Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

by Tom Holland

Amid the evils of a debased age, they craved a touch of class. In the spring of 590, in the great basilica that Constantine had raised over the site of Saint Peter’s tomb, a man from the very heart of the Roman establishment was consecrated as pope. Gregory’s ancestors, so it was reported in awed tones by his admirers in Francia, had been senators. The claim, although an exaggeration, was understandable. The new pope did indeed have something of the vanished age of Roman greatness about him. He had inherited a palace on the Caelian hill, in the heart of the city, and various estates in Sicily; served as urban prefect, an office that reached back to the time of Romulus; lived for six years among the imperial elite in Constantinople. Gregory, though, had no illusions as to the scale of Rome’s decline. A city that at its peak had boasted over a million inhabitants now held barely twenty thousand. Weeds clutched at columns erected by Augustus; silt buried pediments built to honour Constantine. The vast expanse of palaces, and triumphal arches, and race-tracks, and amphitheatres, constructed over the centuries to serve as the centre of the world, now stretched abandoned, a wilderness of ruins. Even the Senate was no more.

Gregory the Great, Latin Father.