The Politics of Roman Memory: From the Fall of the Western Empire to the Age of Justinian

Marion Kruse. The Politics of Roman Memory: From the Fall of the Western Empire to the Age of Justinian. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.

Continuing where Fergus Millar's Greek Roman Empire ends in 476 CE, Marion Kruse employs the study of historical memory to examine how eastern Romans reconfigured their understanding of Roman history to account for the political realities of the 5th-6th centuries CE. Current academic narratives assume that by the 6th century the eastern Roman empire had become fully Christianized with an inextricably linked Roman-Christian identity. As Kruse observes, previous treatments have obscured major features of the period, namely the relevance of ancient Roman history and identity in eastern Rome after 476 CE, when Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus in Rome and effectively ended the western Roman empire. Kruse investigates two intertwined questions: What did being Roman mean after 476? And how did the notion that the Roman empire could fall shape political rhetoric in the east? Relying upon classical philology and literary analysis, Kruse blurs the boundaries between “Christian” and “pagan” historiography, arguing that concerns about Roman history were conceptualized according to traditions of ancient Roman and Greek historiography without reference to Christianity. Despite the assumption that the eastern empire was thoroughly Christian, Roman identity in the 5th-6th centuries was being informed by non-Christian historical memories.

In the opening chapter, Kruse juxtaposes the works of Zosimos’s New History and Hesychios of Miletos’s Roman and General History to examine the rising tensions in Constantinople after 491 with the death of Zeno and acclamation of Anastasius (r. 491-518). Although Zosimos has been treated as the first historian of Rome’s decline and fall, Kruse demonstrates that Zosimos provides no evidence of a definitive or irreversible decline. For Zosimos, Rome’s prominence fell after Constantine’s conversion and establishment of Constantinople, so Romans must reject Christianity and readopt their ancestral religion to rejuvenate Rome. Hesychios, however, reframes the founding of Byzantion and consequently Constantinople through Greek mythistory to parallel the Trojan origins of Rome. Hesychios’s narrative amplifies Constantinople’s glory in juxtaposition with Rome, rather than in competition like Zosimos’ narrative. Kruse expands upon this analysis in Chapter 2 by focusing on Ekphrasis on the Statues of the Zeuxippos Baths by Christodoros of Koptos. Like Zosimos and Hesychios, Christodoros is reckoning with Constantinople’s Romanness after 476 CE but does so through his treatment of the statues at the Zeuxippos Baths. To avoid importing the problems of a broken “Old Rome,” Kruse argues, Christodoros selectively addresses Trojan figures and uses archaic Greek names in order to reconfigure Trojano-Roman mythistory into Greco-Roman mythistory: the Trojan war represents not only the origins for Romans but also a victory for the Greeks and thus for Constantinople.

The next three chapters are thematically organized around the different aspects of Justinian’s formulation of Roman history during the 530s-540s in addition to contemporary responses. In the third chapter, Kruse examines the ways Justinian depicts himself as a restorer of the Republic by framing his conquests and reforms through the Republican context. As Kruse argues, Justinian was trying to capitalize on the positive historical memory of the Republic by inserting himself and his policies into it, an effort which ultimately failed because his critics refuted his claims and disrupted the development of that memory. As much as Justinian wanted to utilize the authority of the Republic, however, he seemed concerned about the tension between the authority of the consul and that of the emperor. Kruse addresses in the following chapter the consulship during Justinian’s reign, detailing how Justinian stripped the position’s prominence and function before absorbing it into the imperial role. Although Justinian’s rationale is never explicitly explained, Kruse observes, he did try to invent histories which minimize the influence of the consulship and thus justify the consular reforms. Nevertheless, his contemporary critics remained vocally unconvinced. In Chapter 5, Kruse considers Justinian’s treatment of “Old” and “New” Rome. Despite Justinian’s reliance upon the authority of the Roman Republic, he conveniently ignored Old Rome as an imperial hub, defining it solely as a prominent religious center. Likewise, Kruse shows, contemporary writers in Constantinople seemed to see themselves as Roman and independent from the Romans of the west, in sharp contrast to the sources discussed in the first two chapters.

Kruse concludes by tracing the development of historical narratives deployed by both the bishops of Rome and the emperors of Constantinople to support their positions on the ecclesiastical status of Constantinople after the Council of Chalcedon in 451 CE. Despite the combination of Christian and Roman identities attested in the correspondences of the period, Kruse argues, these identities remained separable concepts and could be marshalled independently to maintain the distinction between secular and divine spheres, a distinction upon which the Roman see based its primary legitimacy over the see of Constantinople. At the conclusion of the book, Kruse helpfully includes two appendices: a selected chronology of the 5th-6th centuries and the ordination of bishops of Rome and Constantinople.

The Politics of Roman Memory features a significant breadth of sources and incisive analysis. However, the use of the “pagan” and Christian binary invites further discussion. At the outset of the work, Kruse offers a brief explanation that “pagan” refers to the traditional polytheistic and henotheistic religions in the Mediterranean (p. 17, note 1). Explicitly stated in the introduction, the book argues “that there were a number of concerns, in particular questions of Roman history, which were conceptualized according to traditions of pagan historiography and discussed without reference to Christianity” (p. 5). Similarly, the conclusion notes that Justinian justifies his administrative reforms on the basis of “implicitly pagan” Roman traditions (p. 220). But one could argue that “pagan” obfuscates more than it illuminates; it is unclear if “pagan” is Kruse’s assessment of an individual (e.g., Zosimos) or an individual’s self-identification, or if “pagan” could even be treated as an organized category and not a set of geographically diverse practices.[1] Even so, the term seems irrelevant because this thesis does not match the argument woven throughout the book. The thesis assumes that “paganism” is central to the deployment of Roman historiography in defining Romanness. Only Chapter 1 could support such a thesis through Zosimos’s polemic against Christianity and Hesychios’s Herodotian mythistory. Instead, the book proves that despite scholarship’s assumptions to the contrary, writers in the 5th-6th centuries treated Romanness and Christianity as separable categories, and Romanness was often defined by one’s relationship to Roman history, not to Christian history (p. 217). Even if the stated thesis does not do it justice, the argument itself appears strong and convincing.

Akin to late antiquity scholars Peter Brown and Averil Cameron,[2] Kruse writes in an accessible but engaging narrative style that keeps the reader attentive to the dramatic events in the Roman empire during the 5th-6th centuries. Although many of the texts featured in The Politics of Roman Memory have been treated separately in prior scholarship, Kruse convincingly demonstrates that these sources partook in the same discourse and answer the same questions through similar strategies. Scholars interested in late antiquity, memory studies, and discourse analysis would be well-served to read this enthralling book.

[1] James B. Rives, “Graeco-Roman Religion in the Roman Empire: Old Assumptions and New Approaches,” Currents in Biblical Research 8, no. 2 (2010): 242–43.

[2] See, for example, Peter Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978); Averil Cameron, Byzantine Matters (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2014).

Caroline Crews is a Ph.D. candidate in Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on early Christian textual production and transmission, exploring how late antique texts were reshaped and preserved for competing purposes. She can be reached at c.e.crews@utexas.edu, and you can follow her on Twitter.