Foreword to the English translation

doi:10.3366/edinburgh/9780748612390.002.0008

Front Matter

Foreword to the English translation

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https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9780748612390.002.0008

Pages

xiv–xv

Published:

September 2000

Extract

This book, aimed at the ‘educated general reader’, first appeared in France in 1995 as part of the wide-ranging series on ‘La vie quotidienne’ (‘Daily Life’) in history published by Hachette. The cornerstone of that series had been Jérôme Carcopino’s Rome a l‘apogée de l’Empire, a book which saw great success in English translation as Daily Life in Ancient Rome. My vision was to produce a sequel for the period of late antiquity – a presumptuous undertaking, no doubt, but a pinch of recklessness and immodesty is often necessary if we are to fulfil our ambitions.

Since the appearance of Carcopino’s famous book, a great deal of water has passed under Rome’s bridges. Much research has led to a reassessment of the later history of the Roman empire, and the abandonment of the idea of decline; for that very reason the word ‘apogee’ in Carcopino’s title is obsolete today. After all, belief in the idea of apogees is implicitly a belief in that of declines. Carcopino belonged to a generation who still thought of history, whether it was past or present, in those grand terms, and a regrettable outcome of this belief was his participation in the Vichy government, in the role of Minister of Public Education. His generation also thought the Roman empire had reached its apogee under the Flavians and Antonines, and had then sunk into long decline. Moreover, it included anti-clerical historians who, in the wake of Gibbon, saw Christianity as a major cause of that decline. This book is written as a rebuttal of that view of things and, following in the wake of many illuminating studies, offers a portrait of late antique Rome stripped of this hierarchy of ‘apogee’ and ‘decline‘, and of fallacious causalities. It was important to show that Rome never ‘fell’ from one world to another; rather, it remained profoundly itself, becoming very slowly transformed. The Christian Church fully took over the city’s historical and cultural heritage, was nurtured and formed by it. The determination of its bishops preserved for Rome its nature and design as caput mundi; in other words, in spite of undeniable changes, the chief characteristic of the city, between the fourth and sixth century, seems to me to have been continuity.

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