Dr. David Gwynn

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906 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard 21 Dec

Dr. David Gwynn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Ancients · The Fall of Rome: Origins · 4 May 2025 podcast

In the story of the fall of the Roman Empire, what's arguably the key factor is that after Julian, there's actually around 100 years of stability on that frontier. One of the oddities about the whole story of the fall of the Western Empire, the Roman Empire has three great frontiers, the Rhine, the Danube and Persia. Well, the East has to cover two of them to the West's one.

Technically, the East is facing worse enemies than the West is. But crucially, if you can keep the Persian frontier stable, then all you have to do is watch the Danube and the defenses of Constantinople will prevent anyone breaking the Danube and pushing further east.

So perhaps one of the great questions of the survival of the eastern half is how did they manage to keep stability on the Persian frontier? And the key factor that seems to have been at play is the Persians, of course. It's another big empire. That means this isn't their only frontier. Internal troubles as well, civil war factions. Exactly. The Persians have their own problems.

There is a tendency, particularly for historians like me, to mainly just look at the Persians when they're facing the Romans, not think about the Persians as their own entity. But the Persians have two major problems. One is a very powerful local aristocracy, which means a weak shah, a weak ruler, is vulnerable to immediate usurpation.

But the other is that the Persians have a very long northern frontier. And that's on the Russian steppe. That's where the nomads come from. It's the white Huns, isn't it?

Exactly. So whereas the Romans only get the Huns, the Persians are fighting nomads their entire history. And every powerful nomad group hits the Persians before they hit the Romans. So critically, in the 5th century, when the Roman Empire is having so much trouble on the Rhine and Danube,

The 5th century is the most peaceful period in the entire history of Roman-Persian relations, and it's quite clear it's because the Persians are much more worried about the Kidderite Huns, the Hephalites, sometimes known as the White Huns. My personal favorite is a peace treaty that was signed in the year 464.

What that peace treaty said was the Persians asked the Eastern Roman Empire to pay for a Persian fortress manned by Persian soldiers on the Caspian Sea. So this is a fortress deep inside Persian territory. Why should the Romans pay? Because, as the Persians said, we're stopping the nomads.

Exactly. And this is the great advantage. Two great empires can talk to each other. And in the 5th century, they were actually aware that there were greater risks at stake. And so you get this. It's one of the greatest examples of high state imperial relations. But this is why it stayed quiet. If it had gone wrong, the Eastern Empire would have been in horrible trouble.

And that, of course, is exactly what happens under Justinian and even more in the early 7th century. This is a very dangerous frontier.

To a degree it does. It's always one of those qualifying arguments. Constantinople, as it becomes more important, is going to draw further eastern resources The peace treaty after Julian's disaster handed over key fortresses to the Persians that destabilized the entire Roman frontier network.

So the emperor Valens, when the Goths first came to the Danube in 376, there's a reason Valens isn't anywhere near. He's in Antioch. He's looking at the Persian frontier. That's where he had to be focusing. So there is that significant shift. But the Rhine and the Danube frontiers for most of the fourth century seem to be broadly stable. So Julian wins this battle at Strasbourg.

That's for destabilizing the Rhine. Constantine is successful against the Goths. There's ongoing occasional conflict, but there's also peace treaties with the Goths in the 360s. So the Rhine and the Danube aren't heavily fortified, but in a sense, how can they be? These are huge rivers. The Roman frontier structures are about as stable as they're likely to be. The division between east and west,

they are still one empire and they think of themselves as one empire. So East and West don't usually work against each other. They try and cooperate, not always well. In a sense, I suppose what's my recurring theme is the weaknesses are emphatically there. And the way they'll play out in the fifth century is going to expose the West. But the Roman Empire was not about to collapse in, say, 370.

Its structures are still intact. It's basic east-west balance. The east is the stronger of the two halves, but not by such a clear-cut margin that you can see clearly this is what will happen. It's going to take a lot of shocks and a lot of very bad Roman mismanagement. to cause the eventual Western collapse.

It is no. Ammianus Marcellinus, who's the historian who tells us of the arrival of the Goths, their Gothic victory at Adrianople, knows the Huns are coming, isn't a defeatist. He deliberately didn't end his history with Adrianople. He actually ended it with the Goths turning away from Constantinople and a Roman massacre of Gothic mercenaries as a sign that the empire will continue to fight.

The first person who we are aware of who can really conceive of a world where there might not be a Roman empire is Augustine of Hippo writing The City of God. But Augustine is a unique intellectual. capable of this kind of visionary thought that separated what was going on around him from his vision of the divine plan of history. No other Christian writers are doing that.

They're still seeing the Roman Empire as expressing Christianity. The East, of course, will carry on doing that for the next thousand years. They still believe very strongly that, yes, there may be threats on the frontiers, but there always have been. They'll absorb them if they have to. The empire will continue.

I mean, the last time Rome was sacked before AD 410 was by the Gauls 800 years previously. David, with hindsight, do you think Rome's fall and decline was unavoidable? Emphatically, no. Gibbon famously said that the fall of the Roman Empire was inevitable and the reason is simple and obvious. We should just be surprised it survived so long.

It was the inevitable consequence of immoderate greatness. Gibbon's so good at using language. Basically, an empire that big will eventually collapse. I don't agree with Gibbon. The problem is the Romans have recovered from so many shocks before. It's what makes this series of shocks unique.

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