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Lecture based on forthcoming book: Sam Moorhead and David Stuttard, AD 410 The Year that Shook Rome (British Museum Press, 2010)
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Why This Book?
• 1600th anniversary of sack of Rome by Alaric• Already c.200 theories about why the Roman
Empire fell• Since Gibbon barely anyone has told the story
of how it fell• Academic fixation on why has meant much of
the story has been overlooked or misunderstood
Barbarian Raids across Europe in the 260s AD
AD 276 – 376Barbarians in the Empire
• First barbarians settled in Gaul by the emperor Probus (276-282)
• Treaty with the Goths c. 340
• Soldiers, slaves and farm-hands
Happy Days Are Here Again!
• Roman soldier spearing falling barbarian
• AD 355-61
• Felicium Tempus Reparatio
But barbarians become Roman generals
Stilicho, generalissimo of the West during the reign of Honorius (395-408)
Half Vandal, half Roman
Enter Diocletian AD 284
Tetrarchs in Venice
Class fixing Piercebridge Ploughman
Rich getting richer
Hoxne Treasure, Suffolk
Enter Constantine and Christianity
The barbarian invasions 376-407
Across the Danube
Crisis at Hadrianople, 378
Division of Empire, AD 395
Order Restored?
Suppliant Goths under Theodosius’ family at Constantinople
Battle of the River Frigidus, AD 394
Eugenius
Theodosius I The Roman army; citizens and increasingly barbarians
Alaric unleashed - 395…
Ludwig Thiersch
Alaric moves West – 401-3
Honorius flees to Ravenna
Usurpers and barbarians in Gaul
Constantine III 407-11
Alaric besieges Rome 408
Fruitless negotiations
Priscus Attalus 409-10
St Apollinaire, Ravenna
Alaric sacks Rome 8/24Johan Winckelmann, etching, 1782
Kenneth Setton, 1962
Meanwhile in Ravenna…
John W. Waterhouse, 1883
How should we view the barbarians?
What did they want?
Esquiline Treasure, Rome (British Museum)
Who were they? Refugees?
Economic Migrants?
Controlling access
A threat to authority?
Clash with authority
Migrant Workers
Swelling the ranks
The old order of Rome
Symmachus, the Senate and Honorius
The old order in the West?
Does the world need new leaders to face these changes?
The Road to Africa
The fields of Dougga
Appian Way
Burial of Alaric, 410/11
Lithograph, 1895
Galla Placidia c.388-450
Wedding of Galla Placidia
Galla Placidia ‘sold back’ to Rome for 600,000 modii of grain
Roman Modius on a coin of Nerva, AD 96-8
Vandals take Africa, AD 439
The barbarian dream?
Aesop
‘I’d rather have one
grain of corn than all the
jewels in the world.’
What of Rome? Last emperor of the West, Romulus Augustulus, deposed in AD 476
Ostrogothic Rome, AD 49
Cannon: 14 feet; 15 tons; 500lb stone ball; Walls of Theodosius
Mehmet II; Hagia Sophia as a Mosque
What will the challenges of the next 100 years be?
• Environmental: water, sea-levels, temperature, desertification....food shortage
• Economic – shortage of scarce resources• Population increase• Migration, warfare and renegotiating the world order• The emergence of a new kind of leader able to cope in
a different world• How will archaeologists detect many of these changes
in coming millennia?