Rome: Decline and Fall Pt 1: Words
acoup.blog
acoup.blog
A key part of the cultural argument is about the change in art over the centuries. Of the sculptor of the Tetrarchs, the author says:
> The artist is not trying to represent the emperors photographically, but rather trying – and succeeding – at representing the ideal emperors, who fully embody the qualities an emperor should.
And:
> Often this transition is, I think, misunderstood by students whose knowledge of artwork essentially ‘skips’ Late Antiquity... and leads some to conclude that the fall of Rome made the artists ‘bad.’ There are two problems: the decline here isn’t in quality and moreover the change didn’t happen with the fall of the Roman Empire but quite a bit earlier.
How do we know that?
One interpretation of the Tetrarchs sculpture vis-a-vis the "verist" sculpture c. 60 BC is that the artist was trying to do something different. Another is that he was just less capable. The earlier artist could capture a realistic portrait of an individual; the later artist couldn't.
How do we know that the first interpretation is the right one?
The author's argument is that the later artist was still really skilful - as he puts it, "look at those folds!" Yeah, sure, he sculpts way better than I could! But that doesn't seem to prove that he is as skilful as the first artist.
And take the cover of the Lorsch Gospels: the misshapen fingers, the bulging eyes, the blank expressions -- this is crude, not stylized. You get the sense that art is devolving back to the "archaic smile".
With regard to these scultures, I am not aware of any such technological push.
I would expect the second and third part to answer your questions. And I’m pretty sure there will be some “these parts declined” components
Arguably the deurbanization both in India and Europe was to a large degree caused by climate change following the end of the Roman Warm Period.
And yes definitely there were trade networks. But they consisted of relatively few but high value goods. Most of which populations could do without. However there is the point that cities formed around goods that were traded. So I’m no longer as certain that there is no correlation
He doesn't claim that at all. In the intro he explicitly claims that there was such a decline and fall.
In the body of this first post of the series, he explores the areas where the case against his claim is strongest. That doesn't mean he's suddenly retracted his claims from the intro.
Name one scientific discovery that was known in Late Antiquity that was not known in the Medieval period.
This is easier to do for technology, but that shouldn't be misconstrued as part of a generalized collapse of civilization. A large part of technology requires passing knowledge from individual to individual via a kind of apprenticeship, so if something stops happening for a few generations, it's easy to be lost. To use a very recent examples: battleships. We can't make battleship-grade steel armor anymore, because no one's been making it for several decades. But that's not because we've somehow "regressed" in technology--it's just that battleship-grade steel armor has no use anymore, so we stopped making it.
The major decline associated with the Roman Empire is the decline in administrative capacity of the state. And yes, this does bring economic depression and deurbanization, and also loss of several civic engineering techniques. You don't see a decline in scientific knowledge--after all, medieval people were using the same textbooks the Romans were. Maybe there's a pause in development of new scientific knowledge, but it also has to be remembered that the Romans themselves weren't all that prolific in science (as compared to technology). As for technology, well, by the 600s, there's already new technologies kicking about that the Romans never had.
And that's why people push back against the kind of claims embodied by the dumb graph (https://goingmedievalblog.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/worst.... )--it's just not actually borne out by the evidence.
I mean that's not hard to do unless your point is that they were rediscovered in the later centuries of the Medieval period. Almost all of Aristotle, all of Ptolemy, all of Archimedes was unknown in the Christian West for centuries.
Aristotle is actually quite useless in medieval day to day life, so losing his texts is a big deal for a person studying ancient Greece, but not at all for a 650 AD ruler, blacksmith or trader.
Usefulness to daily life is a whole other different metric, and not what gp asked.
Even in the category of practical arts, though, you're mistaken. Check out the writings of Hero of Alexandria or Vitriuvius. Check out the waterwheels at Barbegal. Pick any major civil engineering project like the aqueducts, baths, roads, or arenas of ancient Rome. There is no equivalent until the cathedrals of the later middle ages.
As for arenas, they came out of fashion with the rise of the Christianity. You know, publicly feeding early Christians to lions didn't help popularize this type of entertainment.
Also, all this knowledge was very well alive in Constantinople, so any rich ruler who wanted to build a replica of Hagia Sofia could just hire someone from there. The only problem, there weren't any such rulers who had enough resources.
Regarding Barbegal waterwheels, what do you suggest checking? Waterwheels were abundant in all medieval Europe, this knowledge was never lost.
Isn't that exactly what the "dumb graph" you link to is showing? The y-axis is labelled scientific "advancement", not knowledge.
The author emphasizes people drifting apart and cultural fusions, the natural loss of arts and books due to the medium on which they were written. All of this happens after the fall of any civilization.
Same thing could be said about the Aztecs or any other civilization, their people drifted apart, there was a fusion between cultures and their arts and books were lost due to the medium used to create it (it wasn't fireproof).
The empire didn't fall to any single external force but that is the nature of an empire, unless its conquered by an even stronger empire it always falls from within.
From the article:
> As will readily be apparent, that significance of that division of topics will be important because this is one of those questions where what you see depends very much on where you look, with scholars engaging with different topics often coming to wildly divergent conclusions about the impact and experience of the fall of Rome. And there is no way to really discuss that divergence (and my own view of it) without diving into the still active debate and presenting the different scholarly views in a sort of duel. I’ll be providing my own judgements, of course, but I intend here to ‘steelman’ each argument, presenting it in what I view as its strongest form; as will some become evident, I think there is some truth to both of the two major current scholarly streams of thought here.
According to what evidence and causes?
Besides, what's this "great science" of the ancient world? Science did not become a sustained enterprise until much later in Europe. Even Greek natural science was a relatively short-lived affair, pretty much dying with Aristotle (Stanley Jaki used the word "stillborn" to describe all other attempts to give birth to science in all civilizations other than Christian Europe, the differentiating factor being theological). The Middle Ages were a period of intense intellectual activity (the Scholastics) in which the intellectual bedrock for modern science was birthed. The Renaissance was comparably weak in terms of intellectual rigor, the philosophes later on mere pamphleteers. And today, scientism and other weird ideologies threaten to undermine science and intellectualism in general.
We do not give the Middle Ages enough credit. The question isn't why it is a fashion to deny medieval decline, but why the fashion to deny the period's excellence.
I also did not realize that Alaric lived within the borders of the Western empire, as an independent king. I can see how that would be problematic.
Interesting, I never heard that before. Out of curiosity, did you learn about it in history class or somewhere else?
I mean... that's kind of true... if your definition of the years leading up to the collapse start around 50AD. Roman currency was constantly debased from Nero to Diocletian (by Diocletian, there was almost no silver in the coins at all). Diocletian reformed this, then it started again. About 200 years later the Western Empire fell.
It feels like a stretch, honestly.
Perhaps what might have happened without the parallel Germanic political order can be seen in the Italian city-states, although the history there is very specific so that's just what-if speculation.
Also, as people raise their standard of living and acquire citizenship, governing them becomes harder as well due to higher expectations.
Why did the Roman Empire collapse?
What's the Latin for office automation?
> In all of these, we will mostly be focused on the western empire (with some gestures at the East), but I’ll note here (and no doubt repeatedly subsequently) that this is because the empire didn’t fall in the East, at least not any time remotely around the fifth century. The continued existence of the Eastern Roman Empire is a free, massive point that the change-and-continuity argument gets to score at the beginning of these debates for free, every time.
Is it even possible to talk about the fall of the Western Roman Empire without someone interjecting that the Eastern Roman Empire didn't fall? Is it to be a permanent feature of the discussion, this shift in focus away from the actual topic of discussion? The next time someone talks about the continuity of the Eastern Roman Empire, I'm going to talk about the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Or maybe the fall of the Yuan Dynasty, just for variety.
No. It would be like discussing quantum mechanics without mentioning wave-particle duality--you're missing a key part of the story.
If you're legitimately interested in understanding why Late Antiquity played out the way it did, your hypotheses have to come up with a plausible explanation for why the trajectories of the Western and Eastern Roman Empire diverged as much as they did.
imo I've never been satisfied that the Eastern Roman Empire was sufficiently Roman to actually qualify. Everything I've read and consumed makes me think the Byzantines were as Romans as Romans were Greek, that is to say, they liked to think they were (and possibly claim they were for political reasons).
Byzantines spoke Greek, their architecture was not Roman, their military did not behave like Romans, they were Christian, they didn't eat Roman food; if you line up the Roman Republic, or even early Roman Empire, next to the Byzantines and asked an alien whether or not they were the same, they'd say no.
They definitely called themselves Romans, they loved to "re-conquer" their old empire in the West etc, but from my perspective there is little to tie the two together as "Roman".
Which also happened several times during the Late Republic, a full half millennium prior.
(In particular, a lot of the simplistic popular views of why the Western Empire fell run into this wall.)