ALEXANDER’S DREAM REBORN

The only truly sane monarch in antiquity was Alexander, the wild child, who came to within an inch of creating a world in which we now most wish we could live, one marked by community and not by conflict of cul¬tures. His only really rational successors were Mehmet the Conqueror and Genghis Khan. All were unquestionably destroyers, and all wrought terrible suffering in the world, but all three knew in their bones something that few others have seen or said and no others have been able to bring to reality. Can we dream their dream a bit?

We should be able to see their truth more clearly, with the hindsight of many centuries of recorded history and the accurate topography of modern cartography, and indeed, their truth is a simple one. The great fault line that runs across the landmass of the Old World, separating north and west from south and east, and occurring again in the geography of empires and wars of every generation since the rise of the Persian empire, has the ability to bring humankind to its ruin. In our own time, it has the potential to set loose unspeakable terrors.

Four human agglomerations

The fault line of geography has remained a fault line of peoples. Four human agglomerations divide the Eurasian landmass among them, while sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas stand dangerously outside the stories of those families. Americans—thought dangerous by many because of our self-satisfied exceptionalism—speak to the Europeans as to siblings or cousins, and Africans of the Sahara and the south are marginalized by all, their skin color a frivolous pretext for exclusion. Europeans, west Asians, south Asians, and east Asians compete over the right to define the main story of our species.9

The separate world of east Asia has mainly stood outside the Eurasian psychodrama and may well yet prevail over all its rivals. The two other boundaries of peoples, defining the two directions in which west Asians must look, have been killing fields and chasms of misunderstanding. The United States chose to go to war in 2001-2003 in both those regions.

Alexander had his chance.10 He was too young, too provincial (Macedonian, not Athenian or Corinthian), too libidinous, too fond of drink, too daring—too extreme in every way. Or at least that’s how we explain his ambition and his failure. And he conquered the Persian empire, only to die, deep inside Persian lands, too suddenly and too soon. His generals succeeded beyond what should have been their own wildest dreams in consolidating a remarkable amount of his power, and the Ptolemies of Egypt and the Seleucids of Asia succeeded in establishing Alexandrian kingdoms in lands that had never before thought of owing homage to the Greeks.

Powerful figures as Cassian

Eastern monasticism grew and flourished, and its ascetics probably numbered in the tens of thousands, some even in double monasteries, communities with men and women living separately in the same house. In the west, even with such intellectually powerful figures as Cassian and eventually Gregory, monasticism long remained in small houses, scattered and finding their respective authority in different ways. In Ireland, abbots were bishops and monks ruled the church, but elsewhere, some houses stood alone and rose and fell in a generation or two, while wealth and patronage began to build more powerful houses near royal courts and cathedrals.

Generations after Justinian

Despite all the quarreling of monks, in the generations after Justinian, particularly, but not only, in the western provinces, something important faded from view: heresy. For Justinian’s great effort to bring the whole world into doctrinal alignment with himself not only failed; it failed catastrophically and permanently. Egypt and Syria settled into their versions of monophysitism; Constantinople clung to its increasingly nuanced and impenetrable version of Chalcedonian orthodoxy; the western churches gradually tumbled together under something like the authority of the bishop of Rome—an authority that would sometimes be contested, but rarely on doctrinal grounds. The history of the development of the core doctrines of Christianity henceforth comes to an end, and what will occur in the future are occasional revivals and repetitions of old arguments. Christians in the west during the ninth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries fought over free will and predestination. Westerners could never agree on these questions, though they held little interest at any period for the eastern churches. Now and again, communities would need to act out their hostilities, as when the Greek and Latin churches, long adrift and estranged, found it necessary in the eleventh century—just when harmony would have begun to be valuable—to declare their enmity with mutual excommunications not lifted for 900 years.

A COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

Some men survived in ravaged Italy and even came to prosper again. Three of the senate’s dignitaries from the days of Theoderic lived past their ninetieth birthday and remained atop the greased pole of public life—or rather, leaped from one greased pole to another, deftly and just in time. Least known to us of the three is Cethegus, sole consul of the year 504, master of the offices not long after, and patrician from 512 until his death almost half a century later in 558.

Ennodius praised him in writing as a younger contemporary in his little work on the best way to educate young gentlemen; and Cassiodorus addressed a puzzling document to him consisting partly of family boasting, partly of social climbing, and partly of a biographical index of a few famous contemporaries. Cethegus persisted and persisted in Italy, holding out until 547 or so, after the fall of Rome to Totila in 546. He was by now caput senatus (“head of the senate” by dignity and seniority). He fled Rome before it fell because he was suspected of pro-Gothic sympathies, as many of the veterans of Theoderic’s time would be suspected. When he came to Constantinople, he was regularly seen around and with Pope Vigilius, supporting doctrinal rapprochement and a more vigorous prosecution of the war at home. He seems to have stayed in Constantinople until the last dog had been hung back in Italy and the war finally ended, but we glimpse him one last time at home, now in Sicily, receiving a letter from Pope Pelagius I in about 558.

Liberius, the patrician who had been praetorian prefect in Italy before Theoderic, then served him and his successors in that role in Gaul for a quarter century, appeared in Italy in 535; there, Theodahad put him in a delegation sent to Constantinople to make peace. The sources we have credit him as the one voice who spoke up in Constantinople to report the murder of Amalasuntha, the deed that more than any other gave a pretext for Justinian’s invasion. Liberius was unable, as a result, to return to any Italy not ruled from Constantinople, and so stayed on in the east, where his long experience won him appointment at an advanced age (he must have been well over seventy by then) as Augustal prefect in Alexandria, effectively Justinian’s representative to and governor over Egyptian society.

Sent from Constantinople

In Egypt, Liberius was the grand avenging inquisitor, sent from Constantinople to bring a restive province to civil and ecclesiastical heel. He did as well as could be expected—which is to say, he left no lasting result. Justinian soon turned on him and sent out a replacement without bothering to recall Liberius. Remarkably, Liberius prevailed in an unfair fight, sending his would-be supplanter home in disgrace. Officially recalled shortly thereafter, Liberius still succeeded in defending himself before a court of inquiry on his return to Constantinople in the early 540s. There we must imagine him as part of the circle of western adventurers that also included Cassiodorus and Cethegus, eyes wide open for the main chance.

Even then, his career was not over. When Justinian prepared to send his nephew Germanus west to complete the war in Italy, Liberius was variously the stand-in and deputy as preparations dragged on, eventually going on in command ahead of Germanus, who then died before he could undertake the campaign. Justinian is said to have had second thoughts about the elderly general, but too late to stop his last success. He arrived at Syracuse to find the city under siege by Totila’s forces. Undismayed, he forced his way through the barbarian lines, sailed into the harbor, and got his entire force into the city customized tours balkan.

Armenian named Artabanes

While this was going on, Liberius’s appointed successor, an erratic Armenian named Artabanes, was trying to catch up with him to relieve him of command. But Artabanes encountered a terrific storm off the coast of Calabria and wound up, temporarily, on Malta. Liberius, meanwhile, was in the beleaguered Syracuse. Procopius reports that he found himself unable to carry out successful military actions while constricted by Totila’s siege forces, and that this military impotence made his troops an unwelcome burden on the limited supplies of the besieged city; so he once more embarked his troops and slipped out of Syracuse for a better encampment at Palermo—all this, while Totila was plundering Sicily at will.

Artabanes finally caught up with Liberius in Palermo in 551 and relieved him of command. One story has Liberius going on a last mission to command Justinian’s forces in Spain, but we find his tombstone in northern Italy, near Rimini, with a fine inscription in eight elegiac couplets, suggesting either that he retired to Italy directly from Sicily or that he made his way back into Italy after the “Pragmatic Sanction” to live in the shadow of the new regime from Constantinople. He was about ninety when he died. There is a hint that a descendant was still wealthy and well connected as late as the 590s.

The books that survive side with the Romans

In the Roman world, as one might expect, the books that survive side with the Romans. Even the few narratives that seem to reflect a “barbarian” pride were written in Greek or Latin. Jordanes, a man on the make in Justinian’s Constantinople, wrote his book Getica (“Gothics”) in Latin, inventing a glorious past for the Goths, trying to make sense of contemporary history from the capital’s perspective. Goths, Persians, and Huns very likely had tales of their own, to say nothing of their documents, but the Romans were far and away more documentary and textual, and therefore more like us, and therefore capable of making their voices and personalities more vividly known to us. The “glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome” (in the words of Poe) still enchant many who know little about the realities of ancient life stoletov bulgaria tours.

Merely exalted the Roman past

If you seek the last day of the Roman empire, you’ll have many choices. Never mind that the Roman historian Sallust, Augustine of Hippo in his City of God, and the modern historian Arnold J. Toynbee all date the downfall of Rome from its victory in the second Punic War in 202 BCE. Almost all historians agree that creating an empire to succeed a republic (which is how we conventionally describe the successful putsch by Caesar’s nephew Octavian and his self-remaking under the name Augustus Caesar) merely exalted the Roman past, while abandoning many of its excellences. Dissolution often threatened the hold of the imperial regime over its far- flung realms. Between 235 and 284 dissolution very nearly prevailed, when the longest-reigning emperor of that period was a usurper too marginal for more serious but shorter-lived contenders to bother taking time to exterminate. The remaking of empire in 284 and after, first by the emperor Diocletian and then by Constantine, was intended then and is accepted now as an expression of continuity, though much had to change in order to create a stable new regime. Many historians have long been persuaded that at some time in the fifth century, something decisive occurred. The date of 476 was chosen in the sixth century, for political reasons explored below, and has crept into textbooks repeatedly, down to the present day. But there is no good reason to accept it.

So if Rome did not fall in 202 BCE or 476 CE, when did it fall? In 800 CE the Frankish king Karl, Carolus, or Charles—that is, Charlemagne— concluded that the empire had finally lost its way when the eastern throne fell into the hands of a woman, the empress Irene, and so he had himself crowned emperor by the pope in Rome on Christmas day. Shall we call his dominion—that medieval avatar of empire in the west—a Roman empire? It did business under that name for 1,000 years, until Voltaire waggishly commented that it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. True enough, but at about the same time, in his autobiography, the young Goethe described the impressive ceremonies he had seen himself in Frankfurt for the election of the Roman emperor. That version of Rome finally disappeared in 1806, when Napoleon dispensed with old imperial tradition in order to create his own imperial edifice, however short-lived.