Building Community in Late Antiquity

Abstract

Many chronicles of Late Antiquity, whether their authors recorded contemporary events or reflected on a recent past, are full of anguish. Ammianus Marcellinus mourns the death of Julian and the Battle of Adrianople, Zosimus decries the Empire's Christianization and crumbling institutions, John of Ephesus catalogues the horrors of the plague, Salvian finds the Huns more virtuous than his fellow citizens. It is no wonder that Edward Gibbon, Rome's first modern historian, named his account of the Roman Empire's last millennium The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire . Gibbon's frame so indelibly imprinted itself on the modern consciousness of this period that people seldom noticed its fundamental incoherence: A polity that takes 1000 years to “decline and fall” is doing neither. What weakened and collapsed, as Gibbon contemplated the years from the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180 CE to the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453, was less the Roman state than Gibbon's sense that the Empire could serve as any kind of model for his own political community. And to a certain extent all the accounts I mentioned above shared that same disconnection between the values …