sehepunkte 24 (2024), Nr. 10

Timo Stickler / Umberto Roberto (Hgg.): Das Weströmische Reich und seine Erforschung

The collected volume, whether based on conference proceedings or otherwise, is an increasingly dominant part of the publishing landscape in ancient and medieval studies, not least because funding for scholarly collaboration is so frequently contingent upon publication. Quantity and quality, alas, tend to stand in inverse proportion to one another. The demand for continuous publication forces established scholars to work minor changes on their favourite themes again and again. More junior scholars are, by contrast, encouraged to publish too early and can often find their work lost in volumes wherein the mass of material is comprised of familiar names making arguments that will already be familiar to any potential readership. To say this is to indict the neoliberal competitive model of academic advancement, and the conveyor belt productivity encouraged by the academic-publishing industrial complex - it is very much not to single out the volume under review. Yet it does, unsurprisingly, suffer from the flaws of the regnant scholarly ecosystem. To be sure, we are all complicit, and senior scholars perhaps more than most, in the perpetuation of that ecosystem, one in which 'neue Perspektiven' are expected to appear with the speed of today's twenty-four-hour news cycle rather than at the well considered pace traditionally appropriate to serious scholarly projects.

By way of example we may take two distinguished contributions from the present volume: anyone interested in the fifth-century West will have encountered the differing views of Mischa Meier and editor Timo Stickler on the nature of the Hunnic 'empire' and the specific historical role of Attila in its terminal phase. And here they are again, each drawing out at slightly greater length one aspect of their existing views. This serves to confirm what we know, which is to say that both accept that the balance of Attila's strategy changed dramatically between confrontation and accommodation with the empire, but they place the key turning point some four to five years apart. Fine articles both, they cannot really be said to offer new perspectives. Much the same goes for half or more of the contributions here. Even when authors aren't repeating their own previous arguments, the generally impoverished source base for the period makes novel arguments elusive. Henning Börm's piece on the last western 'shadow emperors' points out that many third-century emperors were just as unsuccessful, and that we know just as little about most of them as we do in 450-470, but we don't think of Tacitus or Probus as shadow emperors because their empire eventually recovered. He also notes that the failures of Avitus, Majorian, Anthemius, and Glycerius seem all to have turned on one unlucky battle. Both observations are true as far as they go, but do not alter the familiar, barely visible narrative of their reigns: we simply lack the evidence to compellingly evaluate motives, incentives, even merest cause and effect. These last emperors are not so much shadows as shades. Likewise, Jeroen Wijnendaele sets out to document that a military chain of command survived into the last thirty years of empire - as it must indisputably have done, to be sure - but rehearsing the careers of the magistri militum, and the even fewer comites, whom we know well enough to discuss proves nothing about the junior officers and subalterns who are, at very best, mere names to us. Neither article is bad, quite the contrary, but neither advances us much beyond Bury or Stein, still less Demandt's exhaustive RE Supplement article, 'Magister Militum', because there's not much room for advancing in the absence of dramatic new evidence. (And it is worth remembering that, as the Vienna Dexippus palimpsest has shown, the most dramatic find in a couple of generations still only alters our understanding around the edges.)

I single out the foregoing four pieces for comment because they are all very good without being new. The volume, though less so than many such collections, has a couple of pieces in which 'new' becomes a synonym for 'imaginary'. Hendrik A. Wagner's piece on Alaric and the sack of Rome is correct to point out the somewhat contradictory chronologies found in our evidence, and also correct that for almost two years before August 410, Rome was de facto in Alaric's power, if not strictly under his control. That said, the novelty of Wagner's piece lies in a detailed exposition of the career of Sarus, including his role in the fall of Stilicho and Eucherius, which is not only undocumented in the extant evidence, but actually rejects without justification important parts of the story that are documented, for instance Stilicho's seeking asylum in church. Carla Sfameni's piece, about remaining pagan after the age of Theodosius, does not inspire confidence when it invokes the baroque fantasies of Stéphane Ratti in the same breath as the reasoned arguments of Alan Cameron. While Sfameni does not explicitly embrace such discredited theories as there having been a 'party of Symmachus', or a pagan resistance, her cursory survey of archaeological evidence in Rome and Athens tacitly accepts their premisses. It would have been far better to acknowledge that strong lingering attachments to traditional festivals, images, and forms of celebration are perfectly compatible with a lack of strong belief, as many an atheist Anglican or Catholic will today happily attest, and that just such lingering attachments explain the archaeological evidence just as well as does any theory about actively pagan partisanship.

On the other hand, the volume also contains several contributions that are very much worth anyone's time. Lucrezia Spera's survey of the evidence for the reinvestment of the emperors in the city of Rome in the fifth century is an excellent introduction to recent research; its extensive documentation can signpost and orientate further exploration of the recent literature. Readers interested in the intricacies of papal and imperial correspondence will want to consult Philippe Blaudeau's helpful account of the dossier of imperial letters associated with the aftermath of Chalcedon in the Rome of Leo I. Laura Mecella looks at the prosopography of officialdom in 425/426, when the forces of the eastern empire installed Valentinian III on the western throne. While there is only so much she can do with the limited evidence, and despite her appeal to notions of philo- and anti-barbarian parties among the senatorial aristocracy (a notion that has long since been discarded outside of Italian academia), she makes a strong case for a deliberate eastern effort to sideline Galla Placidia during the crucial moments of the regime's inception.

Roland Steinacher's article on the politics, ethnic and otherwise, of late antique Africa deploys familiar evidence, but manages to be a short, effective introduction to the Mauri in their various social configurations during imperial, Vandal, and Byzantine periods. More significantly, it represents a rare attempt to take seriously the imperative to treat the ethno-political frontier dynamics of North Africa with the same seriousness, and as having the same importance, as do the 'Germanic' frontiers of western and central Europe. If anything, Steinacher's treatment could have gone even further on the comparative front: what we can see of the activities of Nubel and his sons, simultaneously insiders and outsiders to the imperial system, offers a surprisingly exact analogue to what we can see among the Alamanni of the fourth century. Similarly, the situation he describes in the period following the death of Geiseric - during which he posits a 'Moorish alternative' to Vandal rule, along the lines of Herwig Wolfram's useful formulation of a 'Hunnic alternative' to Roman rule - could stand comparison to the pullulating dynamics of the eastern Alpine and northern Balkan frontiers of the Ostrogothic world, out of which new formations of Bavarians, Slavs, and others would arise.

Finally, Udo Hartmann's wonderful piece on Damascius' Vita Isidori is genuinely eye-opening. It's a close reading of a nowadays rarely remembered story in which Attila fights a sanguinary battle before the gates of Rome against Valentinian III in which, when the battle among the living has ended, the ghosts of the dead warriors carry on fighting, audibly and visibly, for three days and nights. Hartmann carefully compares the story to those of other phantasmic warriors, establishes its independence from Latin accounts of Attila's campaigns, and sets it in its Alexandrian and Neoplatonic context. He also provides a fascinating study in reception history from Photius and Tzetzes down to nineteenth-century paintings and Lieder.

It is good when a volume like this, of which dozens are published each year, boasts so many papers of real quality regardless of their novelty - the ratio of good to bad here is better than the average. Yet the best pieces here would surely find a larger audience and make a greater impact had they been saved for publication in a front-rank peer-reviewed journal. Here, they serve to underscore the nature of collective volumes as a genre - a genre with which we are seemingly stuck, whether we like it or not.