17 ms·

Didn't know that about the Roman Empire, fascinating. Where can I read more about the debate that it possibly never fell?

by syspec 4y ago

ncphil 4y ago
The whole, "did Rome fall, or did it just morph into the modern European states?" thing has sort of been overblown. Even the Medievalists (my old camp) have always recognized that the traditional story European states told themselves about their origins weren't entirely accurate. But those stories weren't created out of thin air. Evidence of continuity abounds. Interwar scholars like Henri Pirenne overstated their case, leaning into economics at the expense of politics. Most historians and archeologists today are firmly in the "fall" camp. I'm generally with them. A couple of recent books: Bryan Ward-Perkins. _The Fall of Rome_. Oxford, 2006. Peter Heather. _The Fall of the Roman Empire_. Oxford, 2007. There are two good studies that could be read as leaning towards cultural and economic transformation while still acknowledging that there were political breaks: Peter Brown._The World of Late Antiquity_. Norton, 1989. Peter Brown. _The Rise of Western Christendom_. Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. Brown is the giant of 20th century Late Roman scholarship (he practically invented the idea of "Late Antiquity" in the 1971 first edition of that book, which I eagerly consumed as an undergrad in 1975). The main strength of Late Antique studies is in a worldview that acknowledges the continuities of Roman civilization in the East _during and after_ 476 (for me, the really critical period was in the 6th and 7th centuries when Constantinople failed to support its colonists on the frontier, and the consequent abandonment of settlements which were by then behind barbarian lines -- aptly described in the contemporaneous "Life of Saint Severian"). On Hancock: He's undoubtedly a grifter at this point. Anyone who has studied Plato seriously (as all good students of history and archeology from the Golden Age into at least the Renaissance have) will know the legion of arguments supporting the modern consensus that Atlantis was no more real than Numenor (which it inspired).
eigenman 4y ago
A good place to start might be Bret Devereaux, who regularly appears on the front page here https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-i-words/ https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-f... TL;DR it depends on what you mean by “Rome Fell”

Didn't know that about the Roman Empire, fascinating. Where can I read more about the debate that it possibly never fell?

by syspec 4y ago

Didn't know that about the Roman Empire, fascinating. Where can I read more about the debate that it possibly never fell?

ncphil 4y ago

The whole, "did Rome fall, or did it just morph into the modern European states?" thing has sort of been overblown. Even the Medievalists (my old camp) have always recognized that the traditional story European states told themselves about their origins weren't entirely accurate. But those stories weren't created out of thin air. Evidence of continuity abounds. Interwar scholars like Henri Pirenne overstated their case, leaning into economics at the expense of politics. Most historians and archeologists today are firmly in the "fall" camp. I'm generally with them. A couple of recent books: Bryan Ward-Perkins. _The Fall of Rome_. Oxford, 2006. Peter Heather. _The Fall of the Roman Empire_. Oxford, 2007. There are two good studies that could be read as leaning towards cultural and economic transformation while still acknowledging that there were political breaks: Peter Brown._The World of Late Antiquity_. Norton, 1989. Peter Brown. _The Rise of Western Christendom_. Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. Brown is the giant of 20th century Late Roman scholarship (he practically invented the idea of "Late Antiquity" in the 1971 first edition of that book, which I eagerly consumed as an undergrad in 1975). The main strength of Late Antique studies is in a worldview that acknowledges the continuities of Roman civilization in the East _during and after_ 476 (for me, the really critical period was in the 6th and 7th centuries when Constantinople failed to support its colonists on the frontier, and the consequent abandonment of settlements which were by then behind barbarian lines -- aptly described in the contemporaneous "Life of Saint Severian"). On Hancock: He's undoubtedly a grifter at this point. Anyone who has studied Plato seriously (as all good students of history and archeology from the Golden Age into at least the Renaissance have) will know the legion of arguments supporting the modern consensus that Atlantis was no more real than Numenor (which it inspired).

eigenman 4y ago

A good place to start might be Bret Devereaux, who regularly appears on the front page here https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-i-words/ https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-f... TL;DR it depends on what you mean by “Rome Fell”