The Romans: An Interview with Edward Watts
By Owain Williams
When did the Roman Empire end — 476, 1204, or 1453? This is very common question when it comes to contemporary discussions of the Roman Empire, and one without a clear answer. In The Romans, Edward Watts favours 1204 as the end of the Roman Empire — a somewhat untypical answer to the question, with 476 or 1453 being the more popular answers. As he explains, “the Crusaders’ capture of Constantinople represents a rupture that is quite different from the Roman-led evolutions that shifted the monarchy to a republic and then a republic to an empire” (p. 7). Regardless of your answer to this question, however, whether it survived for 1200 years or 2000, the breadth of Roman history is remarkable. Just how did the Roman state survive for so long? This is the question Edward Watts seeks to answer in The Romans.
Any history that seeks to cover 2000 years must be either preposterously long or selectively brief. At 736 pages — which includes, notes, maps, and other illustrations — The Romans is the latter. Indeed, readers familiar with Roman history will find there are many events and people not discussed in this book, with many periods and rulers’ reigns summarised in a page or two. Some Roman rulers, such as Justinian or Irene, receive their own dedicated chapter, but this is not the norm. That said, Watts still takes the time to question and correct more dogged narratives about Rome that do not hold up to scrutiny, remarking how the demonisation of Domitian was “utterly bizarre” (p. 223) or that the narrative of Greek treachery surrounding the Crusades is the result of a “self-serving tale of Roman perfidy” from Louis VII of France (p. 625).
While this brevity may be off-putting for readers well-versed in Roman history, from foundation to fall, Watts does not seek to offer a blow-by-blow account of the long journey of the Roman state. Rather, The Romans seeks to understand how the Roman state managed to go on such a long journey, focusing on the institutions and the individuals who helped it do so (and some that did not), in an ambitious narrative that is equally engaging and entertaining.
I wanted to learn more about what goes into putting together such an impressive book. So, I reached out to Edward Watts via email with some questions about the research and writing process, as well as his perspective on Roman history since finishing The Romans, and he was kind enough to answer my questions.
Why did you decide to write a 2000-year narrative history of Rome?
When I was writing my previous book, The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome, I realized that the chronological divisions Roman historians make today reflect the stories we tell and the evidence we privilege, but they do not always capture the experience of the Romans living through those events. Although we mark 287 BC as the dividing line between the early and middle Roman Republic, no Roman woke up on January 1, 287 BC and said “Thank the gods! I made it to the Middle Republic!” Roman lives continued across these chronological fault lines. So too did the long-term (and even medium-term) historical trends that made it possible for the Roman state to steadily transform itself from a pagan, Latin-speaking, monarchy based in Central Italy into a Christian, Greek-speaking empire based in Constantinople.
I wanted to write a history that recovers the lives of these Romans as they lived them without introducing divisions of our own into the narrative. Telling Roman history in this way enables us to better understand how Rome managed to evolve constantly without ever losing its connection to the past.
Both your book and Anthony Kaldellis’ book The New Roman Empire stress the continuity between the ancient Roman Empire and the so-called Byzantine state. Do you think there is a growing acceptance of this position? Why?
It is undeniable that the people we have called Byzantines were Romans, without question or equivocation. They even called their state Romania and their language Romanika. I think that there is a growing understanding about how wrong it is for us in the 21st century to deny people who lived before us the political, cultural, and linguistic identity that they claim. But this is particularly true in the case of the medieval Romans who, Anthony Kaldellis has shown, were reclassified as “Byzantines” by people from western Europe who wanted to snatch the Roman legacy that the west lost in late antiquity back from the Romans in the East who succeeded in retaining it. As scholars and the public become more aware of why the term “Byzantine” emerged, they will, I think become even less comfortable using it.
Why did you stop your narrative at 1204, with the fall of Constantinople to the Fourth Crusade, and not 1453?
Citizenship connects the earliest Roman history with that of the state in the 12th and 13th century AD. Across this entire span of time, Romans believed that the state belonged to them and they had both rights guaranteed by it and responsibilities to it. Even emperors acknowledged that they were also Roman citizens who were bound by the same laws as the fellow citizens they governed.
The Crusader capture of Constantinople in 1204 broke this very long chain. As the Crusaders approached the capital, the emperor Alexius III wrote to the pope and explained that, unlike in the west, power in the Roman state “is not conferred through hereditary succession but through the election of the best men,” who represented its citizens. Even then, Roman emperors remained magistrates who governed with the consent of popular representatives, not kings who had a right to rule as if the state belonged to them.
Crusaders did not think this way. When they took the city, their leaders refused to meet with a delegation of leading Roman citizens. They instead divided Roman territory up amongst themselves without the consent or input of those citizens. This was a fundamentally different regime from anything that Romans had lived under before. The Crusaders had broken the model of a Roman state owned by its citizens and replaced it with a something owned by its conquerors.
There were three major centers of Roman resistance to the Crusaders. One grew up in Epirus in Western Greece, one coalesced around the well-fortified city of Nicaea in Asia Minor, and one was based in the geographically isolated city of Trebizond on the Anatolian Black Sea coast. All of these were Roman states, but each controlled only a part of Roman territory and each included only some of the Roman citizens once unified in the state centered on Constantinople. Each also contested the legitimacy of the other two. They were, then, Roman successor states built out of the original state’s shattered remains. This fragmentation does not entirely go away even after the Nicene Empire recaptured Constantinople from the Crusaders in 1261.
The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 represents a symbolic conclusion of the Roman political project, but it did not actually end either the Nicene Empire (which concluded with the Ottoman reduction of the Despotate of Morea in 1460) or Roman independence (which ended in 1461 with the capture of Trebizond). People calling themselves Romans also continued to live under Ottoman control for many centuries after the 1460s, but their history is something different from that of the unified Roman state that ended in 1204.
You have written on a variety of topics from Roman antiquity, such as the fall of the Roman Republic to the philosopher Hypatia; however, these topics are very much within the scope of typical ‘ancient’ history. Was it difficult getting to grips with later Roman/Byzantine history?
Byzantine history was my first historical passion and I hoped to study it when I began my undergraduate career in the early 1990s. At that time, the most exciting work in Byzantine studies was being done in the late antique period (which runs roughly from 180 through 700 AD) and I was astonished by how much literature and philosophy survived from that time.
As I progressed in my career, I realized that we can best understand late antique texts is by looking at the people who transmitted them to us. In the west, this was primarily done by the Carolingians, who collected, copied, and preserved the texts they found in former Roman lands. In the east, it was done in a much more comprehensive way by people living in the Eastern Roman Empire.
The people we now call Byzantines called themselves “Romans” and believed that Roman history included not just the history of their Roman state but the histories of all the peoples who eventually became Roman citizens. This included the histories of these people both before and after they were conquered by Rome. As a result, Romans in medieval Constantinople saw both Pericles and Augustus as parts of their history and used the language of Thucydides and the ethical frameworks of Plutarch to describe and interpret their worlds. Much of what we know about both ancient Greece and Rome is preserved because of their efforts.
As I worked on this book, I found that the Roman past and present were in regular dialog with one another. I became convinced that I needed to understand the cultural world of Byzantium and the Carolingians in order to fully appreciate the literature of earlier Roman history. At the same time, I needed to understand the events, institutions, and personalities of the Roman monarchy, Republic, and high empire to grasp how Romans living in these later centuries responded to their world.
The biggest challenge I faced when my narrative moved later was getting a handle on the specific events I was narrating. But the consistency of Romans themselves made it surprisingly easy to grasp the language, literary genres, and ideological aims of authors across this vast span of time.
The Romans feels a bit like Roman history’s ‘greatest hits’. How did you decide what to discuss in the book?
I have always been interested in the dynamic between individuals, institutions, and historical change. I wanted to tell a story that highlighted the moments when individual Romans tried to change the world around them, for good or ill, and how the institutions their fellow citizens nurtured reacted to these possible changes. The very long history of the Roman state and the resilience of its institutions offered a unique way to test the extent to which individual people directed historical change.
I found that, most of the time, the Roman individuals who most effectively changed their state did so by working within the confines of the institutions they inherited. The religious policies of Constantine the Great offer a perfect example of this. At the time of Constantine’s conversion in 312, the empire was perhaps 10% Christian. Instead of compelling the non-Christian supermajority to convert or provocatively abdicating the pagan religious responsibilities he had as emperor, Constantine found ways to support the growth of the church and to encourage the adoption of Christianity without ever shaking the Roman religious system so much that it provoked resistance. Constantine’s policy of gradual, calibrated religious evolution was consistent with the way that effective leaders made changes when the state was strong. I tried to tell his story in a fashion emphasizing the wisdom of these choices.
There were, however, rare moments when citizens either believed the state needed a powerful leader to survive or Roman institutions were too weak to resist when such a person emerged. The best example of this comes when Augustus refashioned the Republic into a system presided over by a single individual who guaranteed that the rights of Roman citizens would be protected. I told his story in a way that emphasized why desperate citizens felt the later Republic had lost the ability to protect their lives, property, and rights and how this led them to trust a single charismatic protector. Augustus was not alone in this. The emperors Diocletian, Justinian I, Constantine V, and Alexius I Comnenus also overpowered the institutions they inherited. But Roman faith in and support for their legal, political, and social institutions made such figures relatively rare in Roman history. This was a point I thought the narrative should emphasize as well.
Are you concerned that the scope of the book means it lacks the depth necessary to properly understand the Roman state?
I think every historian is always concerned about the materials they left out or did not treat as fully as they wanted. This is especially true in any chronologically expansive study. I would have loved to speak more about the role played by Roman women in shaping, moderating, and governing their state (and it very much WAS theirs too) over those two millennia
Their stories are fascinating. Tarquinius Priscus’s wife Tanaquil kept the Roman monarchy going after his assassination. Lucretia sparked the creation of the Roman Republic. Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, kept her sons’ populist legacy alive after their murders. Fulvia, Hortensia, Octavia, and Livia helped carve the path from Republic to empire. And so many women in the imperial period kept the state running alongside men and often stepped in to stabilize it when men could not. While many of these prominent women appear in the book, there is a whole separate story of the Roman state that is theirs that I did not have the space to tell.
Ultimately, all states are incredibly complex and Rome is the largest and most complex of all the states to exist in Mediterranean antiquity. There are lots of ways to tell its story. I hope that this book inspires others to try to narrate the entire history of the Roman state in a different way that expands upon mine by focusing on other things and other people.
Having written a history that straddles the divide between ancient and medieval history, when do you think ‘ancient’ history ends in the eastern Roman world? Do you think that such distinctions are helpful?
I believe there is a clear break in what the Roman state could do and what institutions it is able to support during the reign of Heraclius (610-641 AD). This is the period when the Eastern Roman frontier collapses in both the Balkans and the Middle East. When it does, the Roman tax base, financial system, and professional military collapse with it. The state absorbed a massive shock when the Sassanians conquered Syria, Palestine, and Egypt in the 610s, but the Arab conquests of the late 630s and 640s (which followed a brief restoration of Roman rule in the early 630s) fundamentally changed how the empire worked. For the first time in more than 800 years, Rome was neither the richest state nor the dominant military power in the Mediterranean. Not only could it no longer project power beyond its borders but, for many years, the Romans could not even secure their own borders. This, I believe, is the clear end of Roman antiquity.
The state struggles to survive for much of the next century, but it eventually stabilizes and rebuilds its institutions. That century matters, though, because the institutions that are rebuilt and the things they are able to do are quite different from what existed in the late sixth century AD. The early medieval Roman army is not made up of professionals who can be deployed wherever needed. Most soldiers were instead fighting primarily near where they lived, and part of their compensation was tied to the land they inhabited. The financial system was much less sophisticated, and the state was far less wealthy. There was also far less linguistic and religious diversity among eighth century Romans than there was in the sixth century. This is the beginning of the Roman state’s medieval incarnation.
In Rome’s case, I think that the distinction between the ancient and medieval worlds is crucial both to understanding the degree of disruption the Roman state endured and the significance of its successful medieval reorganization. We should, then, both acknowledge the genuine differences between the ancient and medieval Roman polity while we also appreciate the continuities that joined them.
If you want to check out The Romans: A 2,000-Year History, the paperback version is coming out later this year from John Murray Press (UK) and Basic Books (US).
