The Inheritance of Rome Quotes

“he sacked Rome in 410, an event which shocked the Roman world much as 11 September 2001 shocked the United States, a huge, upsetting, symbolic blow to its self-confidence; but it was without other repercussions,”
― Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000

“To survive, Byzantine society and politics folded itself around the state.”
― Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000

“Theoderic ruled Italy from Ravenna, the western Roman capital, with a traditional Roman administration, a mixture of senatorial leaders from the city of Rome and career bureaucrats; he was (as Odovacer had also been) respectful of the Roman senate,”
― Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000

“By around 480, as he put it, ‘now that the old degrees of official rank are swept away . . . the only token of nobility will henceforth be a knowledge of letters’; the official hierarchy had gone, only traditional Roman culture survived.”
― Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000

“The gods were gone, but imperial status remained unchanged –divinus remained a technical term meaning ‘imperial’. The emperor’s position was all the more central in that the Roman empire was regarded as, by definition, always victorious, a belief that survived even the disasters of the fifth century.”
― Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000

“Roman envoys to Attila’s court in 449 greatly offended the Huns when they said that, although Attila was a man, Theodosius II was a god; this was a self-evident statement in Roman eyes, even though the envoys were doubtless overwhelmingly Christian.”
― Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000

“Augustine, as bishop of Hippo, appointed his monk Antoninus in the 410s to be bishop of a subordinate diocese at Fussala, one of Africa’s relatively few villages, in the hills of what is now eastern Algeria. Antoninus turned out to be a bad man - he was young and from a poor family, he was promoted too fast - and he terrorized his village, extorting money, clothing, produce and building materials. He was also accused of sexual assault. Augustine removed him, but did not depose him, and tried to transfer him to the nearby estate of Thogonoetum. Here, the tenants told Augustine and their landowner that they would leave if he came.”
― Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000

“Archaeological and material evidence is at least free from the constraints of narrative. Archaeologists have indeed sometimes been dismissive of written sources (this was a trend of the 1980s in particular), which only preserve attitudes of literate and thus restricted élites, whereas archaeological excavations and surveys uncover real life, often of the peasantry, who are badly served by texts.”
― Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000

“Legislation presents a similar problem. It might seem obvious that a law does not describe how people behave (think of the laws about speeding), but early medievalists have had to face an entrenched historiography which presumes exactly this. Modern history-writing came out of a legal-history tradition, and well into the twentieth century people wrote social history, in particular, under the assumption that if a law enacted something, the population at large followed it. If, however, this is not true in contemporary society, with all the coercive power available to the legal system, how much less could we think it was true in the early Middle Ages, when states were weaker (often very weak indeed), and the populace even knowing what legislation a ruler had enacted was unlikely in most places.”
― Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000

“(Admittedly, sometimes they were right, as in the gothic events of Christmas 896, when the corpse of Pope Formosus (891–6) was dug up by his enemy and successor Stephen VI and put on trial; but that horrified the Romans, too–Stephen did not survive another year. Normally, Roman violence to losers had its own stately logic.)”
― Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000