Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

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dence from some of the eastern provinces in the sixth century have given
the provincial section a distinct eastern emphasis.
Thus Volume XIV presents problems of organization and definition of
subject matter, covering as it does both the collapse of Roman government
in the west in the fifth century and the attempt of Justinian to reassert it
from Constantinople in the sixth. Justinian’s ‘reconquest’ was not straightforward,
spectacular as it seemed in the early stages. The reconquest of
Vandal North Africa in a.d. 533–4 was swift and easy, but its consolidation
as an imperial province was to prove costly, and in the case of Italy
Justinian’s great endeavour met with military, logistical and financial
difficulties of such magnitude that the war lasted for nearly twenty years.
The government of the resulting province was officially organized in a law
of a.d. 554; however, partly as a result of the long war and partly because
of new movements of peoples unforeseeable by Justinian, Italy remained
divided, and the west was fragmented among different kingdoms. There
were also consequences for the east from the attempt at reconquest: a
heavy pressure on resources and manpower, and resulting political cost.
Justinian and his successors continued to try to hold together an empire
which stretched from west to east but which was under almost constant
pressure from outside, and under centrifugal tension internally, both political
and ecclesiastical. 3
This volume perhaps lays more emphasis on the Roman and imperial
perspective than an explicitly medieval European history would do. Yet the
vigorous development of newer states and kingdoms in both east and west 4
makes the point of view from the periphery as important as that from the
centre, and this is also reflected here – for instance, in the rich material in
the provincial section. For this period in particular it is important to recognize
that there are legitimately different ways of seeing it. As in the case of
the debate between ‘continuity’ and ‘decline’, it is largely a matter of where
one places the emphasis and why.
For previous generations, and even before Edward Gibbon’s Decline and
Fall, the historiography of the Roman empire was pervaded by the concept
of ‘decline and fall’. The reasons have been constantly debated, and the rival
claims of internal factors and external pressures weighed up against each
other; the French historian André Piganiol, for example, famously claimed
that Rome did not die but was assassinated, whereas in the Marxist analysis
of Geoffrey de Ste Croix the empire was preyed upon from within by its
own contradictions and inequalities. 5 There are indeed a number of possible
turning-points, such as the Roman defeat at Adrianople in 378. Rome itself
was sacked in 410. But the end of an empire is not always signalled by a
3 Cf. Brown (1976). 4 For the east see Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth.
5 Piganiol (1947); de Ste Croix (1981); see Brown (1967).
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