Review of Michael Kulikowski, Imperial Victory: The Roman World from Hadrian to Constantine (London: Profile Books, 2016) and Imperial Disaster: From Constantine’s Empire to the Destruction of Roman Italy (London: Profile Books, 2019)
When English historian Edward Gibbon composed his history of “the decrease and fall of the Roman Empire” in the late eighteenth century, he was utilizing the story of the decline of Christian Rome as a way to critique the Christian civilization of his own day. Gibbon’s prose lives on, but his timing was off. In spite of problems in North America, the British Empire in Gibbon’s day, far from decreasing and falling, was just going into onto a steady reach world supremacy.
Reading Roman history through the pages of the daily news is a time-honored custom in the West. At the peak of American power, throughout the George W. Bush years, Americans likewise took up the “Are we Rome?” worry rock and rubbed it hard, fretting about the inescapable decline of royal fortunes. “Every other empire in history has fallen,” many Americans stressed as soon as America had actually established itself as the only superpower. “Will ours, too?”
Now that the American colossus is likewise going the method of all worldly glory– now, in other words, that the last of the Western global empires is fading away after a more-than-five-century run– possibly we can finally see Rome for what it truly was. Not as coded message for the present, but as history, a product of its own time.
What was it, then, Rome and her imperial sway? Statism on steroids. The monuments and ruins one sees today while strolling around the Eternal City, and the statues, walls, baths, bridges, aqueducts, roads, and institutions one finds spread across the western third of Eurasia from the time of Rome’s rule, are spin-offs of a huge centralized federal government wedded to a political faith of divine rulership and heavenly favor. Rome was the state, and the state ruled its empire with an iron fist. The faith of divine right to rule cloaked dark sins on the ground. Political murders, palace intrigues, endless slaughter, the plundering of cities, the enslavement of whole populations, and daily ruthlessness to male and beast which would count for criminal depravity in our own time– this was Rome, down and filthy. Illiterate mobs whipped into killing frenzies by demagogues, generals literally stabbing emperors in the back, emperors chasing other emperors across oceans and landmasses seeking vengeance, all keyed to the tune of the state, the imaginary power which flows from and to the political center.
Strip away political theology from all empires and you discover violence. Rome, possibly more than the majority of empires, was political violence at heart.
Where to turn for a real picture of the Roman past? One of the very best current portraitists of Roman power is Michael Kulikowski, head of the Department of History at Penn State University and an expert in the history of late imperial Rome. In two favored books, Imperial Victory and Imperial Disaster (both of which were later released as paperbacks as a testament to their popularity), Kulikowski tells the familiar story of Rome increasing, judgment, and then breaking down. However like other clear-eyed trainees of ancient Roman realities, such as English historian Mary Beard, Japanese historian and essayist Shiono Nanami, and Stanford history professor Walter Scheidel, Kulikowski does not filter his narrative through a haze of apologetics. He informs it, instead, with academic dispassion leavened by wry humor and neatly brought along in fluid prose.
Above all, and maybe crucial for comprehending Rome today, when the temptation is to see Roman history as a mirror for our own time, Kulikowski turns down the use of Rome as example. His remit in Imperial Triumph and Imperial Tragedy is to portray Roman history not as prelude or lesson however as truth, a set of things that took place long ago. Kulikowski composes:
That the present world order is in crisis seems, as I write [ca. 2019], to have actually become a post of faith. At all such minutes, invocations of Rome’s decrease and fall are de rigueur, their vehemence in inverse percentage to their discernment. Professional historians can be forgiven the urge to contribute: an error. Historic example needs, by meaning, simplification at chances with historical understanding. History neither repeats nor rhymes, and the only thing it should teach us is that, constrained by custom, by psychology, and by our always defective memories, constrained most of all by circumstance not of our private making, people tend to make a mess of making their own fate. I hope I do justice to the mess and the muddle. (Imperial Catastrophe, viii)
For the a lot of part, Kulikowski keeps his guarantee throughout these 2 magnificent volumes and adheres to the sources, hypothesizing where those sources thin but constantly remaining, to my mind, within the bounds of historical professionalism. Imperial Accomplishment and Imperial Tragedy are a fine set of histories, particularly welcome at a time when Roman history qua Roman history– and not qua metaphor for the imperial present– is maybe hardest to inform.
Among the most welcome functions of both Imperial Victory and Imperial Tragedy is Kulikowski’s skill in clarifying the almost frustrating complexity of Roman politics. From the days of the late republic till the last gasps of the empire in the West, there were within Roman political consciousness layers and interconnections of political office, tradition, rank, opportunity, and nomenclature. All of the numerous consuls, proconsuls, Caesars, Augustuses, ordines, protectores, notarii, agentes, comeses, prefects, and magisterium militums (these barely come close to tiring the list) are intimidating to the reader some 2 thousand years eliminated from the context of those terms. But Kulikowski embeds them all within a clear governmental structure and clothes them in the cultural and spiritual truths of numerous times and places, helping the reader to understand who was doing what when and under what authority. If you took Roman history in high school or college and discovered yourself entirely lost, don’t misery. Imperial Victory and Imperial Tragedy are very thorough guides for the previously perplexed.
That said, there are times in both volumes when Kulikowski might have been a touch less thorough in recreating the political minutiae of ancient Rome. Kulikowski is absolutely nothing if not an historian faithful to his sources, and it is true that political complexity (which is plentiful in Roman history) sometimes requires substantial description. However, in more than a few passages, my mind went woolly trying to keep separate the string of emperors called Constantine I (r. 306– 07), Constantinus (Constantine II, r. 337– 40), Constantius II (r. 337– 61), Constans (r. 337– 50), and Constantius III (r. 421) (Imperial Tragedy, 317). And this wasn’t even the hardest part. Roman imperial history is laced with personal and place names varying from Celtic to Greek, Gothic to Persian. None of this is Kulikowski’s doing, naturally. Roman history would be a tangle even if no historian were around to inform it. But I got the sense that in attempting to condense a thousand years of political turmoil into about 620 pages or so throughout both volumes, Kulikowski was required to compromise a little bit of cultural context in the interest of keeping all the names and dates in place. There are lists of Roman emperors and Persian kings at the back of both volumes (the Romans were continuously battling with or scheming against the Persians, hence the requirement to list the Persians with the Romans). This is a big help, as are the splendid maps in each volume showing how Rome’s power ups and downs in time. However still, the going can be a little tough in places. “History is simply one damn thing after another,” the well-known stating goes. I aim mightily in a handful of pages not to give up and concur.
Although he composes with an extremely old-school sense of detachment and academic decorum, Kulikowski does sometimes mean the personal stakes of his scholarship in the uncommon sentence or 2 when he lets slip his mask of disinterest. It becomes clear reading through both Imperial Accomplishment and Imperial Disaster that Kulikowski is especially interested in complicating the gotten historical narrative about the “Huns.” For Kulikowski, the term “Hun” covers far a lot of bases and appears to have extremely bit, if any, historical meaning. “In the 4th century AD,” Kulikowski writes,
an older ethnic name comes back on the Eurasian steppe, that of the Huns. Linguistically, our word Hun returns to the name of the Xiongnu (often written Hsiung-nu), an extremely powerful nomadic empire that was the paradigmatic example of a steppe empire for the Chinese sources … China’s Han dynasty had actually ruined the Xiongnu empire in the first century BC, though a rump of the previous judgment elites made it through in the Altai region. In the 4th century, people styling themselves as Xiongnu began to make a reappearance. We find them described as Hunnoi (Latin and Greek, and their modern derivatives), or Chionitae (the Latin and Greek word for the central Asian subjects of the Persian empire), Huna (Sanskrit), and Xwn (Sogdian). These are probably all different ways of writing the exact same native word and that indigenous word is probably what the people called themselves. But does that mean that all these people were “truly” Xiongnu in some authentic existential sense? (Imperial Disaster, 75)
Kulikowski’s answer is that most likely the term “Hun” was applied to various peoples at different times, however that this evident sameness reflects more about the “academic tropes” that European scholars in the “early contemporary centuries” related to the “fall of Rome” and which those exact same scholars likewise “superimposed … on the world’s other cultures” at the time throughout which “Europe discovered and tried to dominate the rest of the world” (Imperial Tragedy, 76). Group identity “does not stay the exact same over generations even if [the group’s] name does,” Kulikowski argues (Imperial Catastrophe, 76). Kulikowski spends a handful of pages in both Imperial Triumph and Imperial Tragedy explicating his theories of the range of individuals who went under the catchall name of “Huns,” an extremely vital part of his interventions into Roman history overall. More intricacy to the story, yes, but this time in an extremely revealing method.
The Huns, whoever they were, were peripheral to Roman history, at least from the Roman viewpoint. However the lessons of identity which Kulikowski imparts can use, I think, just as well to the Roman center as to the wilds beyond her borderlands. If “Hun” was an objected to appellation, then so, too, was “Roman,” in many ways. Kulikowski’s historical narrative highlights the unlimited fight among over who got to be called “emperor” (or any of 2 lots other main titles), whether the plaintiffs came from the provinces or were born and raised in the shadow of the Seven Hills. Goths, Franks, Alans, Gauls, and a dozen other groups besides all wrangled for control of the royal equipment of state. All of them belonged to “Roman” history, of course. However as Rome broadened beyond the bounds of Italy and extended into Africa, the Levant, and the untamed British Isles, the meaning of “Roman” and of “Rome” took on possibly as numerous kaleidoscopic variations as “Hun” did.
My sense on reading Imperial Triumph and Imperial Catastrophe is that this contested Roman center, in turn, exposes the real history of Rome, the true lesson for our time. Roman political history was bloody and callous. Yes, but then again, states are ever so. The more the Roman center was fascinated and schemed over, the more the body count increased as individuals fought and killed to use the royal purple. What was Rome? It was violence, political violence as an arranging concept.
However here a distinct paradox enters into play, a minimum of in the western half of the Roman Empire. As Kulikowski shows, the more people fought over who got to be a Roman emperor, the more remote the real city of Rome as a political arranging concept became. With continuous battling in the provinces against invaders and breakaway kings, and among competing complaintants to the purple, “Roman” emperors grew increasingly aloof from Rome. Sometimes Rome is a backdrop to Kulikowski’s narrative, a trend which magnifies as we move deeper into the fifth and sixth centuries. The political center moved to Ravenna in northern Italy, for instance (specifically during the 440s under Placidia, Emperor Valentian III’s [r. 425– 55] child [Imperial Catastrophe, 207], and before that Diocletian (r. 284– 305) had constructed a palace in the extremely early 300s at Split, Dalmatia, in modern-day Croatia (Imperial Accomplishment, 217). The emperor Hadrian (r. 117– 38) had been fascinated by Greece and spent much of his time there, studying approach and participating in the Eleusinian Mysteries (Imperial Accomplishment, 19– 20). The much later emperor Justin I (r. 518– 27) was obliged by warfare to sojourn at length on campaign along the Danube and Rhine (Imperial Tragedy, 1– 4). By the latter third of the 5th century, as Kulikowski writes in Imperial Catastrophe, some emperors didn’t even check out Rome at all.
This steady disassociation of Rome the city from Rome the empire marked a pattern that, in the end, would produce the real end of the Roman royal duration. Kulikowski is excellent at demonstrating how, in time, the different regions of the empire got increasingly more autonomy and turned into political centers in their own right. Completion of Kulikowski’s tale is specifically apropos, for it is not so much an ending as a tracking off. Individuals stopped appreciating Rome, particularly in the western half of the progressively unmanageable empire that Constantine the Great (Constantine I, r. 306– 37) had split in 2 in the early 4th century. (In the east, or course, Constantinople, called for that emperor, lingered on till it was up to the Ottoman Empire in 1453.) Eventually, Kulikowski writes, “Gothic Gaul and Spain” became “not just Roman provinces under new management, but rather social worlds being changed by outdoors practices that would have been absolutely unfamiliar to the majority of the population. That was how the Latin Middle Ages began” (Imperial Tragedy, 273– 74).
The historic diptych Imperial Victory and Imperial Disaster is an abundant, scholarly, well-written retelling of the oft-told tale of the fluctuate of Rome. I recommend both books to anybody interested in Roman history or in history or politics in basic. Kulikowski does not dissatisfy– this is a splendid history of Rome. But as the reader ends up the last pages of the second volume, I question if he will not concur with me that looking back over the intrigues and political assassinations, the wars and palace coups that give Roman royal history its character, completion of that thousand-year experiment in statism was no catastrophe at all. The real tragedy of empire, possibly, is that the center is not worth fighting over in the first place which the more individuals do fight over it, the more meaningless it becomes.