SI - The End of Nations, Part 3

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Beyond the Obvious

The record shows that even transitions that are undeniably real in retrospect may not be acknowledged for decades or even centuries after they happen. Consider the fall of Rome. It was probably the most important historic development in the first millennium of the Christian era. Yet long after Rome's demise, the fiction that it survived was held out to public view, like Lenin's embalmed corpse. No one who depended upon the pretenses of officials for his understanding of the "news" would have learned that Rome had fallen until long after that information ceased to matter.

The reason was not merely the inadequacy of communications in the ancient world. The outcome would have been much the same had CNN miraculously been in business, running its videotape in September 476. That is when the last Roman emperor in the West, Romulus Augustulus, was captured in Ravenna and forcibly retired to a villa in Campania on a pension. Even if Wolfe Blitzer had been there with minicams recording the news in 476, it is unlikely that he or anyone else would have dared to characterize those events as marking the end of the Roman Empire. That, of course, is exactly what latter historians said happened.

CNN editors probably would not have approved a headline story saying "Rome fell this evening." The powers that be denied that Rome had fallen. Peddlers of "news" seldom are partisans of controversy in ways that would undermine their own profits. They may be partisan. They may even be outrageously so. But they seldom report conclusions that would convince subscribers to cancel their subscriptions and head for the hills. Which is why few would have reported the fall of Rome even if it had been technologically possible. Experts would have come forth to say that it was ridiculous to speak of Rome falling. To have said otherwise would have been bad for business and, perhaps, bad for the health of those doing the reporting. The powers in late fifth century Rome were barbarians, and they denied that Rome had fallen.

But it was not merely a case of authorities' saying, "Don't report this or we will kill you." Part of the problem was that Rome was already so degenerate by the later decades of the fifth century that its "fall" genuinely eluded the notice of most people who lived through it. In fact, it was a generation later before Count Marcellinus first suggested that "The Western Roman Empire perished with this Augustulus." 4 Many more decades passed, perhaps centuries, before there was a common acknowledgment that the Roman Empire in the West no longer existed. Certainly Charlemagne believed that he was a legitimate Roman emperor in the year 800.

The point is not that Charlemagne and all who thought in conventional terms about the Roman Empire after 476 were fools. To the contrary. The characterization of social developments is frequently ambiguous. When the power of predominant institutions is brought into the bargain to reinforce a convenient conclusion, even one based largely on pretense, only someone of strong character and strong opinions would dare contradict it. If you try to put yourself in the position of a Roman of the late fifth century, it is easy to imagine how tempting it would have been to conclude that nothing had changed. That certainly was the optimistic conclusion. To have thought otherwise might have been frightening. And why come to a frightening conclusion when a reassuring one was at hand?

After all, a case could have been made that business would continue as usual. It had in the past. The Roman army, and particularly the frontier garrisons, had been barbarized for centuries. By the third century, it had become regular practice for the army to proclaim a new emperor. By the fourth century, even officers were Germanized and frequently illiterate. There had been many violent overthrows of emperors before Romulus Augustulus was removed from the throne. His departure might have seemed no different to his contemporaries than many other upheavals in a chaotic time. And he was sent packing with a pension. The very fact that he received a pension, even for a brief period before he was murdered, was a reassurance that the system survived. To an optimist, Odoacer, who deposed Romulus Augustulus, reunified rather than destroyed the empire. A son of Attila's sidekick Edecon, Odoacer was a clever man. He did not proclaim himself emperor. Instead, he convened the Senate and!
 prevailed upon its toosuggestible members that they offer the emperorship and thus sovereignty over the whole empire to Zeno, the Eastern emperor in faraway Byzantium. Odoacer was merely to be Zeno's patricius to govern Italy.

As Will Durant wrote in The Story of Civilization, these changes did not appear to be the "fall of Rome" but merely "negligible shifts on the surface of the national scene." When Rome fell, Odoacer said that Rome endured. He, along with almost everyone else, was keen to pretend that nothing had changed. They knew that "the glory that was Rome" was far better than the barbarism that was taking its place. Even the barbarians thought so. As C. W Previte-Orton wrote in The Shorter Cambridge Medieval History, the end of the fifth century, when "the Emperors had been replaced by barbaric German kings," was a time of "persistent make-believe."