Rome Is Burning

A History of Mankind (306)

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Rutilius Claudius Namatianus traveled along the Italian coast to his native Gaul in 416, as he left his position of Rome’s prefect to escape the imperial collapse. In “Of his return,” a long poem he wrote about the trip¹, he describes abandoned cities, ruined roads, wastelands, dotted with oases of prosperity like the port of Pisa, where he comes across locals celebrating a festival for the Egyptian god Osiris.

The world’s wealthiest region, once the imperial center, is crumbling, with estates along the Tiber mouth still displaying the effects of the Gothic sack half a decade before. A year after Namatius’ trip, Orosius wrote that there were still burnt-out buildings to see in Rome, although he hastily added that rather more fires were started by lightning (a sign of God’s displeasure) than by the Goths. The house of Sallust the historian was still half-ruined in the mid-6^th century, according to Procopius. And it was only in the 430s that Emperor Valentinian III paid for the replacement of a canopy structure over the altar of the Lateran basilica that had been taken by the barbarians.

In addition, the sack of Rome was not an isolated disaster. An empire that lacked troops to protect its ancient core and capital most certainly didn’t have them to protect regional hubs. When the British complained about the invading Saxons, all they received was a letter from Honorius, in 410, urging to defend themselves from their enemies.

The effects from all this destruction reverberated across the empire, as small towns and cities complained that trade networks had all but collapsed, driving the complex Roman economy into a profound depression. It’s hard to overstate the effect of these disasters on the daily lives of millions of Empire inhabitants, grown soft, civilized and accustomed to foreign produce and specialized jobs under the Pax Romana for generations, now suddenly facing a hard world of death, plunder, destruction and having to rely on home-grown supplies.

Joseph-Noel Silvestre’s “The Plunder of Rome,” a 19th century painting depicting the Gothic Sack of Rome in 410.

Like his fellow Gallic poet Namatianus, Paulinus of Pella kept a brave face, and sought to secure a future for himself in a safe corner of the waning empire, hanging on to hopes that Rome would rise from the ashes. A grandson of Symmachus’ friend Ausonius, he failed to keep hold of his extensive possessions in Gaul, stolen or ransacked by both Visigoths and Romans², and ended up in a small property in Marseille.

It was in Marseille that Paulinus wrote his autobiographical poem “Eucharisticos,” an expression of refuge on his Christian faith: after all, the emergent religion had a cleansing appeal, leading many to believe that a fresh start was possible for Rome, if only ancient pagan cultic practices, including sacrifices, festivals and divinations, were banned or replaced by wholesome Christian substitutes.

Roman opulence and vice had to be replaced by Christian countenance and discretion – and thus in Arles, Gaul, the surviving sarcophagus of Marcia Romania Celsa, wife of Januarinus, one of Constantine’s Christian consuls, was just as modest as many others that were purchased from Rome by less well-known persons; and, most definitely, nothing like the expensive masterpieces of marble carving that had been used by pagans just a century before.

Christianity itself, however, was too young a religion to have settled into an accepted set of doctrines, and remained divided by the Arian controversy and also by another, closely-related controversy over the nature of Christ. Nestorians, the followers of the Syrian theologian Nestorius (386–450) argued that Christ had a dual divine and human nature, opening up the door to his downgrading to mere prophet by another religion that would emerge from the East³.

Nestorius himself rose to archbishop of Constantinople in 428, in what many saw as a fatal mistake by Theodosius II⁴, but his downfall was just as swift, since he was expelled from the position by critics, already unnerved by his lawyerly formulation of Christ’s nature, when he refused to accept Mary as the mother of God at the 431 Council of Ephesus.

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FROM THE ARCHIVES:

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Sent to Upper Egypt, Nestorius’ influence remained strong among the Sasanian-sponsored Church of the East, to the point that it would eventually be widely known as the “Nestorian Church.” A similar position was supported by other Eastern splinter group: the followers of Docetism, who thought Christ to be a ghostly presence.

Maverick theologians abounded in the period: Jerome (347–420), translator of most of the Bible into Latin (the famous translation that became known as the Vulgate), later became infamous because he denied himself the luxury of baths, as an ascetic practice, and claimed that they were unnecessary because Jesus had “washed” him. His example would be used for centuries during which the absence of Roman-style baths made many religious people abstain from bathing, claiming virtue for following Jerome’s example.

Perhaps because of his extreme views and because he wanted to avoid the fate of his fellow ascetic Priscillian — a bishop of Avila in Hispania who was executed as a sorcerer in 385 — Jerome eventually fled Italy to the discussion-friendly East⁵. That way, he ended up clashing in Palestine with yet another group of Christian malcontents: the Pelagians, in many senses even more picturesque than Jerome. Following the theories of the British monk Pelagius (354–420), the Pelagians believed that original sin did not taint human nature and that mortal will is still capable of choosing good or evil without special divine aid.

In response to this pressure, the Roman elite sought to circle wagons around a consensus Christian ideology based around the Athanasius-Ambrose-Nazianzen ideological axis, and protected by the authority of the Roman state. This line of thought was very highly developed and fine-tuned by the Spanish lawyer Prudentius (348-413), a fair-weather Christian if there ever was one, who argued that pagans did not fully understand that their empire had come into being only, as discussed by others before, as a vessel for Christianity:

“Shall I tell you, Roman, what cause it was that so exalted your labors, what it was that nursed your glory to such a height of fame that it has put rein and bridle on the world? God, wishing to bring into partnership peoples of different speech and realms of discordant manners, determined that all the civilized world should be harnessed to one ruling power and bear gentle bonds in harmony under the yoke, so that love of their religion should hold men’s hearts in union; for no bond is made that is worthy of Christ unless unity of spirit leagues together the nations it associates. Only concord knows God; it alone worships the beneficent Father aright in peace. The untroubled harmony of human union wins his favor for the world; by division it drives Him away, with cruel warfare it makes Him wroth; it satisfies Him with the offering of peace and holds Him fast with quietness and brotherly love.”⁶

The point is somewhat convoluted, but has a satisfactory cyclical ring: for centuries, Christians had opposed and despised the pagan empire, to the point that they went to the trouble of forging “Sibylline” books expressing their authors’ hopes for its fall⁷. By the late 4^th century, Christians weren’t only the only hope for imperial survival, paganism being a completely spent and useless force, but – in a satisfactory turn of the screw – the Christians presented the empire as an unwitting Christian construction to start with.

The good Ambrose had been spared the pain of seeing Milan put under siege in 402 by the most prominent Christian Arian barbarians, the Goths. Prudentius, who had become his sidekick, went one step further. He represented the Empire as a welcoming woman, Roma, who announced in that it was no longer necessary to fear conquest by barbarians at all:

“Let those who din into my ears once more the story of past disasters and ancient sorrows observe that in your time I suffer such things no longer. No barbarian foe shatters my bars with his spear, nor with strange arms and dress and hair goes roving through my captured city, carrying off my young men to bondage across the Alps.”⁸

The above words were written in 403, seven years before the Gothic sack of Rome. Old customs had all but disappeared by then and Christian mobs persecuted pagans with various degrees of ferocity, a custom that became more widespread after 410 and would indeed be maintained for generations. In Alexandria, the pagan scholar Hypatia (350-415)⁹ was murdered after a confused riot that had more political than religious connotations but was still a reflection of an empire in tumult¹⁰; four decades later, a similar riot ended with the mangled corpse of bishop Proterius dragged through the streets.

A strong attachment to Christianism helped to live through these disruptions, for Namatianus, Paulinus of Pella and many others. Prudentius, for example, articulated the late Roman views of a diverse empire united by Christianism instead of the antiquated warrior virtues of the pagans – just at the very moment when the Goths were making headway in his native Spain, at the time perhaps the richest and most strategic of all regions in the Western Empire¹¹.

For many, in fact, the sack of Rome and the collapse of imperial power was a theological problem, not a political problem, and one to be addressed from that point of view. This line of thought was reflected in a timely book published in the 410s by Symmachus’ former protegé Augustine of Hippo (354-430), a rising star in the Christian Church. This book, called “City of God,” argued that Rome, the great city of men, may have fallen and burned to the ground, but the city of God will live forever.

1. Of which only fragments survive.

2. Paulinus’ family still remained prominent in Aquitaine, well after the Roman Empire was a memory there: the descendants of Paulinus’s brother survived at least into the late 6^th century. One of them, in the 560s, was Leontius, bishop of Bordeaux. As described by the Italian poet Venantius Fortunatus, Leontius was a man of an antiquarian bent who refurbished the villa at Preignac where Paulinus’s brother had lived 150 years before.

3. Some scholars point to the little-studied role of Warqah (or Waraqah) ibn Nawfal ibn Asad ibn Abd-al-Uzza ibn Qusayy Al-Qurashi, a Nestorian Christian Arab priest and the paternal first cousin of Khadija bint Khuwaylid, the first wife of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, who is revered in Islamic tradition for being one of the first hanifs to believe in the prophecy of Muhammad. Warqah presumably died in AD 610, shortly after Muhammad received his first Revelation. He had studied the Bible under Jews and Christians.

4. That is the position of, for example, W.H.C. Frend in Fage & Oliver, Op. Cit., p. 435: “He was headstrong and impulsive, garrulous and limited in his intellectual training, and he represented to an extreme degree the theological tradition opposed to that of Alexandria.”

5. In centuries to come, atheists would often present Christian theologians as bores, at best, or semi-literate fools at worst. However, like many early Christian theologians, Jerome fits perfectly within the long line of witty pagan moralists anchored by Lucian of Samosata. In several of his works, he satirically paints a portrait of a corrupt society that his pupils should avoid or even reform, and he used scholarly ways like criticism of Roman comedies featuring virgins chased by horny characters. Jerome was, in fact, among the first Christians to revive the topic of the “theatrus mundi,” the idea that the world is a stage. See “The moral education through laughing in St. Jerome: a case study about the reception of Terence’s Eunuchus, v. 251-252 in the Epistle 22,” by Marcello Peres Zanfra (Academia Letters, July 2021).

6. “Against Symmachus,“ 583-597.

7. See Arnaldo Momigliano’s “On Pagans, Jews, and Christians,” Wesleyan UP, 1987.

8. “Against Symmachus,” 690-695.

9. Hypatia’s father Theon, a mathematician, is known to have left behind some publications of moderate merit. The Suda, a 10th-century Byzantine encyclopaedia, lists three mathematical works for her, stating that all have been lost. Those are commentaries on the Conic Sections of Apollonius of Perga, the “Astronomical Table” and the Arithemica of Diophantus of Alexandria. Alan Cameron, however, argues in his essay “The Life, Work and Death of Hypatia” (OpenEdition Books, 2013) that she in fact edited the surviving text of Ptolemaeus’ “Handy Tables” normally attributed to her father Theon as well as a large part of the text of the Almagest her father used for his commentary. Only six of the thirteen books of Apollonius’ Conic Sections exist in Greek; some historians plausibly argue that the additional four books that exist in Arabic are from Hypatia. Hypatia, then, was like her father a textbook editor.

10. Alexandria, never a quiet place to begin with, was agitated because of a row between Orestes, the Roman governor, and Cyril of Alexandria, the city’s bishop. Orestes instigated the city’s sizable Jewish population to violence against the Christians. After a violent night-time slaughter of Christians at Jewish hands, Cyril struck back by securing the exile of many of Alexandria’s Jews, many of them wealthy patrons of the governor. Orestes tried to employ Hypatia to try to negotiate peace with Cyril. It’s worth mentioning that Hypatia was not an enemy of Christianity, but respected by the Christian intellectual circles of the day, and she maintained a correspondence with Bishop Synesius of Cyrene, with whom she discussed scientific theories; she also was well respected by the Church historian Socrates Scholasticus. The local Christian populace, however, was suspicious of her paganism and Orestes had proven untrustworthy in the past. Fearing another ambush was being planned, as had occurred at the hands of the Jews, they apprehended Hypatia and killed her. The historian Socrates, who was a contemporary of the events, stated that the cause of her death was political, that she was a “victim to the political jealousy which at the time prevailed”. At any rate, she was not killed for being a scientist, much less a woman. Other persons had been similarly killed in the same conflict for similar reasons who were neither scientists nor female.

11. Pagan thinkers, as rule, were less naïve and starry-eyed about the capacity of Christianism to turn Barbarians into productive, law-abiding Romans. The pagan Themistius wrote in 383 that the Goths of Thrace “are now converting the iron from their swords and cuirasses into mattocks and scythes.” Christians tended to see that glass half full: in 417, during a brief respite brought by a series of Roman victories, the theologian Orosius observed: “the barbarians [in Spain], having forsworn their swords, have turned to the plow, and now nurture the surviving Romans as allies and friends.” Cited in “Peregrini, Barbari, and Cives Romani: Concepts of Citizenship and the Legal Identity of Barbarians in the Later Roman Empire,” by Ralph W. Mathisen, The American Historical Review, Volume 111, Issue 4, October 2006, pp. 1011–1040. Modern commentators, rarely friendly to the Christians, have tended to side with the pagans. As W.V. Harris wrote in “Roman Power: A Thousand Years of Empire” (Cambridge UP, 2019): “Christian readers will not want to hear this, and the predominantly Christian historiography of modern times has obscured the fact... Meanwhile the upper order of society was widely infected with an other-worldly outlook, which though it did not amount to defeatism came perilously close to resignation... The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister . . . the sacred indolence of the monks was devoutly embraced by a servile and effeminate age.”