The end of the world as they knew it

A new inquest says Imperial Rome did not decline; its 400-year-old culture fell spectacularly. Sean Kingsley concurs

The decline and fall of the Roman Empire is perennially intriguing and refuses to leave historians in peace. From 1745 until his death in 1778, Giovanni Piranesi produced 2,000 black-and-white etchings of Roman forums, theatres and palaces across Italy. His theatrical attention to crumbling ruins covered in ivy imprinted an enduring image of lost Roman splendour on Western consciousness. Each sketch seems to tell the same story of abrupt abandonment, a sharp dagger thrust into the jugular of the greatest civilisation ever known to man. The explosive script to this film soon followed in the form of Edward Gibbon's epic, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , published in 1776-88.

Given the cornucopia of ancient stories, and an increasingly rich backdrop of physical evidence teased from the soil by archaeologists across the Mediterranean, one could be forgiven for assuming that the academic duel over when and how Rome fell would have been settled ages ago.

Not so. Generations of brilliant minds continue to lock horns over this heavyweight intellectual debate in Western culture. After a decade of research, Bryan Ward-Perkins of Trinity College, Oxford, has thrown his hat into the ring by turning back the clock of history writing to examine why modern man refuses to court notions of decline, and by adding his own fresh economic twist to the curtain call of the ancient world.

Ward-Perkins perceptively emphasises that one of the great "sins" of historical writing is that every generation rewrites the past on the basis of its own experiences and terms of reference. When the underbelly of Europe was especially tender after the defeat of the Nazis in the Second World War, the 5th-century Gothic and Vandal sack of Rome provoked venomous responses. With barbarian atrocities in his own occupied France so fresh in the memory, André Piganiol wrote in 1947 that "Roman civilisation did not pass peacefully away. It was assassinated." Similarly, during the social revolution of early 1960s Britain, the great Cambridge historian A.H.M. Jones clearly had class conflict in mind when he wrote about the "idle mouths" of the unproductive Church and the bloated Byzantine bureaucracy that made the later Roman Empire vulnerable to external attack. Today, following the Balkan and Gulf Wars, empire-building itself is frowned on politically in Europe, and historians prefer to speak of shifts and transformations that emphasise continuity rather than crashes with their overtones of doom.

Cultural changes aside, there is a deeper reason why our perception of the end of the Roman world is cyclical: the ambiguous nature of the written word. For every savage description of Gothic raiding parties and Vandals raping nuns, there are other texts exposing how the very same barbarians were peacefully accommodated by a changed but enduring empire. Defenders of continuity point to the presence of barbarians within the Roman army and the raiders' and conquerors' quick assimilation of Roman customs. In the early 6th century, the Roman statesman Cassiodorus was amused by the Ostrogoths' pride at being more Roman than their Germanic brethren. Into the 570s, the Franks retained circuses for chariot racing at Soissons and Paris. Like a Merchant-Ivory film that makes its characters more British than the British, the outsiders reinvented themselves as the epitome of romanitas , minting gold coins depicting the Ostrogothic King Theodoric in a Roman pose and alongside a Latin inscription.

This absorption makes complete sense. Like the waves of immigrant Albanians and Poles criss-crossing Europe today, the barbarians primarily sought a brave new world. When the Vandals crossed into North Africa in AD429, this 80,000-strong migration included children, the elderly and slaves, all seeking a new promised land. Unlike the Arabs pressuring the borders of the empire in the eastern Mediterranean, the Germanic invaders had a highly flexible cultural identity and no new ideological dogma to impose. But like unwanted guests at a vicarage tea party, as Ward-Perkins amusingly remarks, "they ignored the bread and butter and headed straight for the cake stand".

Unlike many eminent historians who have tackled the "decline of Rome" conundrum, Ward-Perkins is of a new breed who embrace archaeology. He also has little patience with modern European political correctness, preferring to replace it with the evidence from the ever-mounting volume of excavated data that is altering the old historical skeleton. His reading of the archaeology is certainly bold, identifying "a startling decline in Western standards of living during the 5th to 7th centuries... It was no mere transformation - it was decline on a scale that can reasonably be described 'the end of a civilisation'."

What is this new forensic evidence? Archaeology shows that from cuisine to literacy everything that followed the 1st to 3rd-century Roman extravaganza was a pale imitation. At its peak, the empire had forged a pan-Mediterranean global economy, with arterial roads and sea lanes greedily pumping the fruits of empire towards the imperial heart in the Eternal City. Rome's third hill, Monte Testaccio, is today literally a mountain of potsherds comprising the remains of a staggering 53 million amphorae that once contained 6 billion litres of oil guzzled by Rome's consumer society. "Think big" was a philosophy that united the empire, so at La Graufesenque in south-western France, for instance, giant kilns fired batches of 30,000 pots in a single go for a century after AD20. Nothing of comparable vision, scale or structure was seen in the post-Roman world until merchant vessels of the Dutch East India Company sailed over the horizon to the Indies in the early 17th century.

The material world of late antiquity was severely dented by Rome's fall: everything from ceramic roof tiles to coinage evaporated from daily life.

Population levels dwindled to perhaps half or a quarter of Roman levels, and the land became correspondingly less productive. Even the size of cows declined from an average height of 120cm in Roman times to 112cm in the early medieval period.

The cultural contraction affected literacy particularly starkly. In Roman times, graffiti plastered walls and artefacts from battlefields to cities.

During the civil war of 41BC, Octavian trapped Lucius Antonius and Fulvia (the brother of Marc Antony) within the city walls of Perugia. While waiting for the siege to break, Roman soldiers amused themselves by casting lead sling-bolts inscribed "Lucius Antonius the bald, and Fulvia, show us your arse". The same kind of casual lower-class graffiti is rife among Pompeii's 11,000 inscriptions, many of which were perpetrated by petty thieves and "late drinkers".

In the much simpler world that followed, Ward-Perkins argues, almost all writing was confined to formal documents listing laws, treatises, charters, tax registers or letters drafted between members of the ruling elites.

Literacy in the post-Roman West was in essence confined to the clergy.

Among 1,000 subscribers to charters in 8th-century Italy, only one third of witnesses could sign their own name, with the remainder simply issuing a mark. When one allows for the fact that 71 per cent of the signatories were clergy, it is clear that only 14 per cent of lay subscribers knew how to write their names.

Whether or not we agree with the author about the scale of Rome's cultural decapitation, there is no denying the contraction that ensued or that the mightiest civilisation known to man fell hard. Rome's legacy, from architecture to law, remains all around us, but is there a deeper moral to this tale? The author believes so. Just like today, economic complexity and mass production made the Roman Empire interdependent on a geographically broad web of specialists. When production and distribution networks were disrupted, consumers were very vulnerable.

The chaos of the first decade of the 5th century caused a sudden and dramatic fall in imperial tax revenues and, hence, in military spending and imperial capability to protect the empire's borders. The 600,000-strong army of the 4th century could no longer be retained, and the taxes that fed the volatile city poor of Rome were annexed by the barbarians. The nail in the coffin was the loss of North Africa's rich olive groves and wheat fields to the Vandals in AD429. The effect was as if Saddam Hussein had successfully seized the oil fields of both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in 1991.

Ward-Perkins thinks historians should be wary of eliminating all images of crisis and dramatic decline from their visions of past and present. "The end of the Roman West," he writes, "witnessed horrors and dislocations of a kind I hope never to have to live through... throwing the inhabitants of the West back to a standard of living typical of prehistoric times. Romans before the fall were as certain as we are today that their world would continue for ever substantially unchanged. They were wrong."

Such knowledgeable commentary is unlikely to send US President George W.

Bush scuttling into a nuclear bunker, but Ward-Perkins is right to remind us how civilisations can fall swiftly. Policymakers need to remember from time to time that human culture and civilisation have existed for a mere 35,000 years of Earth's 4.55 billion-year existence. We are just a blip in the history of the planet.

Sean Kingsley is managing editor of Minerva: The International Review of Ancient Art and Archaeology , and the author of four books on the post-Roman world.