ALEXANDER’S DREAM REBORN

The only truly sane monarch in antiquity was Alexander, the wild child, who came to within an inch of creating a world in which we now most wish we could live, one marked by community and not by conflict of cul¬tures. His only really rational successors were Mehmet the Conqueror and Genghis Khan. All were unquestionably destroyers, and all wrought terrible suffering in the world, but all three knew in their bones something that few others have seen or said and no others have been able to bring to reality. Can we dream their dream a bit?

We should be able to see their truth more clearly, with the hindsight of many centuries of recorded history and the accurate topography of modern cartography, and indeed, their truth is a simple one. The great fault line that runs across the landmass of the Old World, separating north and west from south and east, and occurring again in the geography of empires and wars of every generation since the rise of the Persian empire, has the ability to bring humankind to its ruin. In our own time, it has the potential to set loose unspeakable terrors.

Four human agglomerations

The fault line of geography has remained a fault line of peoples. Four human agglomerations divide the Eurasian landmass among them, while sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas stand dangerously outside the stories of those families. Americans—thought dangerous by many because of our self-satisfied exceptionalism—speak to the Europeans as to siblings or cousins, and Africans of the Sahara and the south are marginalized by all, their skin color a frivolous pretext for exclusion. Europeans, west Asians, south Asians, and east Asians compete over the right to define the main story of our species.9

The separate world of east Asia has mainly stood outside the Eurasian psychodrama and may well yet prevail over all its rivals. The two other boundaries of peoples, defining the two directions in which west Asians must look, have been killing fields and chasms of misunderstanding. The United States chose to go to war in 2001-2003 in both those regions.

Alexander had his chance.10 He was too young, too provincial (Macedonian, not Athenian or Corinthian), too libidinous, too fond of drink, too daring—too extreme in every way. Or at least that’s how we explain his ambition and his failure. And he conquered the Persian empire, only to die, deep inside Persian lands, too suddenly and too soon. His generals succeeded beyond what should have been their own wildest dreams in consolidating a remarkable amount of his power, and the Ptolemies of Egypt and the Seleucids of Asia succeeded in establishing Alexandrian kingdoms in lands that had never before thought of owing homage to the Greeks.

Powerful figures as Cassian

Eastern monasticism grew and flourished, and its ascetics probably numbered in the tens of thousands, some even in double monasteries, communities with men and women living separately in the same house. In the west, even with such intellectually powerful figures as Cassian and eventually Gregory, monasticism long remained in small houses, scattered and finding their respective authority in different ways. In Ireland, abbots were bishops and monks ruled the church, but elsewhere, some houses stood alone and rose and fell in a generation or two, while wealth and patronage began to build more powerful houses near royal courts and cathedrals.

Generations after Justinian

Despite all the quarreling of monks, in the generations after Justinian, particularly, but not only, in the western provinces, something important faded from view: heresy. For Justinian’s great effort to bring the whole world into doctrinal alignment with himself not only failed; it failed catastrophically and permanently. Egypt and Syria settled into their versions of monophysitism; Constantinople clung to its increasingly nuanced and impenetrable version of Chalcedonian orthodoxy; the western churches gradually tumbled together under something like the authority of the bishop of Rome—an authority that would sometimes be contested, but rarely on doctrinal grounds. The history of the development of the core doctrines of Christianity henceforth comes to an end, and what will occur in the future are occasional revivals and repetitions of old arguments. Christians in the west during the ninth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries fought over free will and predestination. Westerners could never agree on these questions, though they held little interest at any period for the eastern churches. Now and again, communities would need to act out their hostilities, as when the Greek and Latin churches, long adrift and estranged, found it necessary in the eleventh century—just when harmony would have begun to be valuable—to declare their enmity with mutual excommunications not lifted for 900 years.

A COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

Some men survived in ravaged Italy and even came to prosper again. Three of the senate’s dignitaries from the days of Theoderic lived past their ninetieth birthday and remained atop the greased pole of public life—or rather, leaped from one greased pole to another, deftly and just in time. Least known to us of the three is Cethegus, sole consul of the year 504, master of the offices not long after, and patrician from 512 until his death almost half a century later in 558.

Ennodius praised him in writing as a younger contemporary in his little work on the best way to educate young gentlemen; and Cassiodorus addressed a puzzling document to him consisting partly of family boasting, partly of social climbing, and partly of a biographical index of a few famous contemporaries. Cethegus persisted and persisted in Italy, holding out until 547 or so, after the fall of Rome to Totila in 546. He was by now caput senatus (“head of the senate” by dignity and seniority). He fled Rome before it fell because he was suspected of pro-Gothic sympathies, as many of the veterans of Theoderic’s time would be suspected. When he came to Constantinople, he was regularly seen around and with Pope Vigilius, supporting doctrinal rapprochement and a more vigorous prosecution of the war at home. He seems to have stayed in Constantinople until the last dog had been hung back in Italy and the war finally ended, but we glimpse him one last time at home, now in Sicily, receiving a letter from Pope Pelagius I in about 558.

Liberius, the patrician who had been praetorian prefect in Italy before Theoderic, then served him and his successors in that role in Gaul for a quarter century, appeared in Italy in 535; there, Theodahad put him in a delegation sent to Constantinople to make peace. The sources we have credit him as the one voice who spoke up in Constantinople to report the murder of Amalasuntha, the deed that more than any other gave a pretext for Justinian’s invasion. Liberius was unable, as a result, to return to any Italy not ruled from Constantinople, and so stayed on in the east, where his long experience won him appointment at an advanced age (he must have been well over seventy by then) as Augustal prefect in Alexandria, effectively Justinian’s representative to and governor over Egyptian society.

Sent from Constantinople

In Egypt, Liberius was the grand avenging inquisitor, sent from Constantinople to bring a restive province to civil and ecclesiastical heel. He did as well as could be expected—which is to say, he left no lasting result. Justinian soon turned on him and sent out a replacement without bothering to recall Liberius. Remarkably, Liberius prevailed in an unfair fight, sending his would-be supplanter home in disgrace. Officially recalled shortly thereafter, Liberius still succeeded in defending himself before a court of inquiry on his return to Constantinople in the early 540s. There we must imagine him as part of the circle of western adventurers that also included Cassiodorus and Cethegus, eyes wide open for the main chance.

Even then, his career was not over. When Justinian prepared to send his nephew Germanus west to complete the war in Italy, Liberius was variously the stand-in and deputy as preparations dragged on, eventually going on in command ahead of Germanus, who then died before he could undertake the campaign. Justinian is said to have had second thoughts about the elderly general, but too late to stop his last success. He arrived at Syracuse to find the city under siege by Totila’s forces. Undismayed, he forced his way through the barbarian lines, sailed into the harbor, and got his entire force into the city customized tours balkan.

Armenian named Artabanes

While this was going on, Liberius’s appointed successor, an erratic Armenian named Artabanes, was trying to catch up with him to relieve him of command. But Artabanes encountered a terrific storm off the coast of Calabria and wound up, temporarily, on Malta. Liberius, meanwhile, was in the beleaguered Syracuse. Procopius reports that he found himself unable to carry out successful military actions while constricted by Totila’s siege forces, and that this military impotence made his troops an unwelcome burden on the limited supplies of the besieged city; so he once more embarked his troops and slipped out of Syracuse for a better encampment at Palermo—all this, while Totila was plundering Sicily at will.

Artabanes finally caught up with Liberius in Palermo in 551 and relieved him of command. One story has Liberius going on a last mission to command Justinian’s forces in Spain, but we find his tombstone in northern Italy, near Rimini, with a fine inscription in eight elegiac couplets, suggesting either that he retired to Italy directly from Sicily or that he made his way back into Italy after the “Pragmatic Sanction” to live in the shadow of the new regime from Constantinople. He was about ninety when he died. There is a hint that a descendant was still wealthy and well connected as late as the 590s.

Separate reckoning flourished in imperial offices

Meanwhile, a separate reckoning flourished in imperial offices, the so- called indiction, which is effectively the name for a tax year on a fifteen- year cycle. Hence men would speak of the “first indiction” or “the twelfth indiction” and the first would follow again the year after the fifteenth. This system had begun under the reforming emperor Diocletian in 297 and had run for almost fifteen full cycles when our story begins. The practice reminds us that for many purposes, even something so inefficient was serviceable. Periods longer than fifteen years didn’t come to mind very often, not as requiring exact dating, but the tax man came every year and defined economic reality for many. People did not much talk about how old they were until their relatives needed to write their age on the tombstone—and often not even then. The people in this story lived in the bright light of the present, with far less sense of an accurately accounted history—short or long—than even poorly educated moderns have.

Rome in 500: Looking Backward

Rome didn’t see many emperors in the fifth century. Nero’s death let fall a diadem, and in the year 69 CE, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and finally Vespasian grasped at it. Tacitus drily observed that the success of such provincial generals revealed the “secret of empire”—that emperors could be created somewhere other than at Rome. From Augustus to Nero, Rome had been the only obvious dwelling for an imperator, and Tiberius’s self-exile to Capri brought scorn and salacious gossip about what he was up to while swimming with slave boys. After 69, emperors spent more and more time with their armies and on the frontiers. Hadrian in the early second century and the Severan emperors around 200 were away almost as much as they were home. The succession of disasters during the third century had kept emperors far from the capital, fighting each other and managing the frontiers. After Diocletian imposed his military order, he and his successors established a string of imperial cities that followed the frontier: Trier to survey the Rhine; Milan, Aquileia, and Sirmium (modern Sremska Mitrovica on the Save River in Serbia) to watch the Danube without abandoning the Rhine; Constantinople between the Balkans and the eastern provinces; and Antioch in Syria.

Rome was a nice place to visit, but a military backwater. Even many successful emperors never saw it during their reigns. Constantinople, on the other hand, was a palace town, almost constantly aware of the presence of an emperor after Theodosius’s death in 395. The military cities in the west lost their prestige when in 402 the emperor Honorius retreated to the swamp-protected Italian city of Ravenna, with its Adriatic port offering ready sea communication to Constantinople. He and his brother Arcadius in Constantinople stood at the head of a long line of emperors who were mostly figureheads, dwelling in the capital and delegating military leadership to the able.

Through all this, Rome’s emperors cosseted and cared for the city when they had time enough to pay it attention, but dramatic losses befell the city as well. The senate still met, traditional offices were filled, and the old families clung to wealth and position, but their numbers were greatly diminished. By the sixth century, there may have been only a very few dozen active senators, linked together in fewer than a dozen families. The pedigrees by which these people claimed “ancient nobility” were often sketchy as well, for Constantine’s revolution and the army he built two centuries earlier produced many rough-bred military husbands willing to marry into distinguished but impoverished families grateful for the protection and sometimes ill-gotten wealth of their new sons.1 As long as these old families were certain of their prerogatives, they were content to surrender their power to the new men. The city needed the subsidies rich families could provide and clung as well to its ancient self-esteem, but power was another matter stoletov bulgaria tours.

And Rome’s numbers dwindled. The city achieved a population of 1 million or so in the second century, but an estimate by Richard Krautheimer, a scholar who knew that late antique city as no other, brought it down to 800,000 by 400, when Constantinople and Ravenna eclipsed Rome’s real function as a capital. Rome lost half of that in the next fifty years, marked by Alaric’s brief sack of the city in 410, and it lost another half or three- quarters by the late 400s, when the Vandal raid of 455 was only the worst of a half century of indignities. There may have been only 100,000 or so people left by 500. The fortunate followed power to other capitals, while others died, failed to reproduce, or fled to the countryside.