Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

974 conclusion
dramatic event like the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. Scholars are uncertain
whether to lay more stress on the military impact of the barbarians or
on the long-term process of acculturation whereby they were gradually
brought within the Roman world. In either case, as several contributors to
these volumes demonstrate, the barbarians gradually developed their own
distinct identities during this process, and their historians used methods
such as chronicle, chronography and genealogy to bestow upon them a historical
past to rival that of Rome. 6 This creation of new identities is an
important feature of the period, not confined to the west or to the new
peoples: in the sixth century the Syrian Monophysites in the east redefined
themselves as Jacobites, and a hundred years later the Arabs who followed
Muhammad acquired a new identity and a new religion capable of lasting
until the present day.
A straightforward concept of ‘fall’ in relation to the Roman empire is in
any case difficult, in that the empire based on Constantinople survived. In
the sixth century, even though its everyday language was Greek, Justinian’s
empire was still recognizably Roman, its administrative, fiscal and legal
apparatus similar in essentials to the system developed under Diocletian
and Constantine. The official titulature of the emperor had not changed,
and Justinian saw himself as the restorer of the Roman past, an aspiration
warmly endorsed, even if Justinian was criticized in the execution, by the
contemporary writer and former bureaucrat, John the Lydian. 7 By the sixth
century, Constantinople was a city of perhaps half a million, filled not only
with churches and palaces, but also with a panoply of traditional late
Roman buildings. 8 Even though the events of the seventh and eighth
century, especially the Arab conquests and the consequent loss of most of
the eastern provinces, critically undermined this sense of connection with
the Roman past, still for centuries to come the Byzantines continued to
think of themselves as Romans. It was only in the last period of the empire,
under the Palaeologan dynasty, that their intellectual heritage as ‘Hellenes’,
heirs of classical Greece, began to be admitted as worthy of celebration.
The challenge for the historian of the period covered in this last volume,
therefore, is to avoid subjective or tendentious categorization, even when
the terms are used by contemporaries, and to try instead to plot the many
shifts and nuances by which continuity of structures and mentality in fact
coexisted in dynamic relation with multiple change.
This problem of terminology is especially sharply posed in the case of
the eastern empire. From what date is it reasonable to call the emperors in
Constantinople and the inhabitants of the eastern empire Byzantines? The
question has been much debated among Byzantinists, and two main answers
have been given: either the sole reign of Constantine or the founding of
6 Goffart (1988); Heather (1989). 7 Maas, John Lydus. 8 Mango, Développement.
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