central Europe, Germany, you name it as well.  And then of course, there's the Romans themselves.  Imagine you're an emperor like Marcus Aurelius.  You're fighting against one group who's invaded.  Let's say the Marcomanni in the 160s.  What about maybe we need allies from somewhere else?  How about we not only strike up an alliance,  but we also supply arms to other communities  to help us fight them.  But of course, as we've also learned  from contemporary history, this is all fine and well,  but what if the war stops?  These weapons are still there.  Now, all of these factors will probably  have propelled individual, what we call barbarian,  just as a shorthand for non-Roman leaders  to basically attract larger armed retinues,  to attract, well, basically military groups,  but they also need to reward their followers.  And it's fine if the Roman emperor considers you an ally,  if he gives you gifts every now and then,  but what if that stops  because the emperor is distracted by civil war?  There is a civil war,  and that Rhine frontier looks tentingly under defended.  Maybe we should just get some goods for ourselves.  I think one of the stereotypes that we hear  in pop history quite a lot  is that all of these barbarian groups are,  well, barbarians,  and that's a loaded term in itself, isn't it?  We think of uncultured, uncivilized,  living in mud huts,  and the Romans are uber-civilized.  Is that really what's happening?  Are they truly living in a dark age  compared to the Roman light?  An example I like to use,  there is a Gothic village, if I'm not mistaken, Sobari,  where archeologists have discovered columns,  like columns for buildings.  They have discovered terracotta roof tiles,  if I'm not mistaken, even glass windows.  This village was situated 300 kilometers north  of the Danube frontier in modern Moldova.  That is also the impact of Roman imperial power  because these people get goods,  they are allowed to trade  because we should not imagine  the so-called Roman and so-called barbarian world  as yin and yang, good versus evil,  dark versus the light.  On the grounds, there will have been a lot of exchange.  And there is a wonderful Greek poet, Cavafas,  who has a wonderful poem called  Waiting for the Barbarians,  which ends with the lines,  what are we going to do now without the barbarians?  These people were kind of useful.  And this is actually how late Roman emperors  usually considered the barbarian world,  the world beyond the frontiers, useful.  If you're an emperor like Diocletian,  if you're an emperor like Constantine,  this is a laboratory for experimentation.  I may have told you that the age of expansion  has ceased centuries ago,  but that will not prevent Roman emperors.  Let's say, oh, I'm new,  it's my first year in power, what should I do?  How about I invade barbarian lands?  And this is a pattern you will see over and over again.  Yes, during the crises of the third century,  some of these groups, Gothic groups, Frankish groups,  crossed the frontier and pillaged,  and then usually went back to their homelands.  The damage that the empire could wreck  on these communities was far bigger  than what barbarians could do vice versa.  What emperors were interested in  is like military credit, military glory.  But also once they invade, and 90% of the time,  this will be a guaranteed defeat  for any barbarian group trying to oppose them.  What then usually happens, Constantine is a good example,  he invades Gothic lands in the 330s,  he defeats them left and right,  and then he will impose a treaty  forcing them to annually contribute recruits  to the late Roman army.  So basically, this sets them up  in a dependency relationship.  Emperors need the barbarian world  as a source of auxiliaries,  but not just for the army.  

For instance, something that Constantine's father did  when he did similar things across the Rhine  with Franks and Alemanni,  he will have deported communities  to abandoned agricultural lands in Northern Gaul  and settled in there as labor forces.  And most importantly of all,  let's say you're your average Roman citizen.  You can ask yourself, why am I paying so many taxes?  Well, the emperor will strike coins.  Coins are circulating across the entire empire.  They are the best form of mass communication.  One could even say propaganda.  An image that virtually every fourth century  Roman emperor uses is that of the defeated barbarian.  And he can be portrayed as like kidnapped.  We even have coins where you see  a Roman soldier dragging a smaller person,  maybe even a child out of a village.  You can see barbarians being killed.  The emperor is basically sending a message.  This is what your money is being used for  to keep you safe.  

I want to talk a little bit about modern theories  because particularly in modern society  where we are perhaps witnessing an empire  in its death throes,  it's a very common conversation, isn't it,  about how empires decline, how they fall.  And there's always a pundit with a theory,  a reason for Rome's decline.  But all of these pundits have different answers.  Some of them say it's immigration.  Some of them say it's economic policy, religious change.  Is there one theory that makes sense?  Like these pundits will say it's this single theory,  single cause,  or are we looking at a really complicated,  complex system of change  that is causing all of these differences?  

Pundits, politicians, people writing for newspapers  are wildly enamoured with the idea  like there is a problem in society.  X is a serious problem in society.  You know where X was also a serious problem in society?  In the Roman empire.  So if we're not careful with X,  we're gonna end up like the Roman empire.  It's a cheap formula.  You can use it almost for anything.  Migration, religion, climate change, you name it.  Now, interestingly enough, in the early 1980s,  a German scholar, Alexander Daemond,  once tried to catalog all the modern explanations  people since the Renaissance,  scholars since the Renaissance,  have given for what we would call the fall of Rome.  And he came up with 210 different factors,  people have attributed in the past,  contributing towards the decline of Rome.  It's a fantastic catalog.  It goes from like, to front war,  to anti-Germanic sentiment,  to even women's emancipation.  Interestingly enough, one label,  one factor that is never there,  but a lot of pundits would like to use is decadence.  A lot of pundits would say like,  we've become a decadent society.  If we're not careful,  we're gonna collapse like decadent Rome.  There is no lemma for decadence.  So how are you going to explain it?  And well, then you're gonna get to one  of the most vexed questions in the field.  And it doesn't help that I'm writing a book  on this myself for Oxford University Press,  what contributed to what I would call  Rome's disintegration.  Because before you can try to analyze a problem,  you first need to identify the problem.  What are we really talking about?  So the shorthand fall of Rome, what does it mean?  For me, it's the dissolution of Western Roman emperorship  is the only definition that works.  By the end of the fifth century,  there are no longer gonna be any more emperors.  Because you can't say it's the fall of the Roman Empire  if the Roman Empire in the East  goes on for another thousand years.  It's not that the Western Roman East  are structurally institutionally different states,  they're not, they share the same kind of framework.  So you can't even say it's the loss  of the Western Roman provinces,  because some of these will be reconquered  in the sixth century by Constantinople.  If you wanna talk about the fall of Rome  as the loss of the city of Rome,  a lot of popes will have to say,  up until the year 750,  the emperor of Constantinople is still in charge  of my city, and if I'm not careful,  he might exile me to Crimea,  as happened to one pope in the seventh century.  So for me, the only workable definition,  it's the end of embership in the West.  But how are you going to explain that?  And that's of course where our answers diverge.  Something I am strongly arguing against  is the idea, it's the so-called great migrations.  It's these floods of barbarian peoples  crashing over Roman borders,  piercing into Roman provinces  and carving up, dismembering the Roman state.  There are two different things here.  Yes, by the end of the fifth century,  there will be what we call barbarian kingdoms,  whether they're the vandals in Africa,  Aquitanian gaus in Southwestern France,  Franks in modern Gaul,  but we should be very careful about teleological  explanations what I mean with that.  Well, if this is the result in the year 480,  it was always meant to be like that in the year,  choose your poison, 376, 395.  My research in this domain originally started  with a study PhD on the Western Roman army  in the fifth century,  for which I used a concept borrowed from political science  is called warlordism.  Now, what is a warlord in classics and ancient history?  It's a term often used generically, sounds cool,  maybe conjures up images of Conan the Barbarian,  but what do you mean with that?  It's actually in political sciences  that people have spent a lot of time conceptualizing it,  but maybe I can actually just use a modern example.  Maybe some of the readers will, listeners, excuse me,  will remember that in 2023, in the war in Ukraine,  there was a Russian mercenary company  called the Wagner Company,  who was actually in the employment  of the Russian government.  But then its leader, Prigozheny decided,  I'm no longer supported enough, I've had it.  And he started a mutiny.  He's actually in charge of Russian forces,  but they're a mercenary company and they're loyal to him.  And basically he leaves the front in Ukraine  and he starts marching on Moscow.  At some point, he's 350 kilometers removed  from the capital of Vladimir Putin's government.  It's as embarrassing as it got.  We know in the end,  things did not end well for Prigozheny,  but the fact that he was able to get that far  tells you something about the vulnerability  of the Russian government and its armed forces.  And what I noticed in the fifth century,  Western Roman army, there are similar tendencies.  And these are strikingly different from what we know  from previous Roman imperial history.  I mean, if you want to wage opposition  to the Roman government,  what is the usual traditional path?  You set yourself up as emperor.  You basically say, I can do a better job.  And then basically you become the emperor  and you start governing.  But that phenomenon starts fading away  in the fifth century,  which in itself is a sign of structural.  And I've often called these warlords  the poor man's usurper.  Because what you see is like,  some of them will have troops loyal to them  and they might basically opt out of the system.  They basically say like,  I'm no longer working for the imperial court.  They will use violence against the imperial court  basically as a tool to maneuver themselves back  into a higher position of power,  usually as a field marshal or something.  But the fact that they are no longer willing  to become emperor themselves is damning.  And of course, then the question would be  from the audience,  so where do the barbarians figure in all of this?  If you look at the power relations between the empire  and the people across the frontier,  there was always a very imbalanced relationship.  Things started changing massively.  It's true, it has to be acknowledged  with this what I would like to call  the omnishambles of epic proportions  the battle of Adrianople,  which was as big a fiasco as you can find  in Roman imperial history.  It's true in the year 378,  a Gothic army crushed an Eastern Roman field army.  Two thirds of the best part  of the Eastern Roman army were destroyed.  Even the emperor lost his life.  But if you look at what happened previously,  this was not how it was supposed to go  because two years earlier,  you have Gothic groups who request asylum  to be settled inside the Balkans  and in return, they will provide recruits for the army.  And this is something that had happened  over and over and over again in earlier Roman history.  You can go all the way back to Nero,  you can go all the way back to Augustus  to find inscriptions of governors saying,  I settled thousands of Sarmatians in Moasia.  We don't have really time tragedy  called the road to Adrianople,  but I would like to emphasize it's a tragedy,  which could have taken various different junctures.  But what we have in the end is Gothic groups  who get severely exploited by the local Roman authorities  to the point that they're like, we've had it  and they rise up in arms  and probably much to their own surprise,  they end up winning a battle against the Eastern emperor.  Probably something that nobody would have envisioned.  So what you have then is like these Gothic groups  inside the Balkans,  but in the long run,  they do get incorporated into the imperial system.  The next time we see them,  they are serving as auxiliaries  for the Eastern emperor in civil wars  against Western rivals in 388 and 94.  So this is for instance,  where you get to a man like Alaric,  who became notorious in world history  for sacking the city of Rome in the year 410.  And this is what people would regard  like typical barbarian behavior.  There is one scholar whose name I shall not be mentioned,  but for those readers,  they might be interested to find out  that he's mentioned 59 times in the Epstein files.  We have made a very unfortunate comparison  between the Paris terrorist attack of 2015  and the sack of Rome in 410.  And we basically say,  well, this is what you get with migration or barbarians.  Anyway, the reason why I'm pointing out that is it's true.  Again, some things happen.  We cannot dispute the outcome of certain events.  Rome was sacked,  but people often forget Alaric was sitting  outside the gates of Rome for 18 months,  negotiating with the emperor who is not in Rome,  but in Ravenna,  the same imperial government  who previously executed the main field marshal  who had been his patron  and who'd been guaranteeing the terms of service  of his men,  men who'd been serving as imperial auxiliaries  for years and years and years.  And then they're like,  I'm sorry, hashtag take back control.  You're no longer on our employment role.  Then Alaric is like,  that is very unfortunate.  Can we please respect the terms of my contract?  And they're like, no.  And then he's like,  well, guess I'll have to supply my men  and their families myself then.  And this is where he goes like into this again,  it is extortion.  Let's be very clear.  He's sitting outside the gates of Rome.  He extorts the Senate into paying him,  but he also needs to provide for men and their families  who are no longer on the imperial payroll.  And if you want to explain that through ethnicity,  because a large group,  but not exclusively are Gothic people,  I'm sorry.  This is what imperial armies can do.  For those of you who've ever read Tacitus,  remember when Augustus dies,  there's a mutiny of Pannonian legions and Rhine legions.  And these Pannonian legions  will even end up sacking a municipium.  You have to be careful  when you're no longer paying your troops.  Again, think about Alaric.  He's sitting there outside of Rome  for let's say 18 months  and time can go by as slowly  or as fast as for us nowadays.  18 months is a very long time.  In 18 months, you can even form a Belgian government  with that difference being that  for Alaric, the coalition did not work in the end.  And he's like,  well, as every parent will know,  a threat only has so much value  if you're also willing to carry out.  And he's like,  well, then my men will have to spy themselves.  So Alaric is an extreme example  for something that on a smaller scale  will happen over and over again.  But it's not just these barbarian mercenary captains.  If you want to conceptualize them like that,  Imperial officers who are Roman true and true  will behave or indulge in similar behavior,  assassinate their field commander,  separate their troops from other campaigns  when they feel that their terms are not being met.  And then of course,  we have like a lot of internal violence going on  against central authority to the point  that the Western Roman government  becomes a failed state in the fifth century.  

So I just really want to hammer it home  to the listeners  that when we hear pundits speaking with authority  that they've given themselves,  this is the reason,  or these are the two, three reasons that Rome fell.  And they always pin it on minority groups,  religious groups, oppressed peoples, essentially.  This is part of a modern culture war  that is trying to distract people  from political classes exploiting the majority.  Is it fair to say then  that a lot of the problems  that the emperors found themselves in  was because they took people for granted  and exploited them.  And there was pushback?  

I cannot imagine the amount of pressure  someone like Alaric must have been under  because in the best of possible worlds,  the man just wants to become field marshal.  And there are precedents for that.  We know plenty of cases in the fourth century  in the stable late Roman empire  of men who started life as a Frank  or an Alemannic person  and who made it all the way to the top  as field marshal.  And we have to imagine  these people are operating  in a Roman world true and true.  They have to not only interact with the emperor,  they have to interact with his entourage,  they have to interact with senators, with bishops.  We have letter correspondences  who make it very clear these people have to perform  with all the etiquette that is required of them.  But there's some things, of course,  like something entirely different for these men  following people like Alaric.  Some of them will have gone through serious abuse,  thing that massively enforced his army,  for instance, was the fact  that the previous government in the year 48,  not only do they execute their field marshal  who has been in charge for 13 years,  they even persecute the non-Roman auxiliaries  that had been previously employed by them,  even killing wives and children  and stealing their property  or expropriating their property.  Of course, the men who are still in armed service  are gonna flock to Alaric  because they're like, we've been betrayed  in the most inhuman way possible.  And then there's Alaric who knows like,  well, what am I gonna do?  I mean, I need to find a place for my people.  And this is what people conceptualize wrong.  They think like, well, someone like Alaric is a king.  He will try to carve up pieces of land  to create his own state.  All we have, and this is something we need to acknowledge,  all we have are Roman written sources.  They are not writing  from the point of view of people like Alaric.  And they will make it clear during his negotiations,  some of the things he's requesting  are very moderate and modest.  He asks for his troops to be stationed  in what is now modern Austria.  It's not a very rich region.  It's subjective.  It's susceptible to raids from across the frontier.  They can do a job there  and he wants grain to supply his communities.  Sometimes land is being put on the negotiation table,  but we have to imagine these people  are also serving in an Imperial army.  And as we know from the Roman army,  after 20 or 25 years of service,  you will get land as a reward.  So these are also like basically negotiations  over contracts and terms.  And this is where I need to stress our fixation  on ethnicity and migration.  For instance, people like Alaric,  at some points might take the title of Rex  for themselves, like what we translate as king.  But throughout the fifth century,  most of these leaders do not attribute  an ethnic label to it.  For instance, already in the middle of 17th century,  the royal grave of a man called Hildrych,  father of the much more famous Clovis,  who in the early sixth century  will end up conquering most of what is now France  and unite the various Frankish communities.  He was buried there in the late fifth century.  In the mid 17th century,  people discovered his grave and the grave goods,  there is a seal ring.  And the seal ring makes it very clear.  This is for the Rex Hildrych.  It does not say Rex Francorum,  it does not say king of the Franks,  just king, plain and simple.  That is what most of these men use  and you have to consider it from their perspective.  Most of our groups might have a core from one community,  whether they Franks, Vandals, or I don't know, Alamani,  but they attract people  from all kinds of different backgrounds,  slaves, deserters, even Romans.  Why would you discriminate?  So ethnicity alone is not going to provide  a clear explanation for what we would call the fall of Rome.  Sure.  It's just really striking to me that we hear in the news  and on social media all the time  that it's people on boats that are the problem,  it's drag queens breeding to children that are the problem,  it's trans kids hoping to get some hormones  that are the problem.  If you look at the sources,  I can come up with only one striking resonance  between what happened in the fifth century Western empire  and our contemporary world.  This is why we have a structural difference  between the Western empire that disintegrates  and the Eastern empire that will prove resilient  and go on for another thousand years.  There is a different social makeup  of the civilian elites in the West and in the East,  especially when we're talking about  the richest people in society.  In the West, you have like the senatorial class  claiming pedigree going back centuries and centuries,  the richest land owners, not just in the West,  but in the entire Roman world.  In the East, you have much more of a mixed top class,  a lot of them far more dependent  on serving in the Imperial government  to draw wages from that, good paying wages,  let's make it clear.  But the average wealth of Eastern Roman senators  was far less than that of Western senators.  And we have the Imperial law codes  that I previously mentioned.  In the 440s, the Western emperor Valentinian  will publicly acknowledge in these laws,  the treasury is empty.  We no longer have sufficient funds to arm our men,  nevermind raising new recruits for the army.  And if you look back at his previous legislation,  he tried to tax his super rich, but it didn't work.  He had to withdraw that legislation  because they were finding all kinds of ways to dodge it.  And the thing is like his government  was far more dependent on them  than the Eastern empire,  where you have a very different situation.  Because in the same period, in the 440s,  the Eastern government has to deal with the rise  of this man called Attila,  who is creating some sort of, for lack of a better term,  tribal empire in Central Europe  with the Huns as a top elite  and all kinds of barbarian communities underneath them.  And Attila will humiliate the Eastern imperial government  time and time again in the Balkans,  sacking Roman cities,  defeating Eastern Roman field armies  to the point that he can extract tribute  from Constantinople.  Interestingly enough, the Eastern emperor  will also levy a tax on his super rich,  for which our Eastern Roman senatorial sources  cry and shame and indignity.  But the Eastern emperor, the Eastern imperial government  can at least organize their revenue base  much better than Western emperors can.  

I'm gonna ask a question that I know  is gonna have a very complicated answer.  It's not gonna be a short answer.  It's not gonna be a simple one.  I know it, I'm gonna ask it anyway.  What year did Rome fall?  

Okay, this is where I have to make a confession.  I can be very active on social media.  And yes, I confess,  I used to have an account on Twitter.  My most viral post I ever made,  I think it had like 2 million views or something,  was Jeremy Clarkson leaning over the question,  what year did Rome fall?  And then you have answers like 395, 476, 751,  1204, 1453.  And I basically added to that,  if the correct answer is not 1453, I'm gonna riot.  And that went viral.  From the Roman historical point of view,  I'd say 1453, when the last Eastern Roman emperor dies  during the fall of the city of Constantinople.  I think it's fair to say  that Roman imperial history stops then.  That would be arguing from a purely long view  of Roman history.  So I'm gonna offer a simple answer  to your very complicated question.  

Okay, fantastic.  Second question that goes with it.  We love talking about decline,  but what do we mean by decline?  Cause you've mentioned art, you've mentioned culture,  we've mentioned a bit of extra taxation, et cetera.  But would a person know  that they're living in the city of Rome  or one of the great cities of the empire  and walk around thinking,  wow, this is falling apart around me?  

Again, depending which period we're talking about,  people will have noticed.  And not just elite writers,  but ordinary people as well.  And this is, for instance,  why for me it's so hard.  This is where I make a clear distinction  between living in a late Roman world,  even when there are no longer emperors in the West,  living maybe in a late antique world,  or then asking the question,  are we still living in anything  that looks like an ancient world?  Take the city of Rome, for instance.  Sixth century is a very good case for that.  When there are no longer emperors in the West,  people in Italy don't really seem to mind,  seem to be like cry havoc.  The symbolic value of the year 476  was only coined two generations later  in the city of Constantinople,  not coincidentally,  when you have an Eastern emperor like Justinian,  who is willing to indulge in imperialism  in the West again.  When people there are like,  but I thought we were supposed to be living  in a Roman world,  why is the emperor declaring war on us?  When we look at cities, for instance,  Justinian's wars in Italy  are the longest war that the Italian peninsula,  longest ongoing war it has ever experienced  throughout its history, 25 to 30 years.  A city like Rome will be reduced to a husk  in the aftermath.  Like if Rome in the early fifth century  would have still had a population  of a couple of hundred thousands,  by the middle sixth century,  what is it gonna be like?  No more than 50,000, maybe even less?  That is a severe reduction in scale.  This is why I find it so important  to talk about the physical reality  of talking about a late Roman world  versus sometimes the intellectual landscape  of late antique world.  Yes, even in the year 700,  you might find bishops traveling from Syria  to Italy to North Africa, sure.  But what about the mass of people,  of regular people?  And it does make a difference.  For instance, when we're talking about law,  the contribution of Roman law,  there is a clear difference  between living in a society  where Roman law is still a fundamental vehicle  versus where it is not.  For instance, in the same region,  let's say Gaul, in the early sixth century,  we have three different types of law codes.  One for the Franks in the north,  one from Burgundians in eastern,  southeastern Gaul in the Rome Valley,  and one for Gothic people in Aquitaine  in southwestern France.  There's a lot of continuity in the south  with Roman law.  Basically, these law codes  are like a stream-lized, provincialized version.  In the north, it's something very different,  like the so-called Salic law code.  One thing that really strikes out  is like what I would call getting away with murder.  There is a so-called system called Wehrgild,  where there are fines for killing people.  Let's say you kill a Roman person,  my gosh, I'm saying something like 600 gold pieces.  Let's say you call a Frankish person 800 gold pieces.  The fact that you can put a price on a human life  is as un-Roman as it gets.  The way that you can basically like,  well, I murdered a guy, but what are you gonna do,  fine me?  Okay, I don't wanna be too farcical.  These are staggering amounts, staggering sums.  Most ordinary people would have never been able  to afford that.  You would have basically like all chip in  with the community or start negotiating.  But this is as much a saying that  there is no governmental apparatus anymore.  There were remnants of the imperial bureaucracy in Italy  serving the first Gothic kings,  where you have much more continuation of that.  In Northern Gaul, these imperial structures are gone.  Frankish kings barely have an administration  with the name.  So they're basically like,  you have to sort it out yourself.  And the only thing we can do is send a marshal  to declare, was he killed in the right way?  Did you do things legitimately?  Let's talk about women.  There's a fundamentally different situation.  If you're a woman living in a Frankish society  in the sixth century, then if you were still living,  let's say in Southern Italy,  still controlled by Constantinople,  where Roman law still holds sway.  I'm not gonna say that women had a superior place  in Roman society,  but at least Roman law came with certain protection,  with certain mechanisms to at least ensure things.  For instance, like marriages,  that your husband would not simply  basically when he wants to get rid of you,  I'm just gonna divorce you and run up like,  honey, what about staying with the dowry?  We see that women in the Eastern Roman Empire  take on much more responsibilities.  They have also like sometimes like professions,  which we do not often can trace back in modern Gaul  or in England.  It gets to the most extreme point  why you get to the century.  And then we're of course, way beyond antiquity.  When you study the Domus Dei book of William  and his Norman conquerors,  and you look at property,  women are only involved in 5% of property  and property transactions.  In Southern Italy, 500 years later,  still controlled by Constantinople,  women are involved in 25% of the transactions.  That is a serious difference between living  in remnants of a Roman world or not.  That's a really interesting point  that makes me think of some of the stereotypes  and the simplifications that we're facing.  So the Roman Empire, it doesn't fall in a day.  Imperial power is eroded,  it contracts maybe, weakens,  but it's carrying on long after  a lot of people will tell us that it ended.  So what we're essentially saying then  is that we should get rid of this idea  that at one particular point,  someone hits the light switch and we're,  boom, everyone's in the Dark Ages.  And I just wanna offer two sides of the same coin  because the Roman Empire or antiquity  is always upheld as the model,  as a superior civilization.  But we'd have to ask ourselves, for whom?  This is not a world of middle classes.  I mean, the art we're watching,  we're viewing, the literature we're reading,  these are products of elite consumption.  But what about the ordinary people?  For instance, one of the major advances in archeology  is the study of skeletons and the composition  and the origins of human bodies,  but also like their basic health, really.  You can study skeletons from communities in England,  stable communities.  We know there was a human settlement there,  people have been living there since the Iron Age.  So you can compare these skeletons  when they go from Celtic period to Roman period  to Anglo-Saxon period.  People living in Celtic times and Anglo-Saxon times  were taller and healthier  than those who were living under Roman rule.  And this is also an immediate consequence  of living in an imperialist state.  The Roman Empire needed to sustain itself  in three continents.  That requires a lot of resources,  it requires a lot of labor.  Some of these people were physically impacted  by toiling away for the empire.  Now that's one extreme side of the coin.  On the other side, we should not forget,  and this almost sounds a bit like Monty Python  and what did the Romans ever do for us?  The other extreme side would be depending  where you live in the Roman world,  you can be spared from like the most manifest,  the grandest scale of violence,  spared from warfare.  When Augustine, the Bishop of Hipperagia  is one of these great thinkers of the church,  the Bishop of his local community,  when he dies in the year 430,  his city is being besieged by Geiseric  and his Vandal army.  It was the first time in nearly half a millennium  since Julius Caesar's civil wars  that the city of Hipporhegia had experienced warfare.  Half a millennium without war,  if you look at our current state of the world,  might be not something to scoff at.  

Absolutely.  Okay, we're coming to the end of the conversation now.  So penultimate question,  what's the biggest misconception about late antiquity  that you really want to make sure  that we have thoroughly demolished  with this conversation?  

I would say that the peoples living across the frontiers  whom we call barbarians are not a separate world.  They are just as much part of this late Roman world,  this late antique world.  Emperors clearly regarded them as such.  And as far as even late Roman emperors are concerned,  these are not the biggest threat.  These are not the flood about to crash over the gates.  For people living on the other side of the border,  especially in the fourth century,  it's the Romans or the Imperial army  would have been the more bigger looming threat.  

So final question, it's a doozy.  This is a long period  with different things happening in different areas.  So it's automatically complicated.  Lots of knots that need untangling,  lots of nuance to get to grips with.  If anyone listening is thinking,  wow, I really do want to know more about this,  even if it's just because it's a little bit  Game of Thrones-y,  where can we go to get a little bit more information  and do a bit of a deeper dive?  

Okay, that is a trick question  because now I could be tempted into naming this colleague  and that colleague and possibly offending  all the other ones whom I'm not gonna name.  I mean, I could basically advertise my own material,  but the problem is that I've written two trade books  on this, but in Dutch, sadly, I will.  Once I find my eight day a week,  I'm gonna translate one of them.  But it's like, just to give you an idea,  I know there's so many people who are interested  in knowing and finding out more about it.  And it's not always easy to find accessible literature,  literature that's written by somebody  who knows the sources, the scholarship true and true,  but also writes it in an accessible way.  Just to give you an example,  I wrote this book called The World of Clovis,  just looking at the Franks and Gauls  from the third to the sixth century.  In a year, that book sold 7,000 copies  around the sixth print.  I know by English standards, these are minor,  this is like small change numbers,  but by Dutch standards, it's mind blowing.  So maybe hopefully once I get to my English translation,  I am actually, almost everything I've said here,  I'm trying to write down, I'm already at chapter four,  so if the publisher is listening, yes,  the book is happening for Oxford University Press's  Ancient Warfare and Civilization series,  which is meant to reach a wider audience.  I'm writing this book on Rome's disintegration.  If you wanna have something more accessible  and are still interested in this,  I think I would have to settle for the twin volumes  by Michael Kolikowski, Imperial Triumph  and Imperial Tragedy.  Imperial Triumph goes from the death of Trajan  in the early second century to the mid fourth century.  And of course that in itself could be a mental game changer  to think of the period even as the third  and the most of the fourth century  as a highlight of Imperial rule.  Because despite all these challenges,  despite all these crises, the Roman Empire survives  and manages to reassemble itself  with just an achievement in its own right.  And then his Imperial Tragedy  goes much wider than I intend.  He covers both Western and Eastern affairs in great detail  while I mainly look at the disintegration  of Western imperial power.  And he takes the narrative all the way to the sixth century.  I should warn you though,  and he will concede that himself  in one passage in his first book.  Gee, those were a lot of names.  This is of course what you get with political history.  So be careful with that.  But if I can recommend only one title and one author,  I actually cheated by giving you two titles,  but I would go for Michael Kalikovsky.  

I'll allow it.  Just so that we're sure though,  if we happen to wander into a secondhand bookshop  and see some of those wonderfully antique looking books,  is there any book that is so outdated  that we should avoid it?  

Oh my, there's too, too many to name.  Oh my God.  So too many to name.  I wouldn't even know where to begin.  But actually I'll flip it around.  I'll make a case for a positive approach  for somebody who would now be considered outdated.  There was an Irish scholar called E.A. Thompson.  And immediately after World War II,  he started publishing books on Attila,  on the historiographer Ammianus Marcellinus,  on the Visigoths, when nobody else was doing this.  Like when I'm talking about Peter Brown  and his revolutionary essay,  The World of Late Antiquity, that's 1971.  Thompson was a pioneer long before anyone else  was doing it.  He writes in a very clear, very understandable prose.  Many of his books, you can still buy very cheaply online,  whether they're secondhand or so.  And yes, a lot of his framework  we would now consider outdated.  But the man has a sense of humor.  He writes clearly.  So you know what?  I'm sorry, Michael,  you can be pushed to the back now.  For all I care, read E.A. Thompson.  

There you go.  You've heard it from the man himself.  Thank you so much for coming on  and having this discussion,  because as I say, I know nothing.  So this was really illuminating for me  and I'm sure it will be really illuminating  for other people as well.  So we are so grateful to you.  

Thank you.