Who Were the Romans?

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What happens when the greatest empire in the world pulls out and leaves you to your fate? Who fills the power vacuum? Who keeps law and order? How does civilisation survive? Faced with invasion by a coalition of Picts and Saxons, the Roman citizens of Britain appeal to the Emperor for help; but Honorius is in no position to aid them. Rome has just been sacked, the Goths are ravaging Italy and the western half of his empire, where Britain lies, has been supporting a pretender.

Honorius drafts them a reply telling them that they must 'look to their own defences'. With these words, Rome's official ties with Britain are lost. With the withdrawal of imperial authority, Roman Britain did not magically cease to exist. In fact, the emperor had lost control several years before. Britain had long been a bolt-hole for pretenders to the imperial purple, and in times of crisis it had a history of seceding from the empire and looking after its own affairs. In the wake of this failure, the citizens of Britain seem to have thrown out Constantine's officials and turned to the emperor for help - but he rejected them.

The traditional story, told by both Saxon and British sources, is of a superbus tyrannus named Vortigern which means 'High Chief' in Celtic , at the head of a council of British leaders.


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These leaders settled a group of Saxon mercenaries, led by Hengist and Horsa, in Kent, to protect their lands against Pictish raiders. The mercenaries then mutinied, and took over the lands they were supposed to protect.

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The language used indicates that some semblance of Roman administration had survived into sub-Roman times and was falling back on the old late Roman practice of hiring barbarian mercenaries. When this happened is not clear. This blood and thunder depiction of the coming of the Saxons could be a construct of our sources, which rely heavily on the oral tradition of Celtic and Saxon battle poems. Only one source, Gildas, was writing within a hundred years of the events described, and even he was trying to prove his own agenda, that the kings of Briton had lost their land to the Saxons through debauchery and godless living.

It is as if we were trying to tell the story of the creation of Ireland with only Dr Paisley and Irish Republican folk-songs to rely on. While the lords of the land fought for control, what was happening on a local level to the ordinary inhabitant of sub-Roman Britain? The archaeological record seems to tell a more peaceful tale. There is no indication of wholesale burning or murder with the coming of the Saxons. At certain rural sites, such as West Stow and Mucking, the evidence suggests that the Saxon settlers were allocated marginal land next to an existing Romano-British settlement.

Who was in control here, the Romano-Britons or the Saxons? There is no doubt that urban life declined in the decades following the withdrawal of Rome. This was because the cities had lost their central function as centres for taxation and administration, but it had been happening long before Honorius put pen to paper. In the latter part of the fourth century, the urban aristocracy had been moving out of the towns, trying to avoid their civic responsibilities and no longer spending money on maintaining public buildings. Imperial coinage had stopped being sent to the province some time during the s, and without it the towns had lost their main raison d'etre.

The work is notable for its erratic but exhaustively documented notes and research. Numerous tracts were published criticising his work. In response, Gibbon defended his work with the publication of, A Vindication Gibbon's comments on the Quran and Muhammad reflected his view of the secular origin of the text. He outlined in chapter 33 the widespread tale of the Seven Sleepers , [15] and remarked "This popular tale, which Mahomet might learn when he drove his camels to the fairs of Syria, is introduced, as a divine revelation, into the Quran.

A special revelation dispensed him from the laws which he had imposed on his nation: Gibbon described the Jews as " a race of fanatics, whose dire and credulous superstition seemed to render them the implacable enemies not only of the Roman government, but also of humankind ". Because of his view Gibbon has been charged with antisemitism. Gibbon challenged Church history by estimating far smaller numbers of Christian martyrs than had been traditionally accepted.

The Church's version of its early history had rarely been questioned before. Gibbon, however, knew that modern Church writings were secondary sources , and he shunned them in favor of primary sources. Volume I was originally published in sections, as was common for large works at the time. The first two were well received and widely praised. Gibbon thought that Christianity had hastened the Fall, but also ameliorated the results:. As the happiness of a future life is the great object of religion, we may hear without surprise or scandal that the introduction, or at least the abuse of Christianity, had some influence on the decline and fall of the Roman empire.

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: Faith, zeal, curiosity, and more earthly passions of malice and ambition, kindled the flame of theological discord; the church, and even the state, were distracted by religious factions, whose conflicts were sometimes bloody and always implacable; the attention of the emperors was diverted from camps to synods; the Roman world was oppressed by a new species of tyranny; and the persecuted sects became the secret enemies of their country.

Yet party-spirit, however pernicious or absurd, is a principle of union as well as of dissension. The bishops, from eighteen hundred pulpits, inculcated the duty of passive obedience to a lawful and orthodox sovereign; their frequent assemblies and perpetual correspondence maintained the communion of distant churches; and the benevolent temper of the Gospel was strengthened, though confirmed, by the spiritual alliance of the Catholics.

The sacred indolence of the monks was devoutly embraced by a servile and effeminate age; but if superstition had not afforded a decent retreat, the same vices would have tempted the unworthy Romans to desert, from baser motives, the standard of the republic. Religious precepts are easily obeyed which indulge and sanctify the natural inclinations of their votaries; but the pure and genuine influence of Christianity may be traced in its beneficial, though imperfect, effects on the barbarian proselytes of the North.

If the decline of the Roman empire was hastened by the conversion of Constantine, his victorious religion broke the violence of the fall, and mollified the ferocious temper of the conquerors chap. Voltaire was deemed to have influenced Gibbon's claim that Christianity was a contributor to the fall of the Roman Empire. As one pro-Christian commenter put it in As Christianity advances, disasters befall the [Roman] empire—arts, science, literature, decay—barbarism and all its revolting concomitants are made to seem the consequences of its decisive triumph—and the unwary reader is conducted, with matchless dexterity, to the desired conclusion—the abominable Manicheism of Candide , and, in fact, of all the productions of Voltaire's historic school—viz.

The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosophers as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.

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He has been criticized for his portrayal of Paganism as tolerant and Christianity as intolerant. Drake challenges an understanding of religious persecution in ancient Rome , which he considers to be the "conceptual scheme" that was used by historians to deal with the topic for the last years, and whose most eminent representative is Gibbon.

With such deft strokes, Gibbon enters into a conspiracy with his readers: So doing, Gibbon skirts a serious problem: Gibbon covered this embarrassing hole in his argument with an elegant demur.

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Rather than deny the obvious, he adroitly masked the question by transforming his Roman magistrates into models of Enlightenment rulers—reluctant persecutors, too sophisticated to be themselves religious zealots. Others such as John Julius Norwich , despite their admiration for his furthering of historical methodology, consider Gibbon's hostile views on the Byzantine Empire flawed and blame him somewhat for the lack of interest shown in the subject throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Gibbon's initial plan was to write a history " of the decline and fall of the city of Rome ", and only later expanded his scope to the whole Roman Empire:.

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If I prosecute this History , I shall not be unmindful of the decline and fall of the city of Rome; an interesting object, to which my plan was originally confined. Although he published other books, Gibbon devoted much of his life to this one work — His autobiography Memoirs of My Life and Writings is devoted largely to his reflections on how the book virtually became his life.

He compared the publication of each succeeding volume to a newborn child. Gibbon continued to revise and change his work even after publication. The complexities of the problem are addressed in Womersley's introduction and appendices to his complete edition. Many writers have used variations on the series title including using "Rise and Fall" in place of "Decline and Fall" , especially when dealing with large nations or empires.

Piers Brendon notes that Gibbon's work, "became the essential guide for Britons anxious to plot their own imperial trajectory. They found the key to understanding the British Empire in the ruins of Rome. In , an established journal of classical scholarship, Classics Ireland , published punk musician's Iggy Pop 's reflections on the applicability of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to the modern world in a short article, Caesar Lives , vol.

Of course, why shouldn't it be? We are all Roman children, for better or worse I learn much about the way our society really works, because the system-origins — military, religious, political, colonial, agricultural, financial — are all there to be scrutinised in their infancy. I have gained perspective.