[Marxism] How Rome's endless "war on terror" ended up -- an ahistorical thought for today

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is an excerpt from a review in the latest London Review of Books, now
online. I include the concluding paragraphs, but the whole review is a very
fun read. My fascination with this kind of thing is one of the reasons why
Edward Gibbon is one of my all-time favorite writers.
Fred Feldman


http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n03/kuli01_.html
London Review of Books
Bed-Hopping and Coup-Plotting
Michael Kulikowski 
Attila the Hun: Barbarian Terror and the Fall of the Roman Empire by
Christopher Kelly. Bodley Head,  290 pp., £17.99, September 2008

[snip]
A year rarely goes by without a new version of the Attila story, whether
told in its own right or as part of the story of Rome?s fall. Given that all
the thorny historical problems were worked out decades ago, each new version
differs from the last mainly by way of emphasis, artistic colour, and the
author?s competence as a historian. Kelly?s well-told and reliable account
is the best to have come along in years, showing a judicious approach to
archaeological evidence that one could wish more widely imitated. Its
subtitle and some of its conclusions, however, stand rather too close to a
revenant ?it were the Huns wot done it? school of analysis: no Huns means no
Goths means no fall of the Roman Empire. 

The revival of this external catastrophist model, last popular immediately
after the Second World War, is no doubt a response to the rose-tinted,
EU-inspired interpretations of the 1990s, which at their height could
construe the fall of the empire as a Mediterranean break from which the
barbarian holidaymakers forgot to return. Yet I suspect that barbarian
hordes have come back into vogue because they are, in their way, a
comforting explanation. If only the aliens had been kept out, if only the
empire had had the sense to strike back in time, then Rome wouldn?t have
fallen. 



In a Western world that feels itself increasingly under assault from
mystifying outside forces, from multiculturalism where once there was
monoculture, and from Islamism where once there were colonies, the model of
barbarian invasion spares us having to contemplate a far queasier
proposition: the worrying capacity of an entire society to collapse, and a
whole culture to disappear, through stupidity, greed, indifference and the
weight of its own unsustainable contradictions.

That is precisely what happened to the Roman West. Its great magnates would
not countenance the rise of a new elite of petits fonctionnaires ? of the
sort that took over in the East, newly rich and deeply invested in the
empire?s success, if indifferent as a class to the fortunes of any
particular emperor. Unwilling to pay the taxes that might have sustained a
professional army, the West?s senatorial magnates forced the state to rely
on warbands with no connection to it save the general who employed them.
Small wonder that earlier generals had relied on barbarian recruits the way
Aetius relied on Hun mercenaries, or that his soldiers guaranteed his
authority rather better than his imperial rank did. Small wonder, too, that
every other would-be strongman in the West followed suit, and that the
officer?s uniform of the Pyrenean macaque replaced civilian finery as the
visible symbol of genuine power. The old civilian magnates of the West
discovered too late that their unwillingness to support the emperor?s
administration might cause the imperial structure that sustained their own
position to collapse. As the emperor and his supposed representatives grew
weaker, so local sources of power ? the warlords, the bandit chiefs, the
barbarian kings on Roman soil ? came to look more attractive and less alien.
It took only a couple of decades for a generation to realise, with genuine
surprise, that they had created a world that no longer needed an emperor. As
for Attila, he and his Huns were spume on the waves of the historic,
catastrophic implosion of ancient society. It was his inadvertent
achievement to have razed Aquileia to the ground, and create a world in
which Venice could be born. But the Western Roman Empire had already settled
on a method of destroying itself that would have been effective had Attila
never existed.

Michael Kulikowski is Riggsby Director of the Marco Institute for Medieval
and Renaissance Studies at the University of Tennessee. His books include
Late Roman Spain and Its Cities and Rome?s Gothic Wars.
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