Texts in Context:
Nightfall on Classical Antiquity
By Gabriel Blanchard
Not with a bang, but with an administrative technicality.
Constantine the Great
History and pop culture tell us the following about the Emperor Constantine: he pretended to be a Christian to win a battle; he really did become a Christian on seeing a cross in the sun; he was not baptized until his deathbed; he favored Christianity while remaining a sun-worshiping pagan; he was an Arian heretic; he was a saint; he used the Council of Nicæa to pick the books of the Bible; he used the Council to pick his favorite out of dozens of versions of Christianity; and he had no control over the Council. Which, say what else you will about him, but all this does make him an unusually well-rounded figure.
Here is the real scholarly consensus. Constantine—who had Christians in his family, including his mother—certainly began adopting Christian imagery at the Battle of Milvian Bridge, which took place near Rome in 312 and established him as sole emperor. He then issued the Edict of Milan in 313, which mildly favored Christianity while still guaranteeing freedom of worship to everyone.1 Publicly, he also kept using imagery from the cult of Sol Invictus or “the Unconquered Sun” for over a decade (a deity that had come to prominence late in the third century and was closely tied to the emperors).
Without claiming to convert, Constantine made it clear he considered the peace of the Church his business: many of his subjects were Christians, whom he did not want disturbing the peace of his realm. To that end, when a theological dispute started causing problems in Egypt, and he was unable to stop it with (quite literally!) a strongly worded letter, he convened the First Council of Nicæa.
This was the first of what are known as the Seven Great Ecumenical2 Councils (Nicæa I in 325, Constantinople I in 381, Ephesus in 431, Chalcedon in 451, Constantinople II in 553, Constantinople III in 680-681, and Nicæa II in 787). The only doctrine it addressed3 was the theology of Arius, a deacon from Alexandria with friends in high places. He taught that the Logos—the being incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth—was not God exactly, but a created, godlike being who created all other things. The view now known as orthodox Trinitarianism was championed by Alexandria’s bishop, Pope4 Athanasius I. Arianism was firmly rejected at Nicæa: only two bishops dissented out of over three hundred in attendance, and the Nicene Creed was produced as the orthodox formula of Christian belief.
A New Rome …
Shortly thereafter, in 330, Constantine built a new capital. It had several nicknames—Konstantinopolis after its founder, Byzantium after the ancient city whose site it reoccupied; but its principal name was simply Nova Roma, “New Rome.” It was on a peninsula called the Golden Horn, on the western side of the Bosporus (the strait which connects the Black Sea with the Ægean), which had some of the best harborage in the world. New Rome was henceforward the seat of the Empire: even in Greek, its inhabitants called themselves Ῥωμαίοι [Rhōmaioi], “Romans.” The new city was much better positioned than Old Rome to address frontier threats, whether from the Goths and Slavs or from Sassanid Persia. However, in 337, Constantine found himself dying, and really was baptized on his deathbed. His office continued to be Christian after him; except for Julian the Apostate (r. 361-363), there was never a pagan Emperor again.5
The tetrarchy Diocletian had designed did not persist during the Constantinian dynasty; however, Theodosius I (r. 379-395) permanently restored the division of the realm into East and West Roman Empires. He ruled the whole himself, but the split was made effective under his sons, Arcadius and Honorius. The two emperors were fully entitled to act as they saw fit in their own spheres. Yet the Empire was still notionally one, with its capitals at New Rome and Milan (or sometimes Ravenna), moved north from Old Rome, again with the Goths in mind.
… With New Problems
Speaking of Goths, that problem had changed. The usual Roman method of dealing with frontier barbarians was neither conquering their territory, and so overextending the government, nor ceding territory to them and so losing Roman glory. It was, instead, to co-opt the barbarians themselves as something called foederati—a status somewhat between allies and subjects (but more the latter than the former), settled on imperial land and enjoying the privileges of Roman civilization, which were much coveted, by integrating with the rest of Roman society. This had been the solution to troublemaking frontier barbarians for centuries, and it worked splendidly when integration was effectively implemented. It even produced great champions of the Roman cause like Stilicho the Vandal, who married Emperor Theodosius’ niece, and was appointed by him as Honorius’ guardian until he came of age.
However—in an irony befitting the demise of the classical era—Stilicho’s own end was at Roman hands, as something between a slandered martyr and a hero with a tragic flaw. Stilicho himself was probably a Nicene Christian (or he would hardly have been allied to the family by Theodosius); but in this, he was exceptional. Not that Goths clung to paganism; plenty of Goths were Christians—Arian Christians. And if the integration of Gothic foederati was ineffectual in one way or another, especially if it did not include persuading them to adopt Nicene theology, it could make for something more like a state-within-a-state than a new crop of Romans.
I forget why Rome fell, exactly. I expect it was just one of those things.
It was at such barbarous hands that, at the close of summer in the year 410, all the Mediterranean felt a blow upon the heart. On 24 August, in Honorius’ absence, King Alaric of the Visigoths led his men into Old Rome and sacked the ancient city. Since the Visigoths were Arians, most of the churches were spared, though this mercy did not extend to the Lateran basilica, the Pope’s residence. The tombs of Augustus and Hadrian were ransacked and their ashes scattered, and Honorius’s sister, Galla Placidia, was taken as a hostage.6 (Pope St. Leo the Great would narrowly dissuade Attila the Hun from doing the same to Rome forty-two years later; three years after that, he was unable so to dissuade the Vandals.) Even the severe, withdrawn St. Jerome wrote, in tears, that “The city which took the world captive has been captured.” This sack prompted the great African bishop, St. Augustine—who would die as the Vandals were besieging his own home—to compose perhaps his greatest work, The City of God; but, after eight centuries of invincible Roman security, the sack struck like the death knell of all the works of man in every city of the Empire.
“Like Two Spent Swimmers That Do Choke Their Art”
Many “barbarous” peoples lived on both sides of the Roman border: Avars, Franks, Jutes, Ostrogoths, Saxons, Serbs, Suebi (stop thinking if you hit “Vikings,” though, that means you’ve gone too far). Speaking of the Visigoths and Vandals, the former set up a kingdom in the province of Hispania, and in fact the Visigothic Rite of the Mass is not quite extinct even today, while the latter established a realm in North Africa. But it was not the Goths who chiefly afflicted Rome. To understand the thing properly, let’s rewind a few paragraphs.
The emperor gave peace to the Church, and tried to put it at peace with itself; it can hardly be said the Church gave peace back to the emperor. The aftermath of Nicæa lasted until the next council, in 381; the Nicene “winner,” Athanasius, was exiled no less than five times by four emperors, after his victory. Christianity caused this trouble because it was defined by orthodoxy, “right belief.” Paganism had no dogma, but any Christian dispute with the wrong doctrinal implications could go from candle-flame to conflagration almost instantly. The Christian emperors wanted a united realm, which they hoped to foster through a united Church, but the Church was ill-suited to the design. Whether really governed by a Holy Ghost or by superstition, either way, it was not governed by the likings of Cæsar; it “started aside like a broken bow.”
And though councils might settle the official theological line on a question, they did not necessarily convince many adherents of rejected views to change their minds. The fallout from the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, in 431 and 451, proved worse than the Arian controversy. The quarrel was between two views of Christ. The dyophysites argued he had two natures, one divine and one human; the miaphysites7 argued he had one divine-human nature. The former suspected the latter of blending and confusing Christ’s deity and humanity, making him really neither God nor man, while the latter suspected the former of dividing Christ into two separate beings. An extreme form of the dyophysite view was rejected at Ephesus, at which Christians in the Persian Empire broke communion with the rest of the Church—bad enough, with worse to follow. When the miaphysite formula was rejected at Chalcedon twenty years later, all over Egypt and Syria, its adherents simply rejected Chalcedon right back. The schism was a thorn in the side of the East Roman Empire for centuries thereafter, seriously undermining the influence of orthodox emperors over Egypt and the Levant.
Gibbonish Gibberish
The influential British historian Edward Gibbon considered the Church a major contributor to the decline of the Empire. There is a sense in which he was probably correct, but it was not the sense he meant. He believed the Church, and especially monasticism, led to a decline in civic virtue—in other words, people “being so heavenly-minded they were no earthly good”: money that could have funded public works going into episcopal coffers, and people becoming monks instead of maintaining the judicial system or the military. He famously sneered at the Arian controversy for being “over an iota”—the spelling difference between the key technical term of Trinitarianism, ὁμοούσιος [homoousios], and that of the Arians, ὁμοιούσιος [homoiousious]: the words mean “of the same kind” and “of similar kind.” (This, Gibbon must have known was unfair of him, if he had an honest bone in his body. Of course the difference between “similar” and “the same” is enormous: dogs are similar to wolves, but we do not try to cure children of the fear of wolves, or look for a well-bred sheepwolf to guard our herds.)
But more generally, Gibbon’s version of the theory has fallen from academic favor because it is clearly wrong. Even if we had no further evidence, the blatant this-worldliness of much of the Church’s history during the era of the Seven Great Councils is far too embarrassing to ignore. But we do have further evidence. Among other sources, four names from our author bank—St. Athanasius, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Jerome, and St. Augustine—all hail from the mid-fourth to early fifth centuries. True, most religious behavior now took place under a Christian rather than a pagan ægis; there is no particular reason to think there was any more religious behavior than before. And yes, some men who would in past centuries have become statesmen and orators now became bishops or hermits, but they often did so after long careers precisely as statesmen or orators. And while hermits might—might—remain distant from society, in their desert caves or atop their pillars (this being the era of the Stylites, arguably the funniest variety of monasticism), bishops could barely keep out of public affairs even if they wished: the career of St. Gregory the Great exhibits this in spades. It was not poverty or otherworldliness or nonviolence that made the Church a bad civil aide to the Empire; it was, if anything, the emperors’ own determination that the Church should have the nature of a civil aide, distracting and consuming their energies on a project that was never likely to work, and never did work.
This Is the Way the West Roman Empire Ends
So, while Gothic raids didn’t help, they didn’t impact things as much as one would think. Un-integrated foederati did cause trouble; for instance, the Burgundians staged a rebellion in 435, roughly around Alsace and Baden. (Their defeat by Flavius Aëtius8 and an army of Hunnish mercenaries is thought to form the remote background to the Nibelungenlied.) But the Goths who eventually overran the West Roman Empire during the fifth century aspired to be Roman, maybe more than anything else. When the Vandals took over in North Africa, the Visigoths in Spain, and the Ostrogoths in Italy, it was more as something like mafiosi than invaders.
Even in 476, when Odovacer the Ostrogoth deposed the last West Roman Emperor,9 little changed in practice or even in theory. The state’s machinery remained intact and functional. In fact, not only Odovacer, but his successor (and conqueror) Theodoric, claimed to be mere agents of the Emperor Zeno out east in New Rome, and both prided themselves on the title of “patrician” which he granted them. There were signs of rust on the Roman edifice, certainly: an execution of Boëthius here, a founding of the Benedictine Order there; but one must expect that on a civilization thirteen centuries old. Rome disintegrated on paper while standing there in stone—or rather, it didn’t even disintegrate on paper.
So, hang on a minute. What’s this “nightfall on antiquity” business about, then? Just what did change?
1This was a strong move for a few reasons. Obviously it pleased Christians, who by now were a significant fraction of the Empire, especially in the east. In addition, the Diocletianic Persecution had not been popular: many pagans found Christianity ludicrous or vulgar, but few wanted to see their neighbors (who might be their relatives and friends) tortured or executed just for having silly opinions.
2Ecumenical comes from the Greek word οἰκουμένη [oikoumenē], “inhabited world.” In antiquity, “the Ecumene” was sometimes used as a moniker for the Mediterranean and its environs.
3Some administrative and ritual matters were discussed as well (e.g. a revision of the calendar).
4Like the Bishops of Rome, those of Alexandria enjoy the title Pope. At this time, the sees of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch were paramount: according to tradition, St. Peter founded the churches of Rome and Antioch, and his protégé St. Mark founded Alexandria’s.
5How rapidly paganism disappeared is unclear. Theodosius I passed laws against some pagan practices, but did not ban paganism as such; e.g., senator Q. Aurelius Symmachus, who outlived Theodosius, publicly championed the old gods. Pagan worship continued in private into the sixth century, if not later. (This should not be confused with the discredited witch-cult hypothesis.)
6This had a strange resolution: four years later, when West Roman-Visigothic relations had (to say the least) dramatically improved, Galla Placidia was married to Alaric’s successor, Ataulf.
7These are sometimes called “monophysite,” especially in older literature; “miaphysite” or “Oriental Orthodox” (not to be confused with Eastern Orthodoxy or the Church of the East) are more correct terms. Miaphysite Christians today live mainly in Armenia, Egypt, Ethiopia, and India.
8Pronounced (by most English speakers) flā-vē-ŭs ā-ē-shüs.
9This emperor’s name, ironically, was Romulus Augustus. (Made emperor at the age of ten, he was often called “Augustulus”; -ul- is a diminutive infix in Latin, like the English suffixes -y, -ette, or -ling.)
Gabriel Blanchard has a baccalaureate in Classics from the University of Maryland, College Park, and has worked for CLT since 2019. A proud uncle of seven nephews, he lives in Baltimore, MD.
If you enjoyed this piece, there’s plenty more to check out here at the Journal! Some earlier posts in the Texts in Context series include this one on the remote civilizations of the proto-Bronze Age, this one on the pre-Exilic history of the Hebrew people, and this one on classical Athens at the zenith of her glory; or, if you’re more interested in the authors of the texts we’re contextualizing, you might enjoy these introductions to Hippocrates, Averroës, Thomas Hobbes, Galileo Galilei, Frederick Douglass, and John Steinbeck.
Published on 15th October, 2024. Page image of the Moon during a total lunar eclipse, photographed by Sergei Mutovkin in May of 2022, used under a CC BY 2.0 license (source).
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