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 | | The End of the Past: Ancient Rome and the Modern West (Revealing Antiquity) by Aldo Schiavone, Margery J. Schneider (Translator) ISBN-10: 9780674000629 ISBN-10: 0-674-00062-5 ISBN-13: 9780674000629 ISBN-13: 978-0-674-00062-9 Hardcover 2000-04-28 Harvard University Press Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description This searching interpretation of past and present addresses fundamental questions about the fall of the Roman Empire. Why did ancient culture, once so strong and rich, come to an end? Was it destroyed by weaknesses inherent in its nature? Or were mistakes made that could have been avoided--was there a point at which Greco-Roman society took a wrong turn? And in what ways is modern society different? Western history is split into two discontinuous eras, Aldo Schiavone tells us: the ancient world was fundamentally different from the modern one. He locates the essential difference in a series of economic factors: a slave-based economy, relative lack of mechanization and technology, the dominance of agriculture over urban industry. Also crucial are aspects of the ancient mentality: disdain for manual work, a preference for transcending (rather than transforming) nature, a basic belief in the permanence of limits. Schiavone's lively and provocative examination of the ancient world, "the eternal theater of history and power," offers a stimulating opportunity to view modern society in light of the experience of antiquity. | ||
Reviews | ||
Perhaps the Most Impressive Analysis of Rome's Fall Historians analyzing the fall of Rome tend to fall into two camps -- the gradualists and the catastrophists. The former see the so-called "fall of Rome" as the gradual and continuous transformation of the Western Empire into various dark-age kingdoms, without any clear break marking that transformation. The latter see the fall as a signal event, marking the rapid collapse of a way of life and the substitution of a radically different one. Schiavone is clearly in the catastrophist camp, but with a difference. Unlike most catastrophists who bewail the wreckage of a magnificent human creation, Schiavone sees the collapse of the Western Empire as a good thing. He claims that Rome's fall cleared away a stagnant and regressive system and made room for a more dynamic and progressive Europe. If the Western Empire had really been continuous with its successor entities, like the Eastern Empire was, it would suffered the sort of zombieque half-life the Balkans endured for ten centuries. I wish I could remember the citation, but I can remember being struck by a historian who claimed that while approximately 600 inventions during the Roman Empire would be considered "patentable" under modern law, about 1,000 such inventions were produced in Europe in the 10th century alone. Schiavone suggests that once the trauma of the Barbarian invasions and the depopulation of the Western provinces had run its course, life spans were longer, people were healthier and better-fed, and a basis was being laid for exconomic and social expansion. Most of Schiavone's attention, however, is devoted to an analysis of the reasons why the Roman system was not viable. The predatory nature of imperial economics, the anti-technological and anti-merchantile nature of the economy, the fragility of an urban society lacking urban technology, and above all the moral and economic drag of a slave-based economy isnured that once Romes's foreign conquests ceased, the empire was subsisting on (and slowly devouring) its looted capital. This sort of society, Schiavone suggests, could not endure indefinitely, and if Rome had not dissolved in the fifth century, it would have in the sixth or seventh. Or, if it had not be subjected to significant foreign pressure, it would have shriveled up and faded away before it was finally destroyed, like the Byzantine Empire. Shiavone brings a large number of important ideas to bear on the "fall of Rome" debate. He is one of those who believes Rome's fall to have been inevitable, that its fall was inherent in the very nature of the imperial Roman state, and that the Roman Empire contributed far less to the modern world than its ostensible legacy would suggest. He almost goes so far as to say that the greatest favor Rome did to the future was to collapse so thoroughly that it made the type of civilization it had built impossible (and undesireable) to recreate. The detritus of the empire's fall permanently blocked a road to nowhere. There is so much suggestive thinking in this short book that it deserves to be set beside Gibbon and Bury. While the notion that the economic basis of the empire was the cause of its collapse is not new, the idea that this collapse was both beneficial and necessary is. No one interested in the end of the Western Empire should overlook this book. | ||
Helpful though needlessly academic Although I'm not a classicist by specialization, I have taught a one-semester college survey course in ancient Rome for twenty-six years. Schiavone, whose self described "difficult Italian" has been translated for this volume, has provided me with a number of significant insights that I hope to use in future lectures--notably ideas from Chapter 9, "Slaves, Nature, Machines." Nevertheless, the book is too long by about half and filled with academic name dropping. The author spends overmuch time trying to convince his readers that he has a thorough command of his sources in all languages. He does. But that's what footnotes are for. Furthermore, dragging in moderns like Marx, Hegel, and Weber does little to advance his argument--although it may have encouraged Harvard to accept this book for its list. Even more strained is Schiavone's argument that at the end of the Republic there was a window of opportunity for Rome to have abandoned its slave-based economy and to have moved towards a more modern notion of productivity. | ||
Decline and Fall, ...and Rise I read this work on the decline of the Roman Empire in association with Hardt and Negri's Empire (!), and this cast these two(quite different!) books in an ironic light. This account of the dynamics of Roman decline begins at the high point of the second century A.D. when the Roman system seems to reach a peak, as reflected in the Oration of Aristides, "To Rome", with its celebration of the Roman achievement. More than imperial complacency, the oration points to a pinnacle of achievement on the scale of a universal history, in a mood not totally dissimilar to the 'end of history' concept of today. Behind this mood of a victorious civilization lies a system starting to reveal its actual state of frozen development, unable to proceed in a linear direction beyond its premises, a civilization deprived of it future, with the outcome of its dissolution almost prerequisite to future advance. The author cogently assesses the economic factors in the context of the slave system, the 'blind alley between economics and politics'. As the book ends with a short essay on the resolution to this impasse in the displacement and recursion of modernism, with its economic breakthrough and basic liberties essential to that, we are left nonetheless with a sense of what might happen again, a civilization reaching the limit of its basic premises, unable to advance. Well worth reading. If "Empire" is your cup of tea, read this work alongside of that. | ||
a labor Blinded by footnote barrages at times I am sure to have missed some of the fine arguments presented. However, this book is golden despite the scope of an almost intractable undertaking. The author discusses in the most detail the ways of the Roman economy and its labor supply (slave), in order to argue that when conditions of the Roman world were no longer sufficient to maintain the empire the "greatest catastrophe ever experienced in the history of civilization" was experienced due to the very nature of these systems. The result is a dense opus of effort and erudition that re-evaluates the Romans, Roman historians, and the differences between the Romanity and modernity. | ||