Gladiator fights were the phenomenon of their day – a celebration of courage, endurance, bravery, and violence against a backdrop of fame, fortune, and social scrutiny. Today, over 6 million people flock every year to admire the Colosseum, but what took place within those ancient walls has long been a matter of both scholarly debate and general interest.
The post 11 facts you may not have known about Roman gladiators appeared first on OUPblog.
What importance do the civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean have for us? This question has been answered in different ways over the centuries, but for a long time the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome have been attractive as a baseline and a model, be it in economic, aesthetic, cultural, military, or political terms.
The post The origins of political order appeared first on OUPblog.
The poet we call Martial, Marcus Valerius Martialis, lived by his wits in first-century Rome. Pounding the mean streets of the Empire's capital, he takes apart the pretensions, addictions, and cruelties of its inhabitants with perfect comic timing and killer punchlines.
The post Oxford World’s Classics Reading Group Season 4: Martial’s Epigrams appeared first on OUPblog.
By Peter Heather
The Roman Empire at its peak was the first great hemispherical power in human history. Over the years, though, this mighty society was torn apart by internal strife and attacks by rival powers. Below, the renowned historian Peter Heather describes the ten most critical turning points which led to the fall of the Empire and the beginning of the Dark Ages.
-
242 AD: The accession of the Persian King of Kings
http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/1-Shapur.jpg
The Sassanian Shapur I unites Iran and Iraq to create a Near Eastern superpower that inflicts colossal defeats on three different Roman Emperors. After sixty years of struggle, Rome restores stability on its eastern front, but at huge cost in terms of higher taxes to fund the necessary doubling of its armed forces, and the Persian threat is only parried not defeated. There is now little spare capacity left in the Roman imperial system should another major threat arise.
-
August 9, 378 AD: Emperor Valens and two-thirds of his elite field army are killed on one day at Adrianople
http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/2-Valens.jpg
The root cause is the rise of Hunnic power on the fringes of Europe which caused tens of thousands of Gothic refugees to arrive on the Danube late in 376. At war with Persia, Valens had no choice but to admit them, and, faced with underlying Roman hostility, they effectively reorganised themselves into the new, militarily powerful coalition which destroyed Valens and his army.
-
December 31, 406 AD: A huge mixed force of Alans, Vandals, and Sueves crosses the river Rhine into Gaul
http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/3-Vandals.jpg
Following hot on the heels of Radagaisus’ invasion of Italy the previous summer, this unprecedented breakdown of order on the western Empire’s frontiers is a sign that the epicentre of Hunnic operations is shifting decisively westwards and, in the process, remaking the balance of strategic power in central Europe against Rome’s interests.
-
August 24, 410 AD: The sack of Rome by the Visigoths
http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/4-Visigoths.jpg
At the head of the Visigoths - a new coalition built out of the Gothic refugees of 376 and the followers of Radagaisus – Alaric sacks the city of Rome. The Emperor Honorius is powerless to protect the old imperial capital and soon has to write to the British provinces to advise them to look to their own defence. Faced with both Visigoths and the Rhine invaders of 406, the imperial authorities start to abandon outlying territories to concentrate force where it is absolutely needed.
-
Summer 418 AD: A treaty gives Gallia Aquitania to the Visigoths
http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/5-Gallia-Aquitania.jpg
Fl. Constantius, eminence grise behind the throne of the western Emperor Honorius, is forced to cut the Visigoths a deal. They are settled permanently, with full imperial recognition, in southwestern Gaul. The western Empire no longer has sufficient military strength to defeat all the invaders now established on its soil, and wants to use the Goths, perceived as the lessor of two evils, to help defeat the Rhine invaders of 406 who have occupied most of Spain.
-
October 19, 439 AD: The Vandals take a Kingdom
http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/6-Vandal-Alan-Kingdom.jpg
Geiseric, king of a new Vandal-Alan coalition formed from the survivors of the Rhine invasion, ravaged by combined Gotho-Roman assault, leads them off their current Libyan reservation to take possession of Carthage and the richest provinces of the entire western Empire. This is a direct threat to the continued flow of vital tax revenues which keeps the Empire’s remaining armies in being.
-
Summer 441 AD: The Huns attack
http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/7-Huns.jpg
Attila and Bleda, new leaders of the Huns, attack cities of the East Roman Balkans. This causes Constantinople to withdraw its forces from a joint expeditionary force gathering in Sicily to restore Carthage and its surrounding Tunisian provinces to Roman control. As a direct result, the western Empire has to recognise Geiseric’s control of the richest parts of North Africa and accept the decline in its own military capacity which necessarily follows from this loss of revenue.
-
July 9, 455 AD: Avitus is declared western Emperor at the Council of the Gallic provinces in Arles
http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/8-Avitus.jpg
He wins recognition from the Roman Senate, and is the first legitimate western emperor to rely directly on the military power of recent immigrants – in this case the Visigoths – as a crucial building block of his regime. Rome’s military capacity has declined to such an extent that, from now on, at least some of the new barbarian powers established on west Roman soil will have to be included in the process of imperial regime creation.
-
Summer 468 AD: Rome’s final grab for Africa fails
http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/9-Cap-Bon.jpg
An East Roman expeditionary force led by the general Basiliscus is destroyed by Vandal fireships off the coast of North Africa. The last attempt to win back the riches of North Africa from Geiseric fails and the other barbarian powers established on Roman soil realise that the western imperial centre is nothing but a hollow sham. They therefore quickly grab all the territory that they can, often coming more into conflict with one another than the few remaining Roman armies.
-
September 4, 476 AD: Romulus Augustulus is deposed, ending the empire
http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/10-Augustulus.jpg
Odovacar, commander of the last Roman army of Italy, exploits discontent over pay arrears among his soldiers to depose the last western Emperor, Romulus Augustulus. He pays them off in land because so many provinces have now been lost that the surviving tax revenues are insufficient. He also persuades the Roman senate to send the western imperial vestments and diadem to Constantinople with a declaration that the west no longer needed – in fact could no longer support - an emperor of its own.
(Pictured: "Romulus Augustulus resigns the Crown," from Mary Yonge's "Young Folks' History of Rome.)
Peter Heather is Professor of Medieval History at King’s College London. He is the bestselling author of The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes and Imperial Pretenders, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe, and numerous other works on late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only classics and archaeology articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credits: 1. Coin with profile of Shapur. Permission via GNU license via Wikimedia Commons. 2. Statue of Valens. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. 3. “Vandals Plundering,” from Mary Charlotte Yonge’s Young Folks’ History of Rome. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. 4. “Sack of Rome by the Visigoths” by JM Sylvestre. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. 5. Map of Roman territories; Gallia Aquitania highlighted. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. 6. Map of the Vandal-Alan Kingdom. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. 7. “Attila, the Scourge of God,” by Ulipano Checa. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. 8. Coin with profile of Avitus. Permission via GNU license via Wikimedia Commons. 9. Cap Bon, site of the Roman defeat. Photo by Sergey Prokopenko. Creative Commons license via Wikimedia Commons. 10. “Romulus Augustulus resigns the Crown before Odoacer,” from Mary Charlotte Yonge’s Young Folks’ History of Rome. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
The post Ten moments that shook the Roman world, in pictures appeared first on OUPblog.
This Day in World History - Control of the Roman Empire was in the balance when the armies of Constantine and his brother-in-law Maxentius clashed near the Milvian Bridge, north of Rome. Despite having a smaller army, Constantine triumphed—a victory made secure when Maxentius drowned in the Tiber River while trying to escape. Constantine’s victory left him in command of the western half of the Roman Empire—but it also had more significant consequences.
Michelle Rafferty, Publicity Assistant
Recently Tim Parsons, Professor of African History at Washington University and author of Rule of Empires: Those Who Built Them, Those Who Endured Them, and Why They Always Fall, stopped by Oxford with his wife Ann. In the following podcast Ann asks Tim a few questions about his book and what empires past can tell us about the present.
Michelle Rafferty: Today we have a special treat here at Oxford. I’m here with Tim Parsons and his wife Ann Parsons, and Ann is actually going to interview Tim. Here we go.
Ann Parsons: Your specialty is African History. What motivated you to write a book about empires worldwide?
Tim Parsons: Well in the past as a social historian of Africa I’ve written books about common people, which means I write about how common people live their daily lives, and in this case, in studying East Africa, I’ve looked at how East Africans, average people, experienced empire. And one of the things that troubled me is in the last ten years we’ve heard a lot about how empires can be benevolent, civilizing, how they were forces for global order and security, and how then the way to solve the problem of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the global war on terror, was that the United States should impose an empire from above, and that this would be the way to restore order to the world. And as someone who has studied empire from the bottom up, that I see the true realities of empire, I knew from the start in 2003 that this was a very bad idea. One of the things that I felt I had to do was make this case, I had to actually talk about empires historically, to go back in time and to see if what I know about the British Empire in East Africa held true all the way back to the Roman Empire because that’s what many of the current proponents of empire now, cite.
Ann: So then what do these historical empires tell us about the present?
Tim: Well, first of all they us that it’s really a very bad idea to cite ancient civilizations as examples for modern American foreign policy. In others words, empires, if we go back 2,000 years to the Roman Empire, if we even go back to the 15th century Spanish Empire in the Americas, yes those empires did last a long time, but one of the reasons why they did is because things were very different back then. The communication was much slower, transportation was much slower, they were largely agrarian societies when literacy was not very widespread, and most identities, which means how people identified themselves, were local and confined to the village level. And in those times it was very easy to conquer many villages and then to impose rule from above. So that made these empires appear much more stable than they actually really were. And what you find out, if you at the history of empire over time, you see that the lifespan of empires gets shorter, and shorter, and shorter, to the point, as I argue in the book, that empires today don’t exist.
Critics on the left of American policy in the last maybe 50 years have branded the United States as a new empire, as the new Rome because they don’t like American foreign policy, because they don’t like the exertion of American force around the world. And that’s a problem I think, because by calling the United States an empire they are missing the true definition of empire. An empire is direct formal rule. They fail to recognize that it’s not the question of whether the United States is an empire or not, it’s that they should point out using empire as a model is a very bad idea because empir
