The End of the Past: Ancient Rome and the Modern West (Revealing Antiquity) [Hardcover]

Aldo Schiavone (Author), Margery J. Schneider (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 28, 2000 | ISBN-10: 0674000625 | ISBN-13: 978-0674000629

This searching interpretation of past and present addresses fundamental questions about the fall of the Roman Empire. Why did ancient culture, once so strong and rich, come to an end? Was it destroyed by weaknesses inherent in its nature? Or were mistakes made that could have been avoided--was there a point at which Greco-Roman society took a wrong turn? And in what ways is modern society different?

Western history is split into two discontinuous eras, Aldo Schiavone tells us: the ancient world was fundamentally different from the modern one. He locates the essential difference in a series of economic factors: a slave-based economy, relative lack of mechanization and technology, the dominance of agriculture over urban industry. Also crucial are aspects of the ancient mentality: disdain for manual work, a preference for transcending (rather than transforming) nature, a basic belief in the permanence of limits.

Schiavone's lively and provocative examination of the ancient world, "the eternal theater of history and power," offers a stimulating opportunity to view modern society in light of the experience of antiquity.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Schiavone, a professor of Roman law at the University of Florence, addresses one of the most debated questions of European history: What brought about the collapse of ancient Graeco-Roman society? Or, as the author puts it, "What separated imperial antiquity so irremediably from European modernity?" Schiavone's analysis is very much in the mainstream of contemporary thinking on the subject (traditional explanations such as the rise of Christianity and the influx of barbarian hordes are no longer current). He argues that the seeds of the collapse can be found in the development of Roman institutions as far back as the second century B.C. These institutional flaws, combined with changes in the socioeconomic balance of the late Roman world, resulted in a cataclysmic upheaval of life in cities throughout the Roman West. Schiavone's analysis is based on a sophisticated blending of theory and empiricism, with more of the former than the latter. The difficulty with his solution, however, is that so little economic evidence survives that any conclusions must remain speculative. Deploring the increasing specialization of history, Schiavone says he has set out to write a book for both historians and a wider, nonprofessional audience. To be sure, he has taken care to translate extended citations from Greek and Latin authors, and traditional scholarly apparatus is unobtrusive, but, because of the complexity of the evidence, the book is unlikely to appeal to anyone other than scholars of the ancient and medieval world. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

In the middle of the second century A.D., the brilliance of Graeco-Roman civilization and the relative stability provided by the Pax Romana seemed to promise a benign, even glorious, future. With hindsight, we can see the ultimately fatal fissures that lay beneath the surface. In this difficult but often fascinating work, Schiavone examines the extent to which our own civilization is an heir to that glittering age. Did the long decline of the empire, which is generally assumed to have begun late in the second century, result in a permanent rupture in the thread of history? If so, does our cultural heritage owe far more to the medieval world than to the classical? This is an important and complicated question, and to appreciate and comprehend Schiavone's thesis, knowledge of classical history is essential. Readers with the necessary background should find this a stimulating and provocative work. Jay Freeman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (April 28, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674000625
• ISBN-13: 978-0674000629
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,633,347 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a labor, July 8, 2000

By 

Alvaro Lewis "jwatson5" (Redwood City, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The End of the Past: Ancient Rome and the Modern West (Revealing Antiquity) (Hardcover)

Blinded by footnote barrages at times I am sure to have missed some of the fine arguments presented. However, this book is golden despite the scope of an almost intractable undertaking. The author discusses in the most detail the ways of the Roman economy and its labor supply (slave), in order to argue that when conditions of the Roman world were no longer sufficient to maintain the empire the "greatest catastrophe ever experienced in the history of civilization" was experienced due to the very nature of these systems. The result is a dense opus of effort and erudition that re-evaluates the Romans, Roman historians, and the differences between the Romanity and modernity.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perhaps the Most Impressive Analysis of Rome's Fall, June 15, 2007

By 

John E. Mack (New London, Minnesota United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The End of the Past: Ancient Rome and the Modern West (Revealing Antiquity) (Paperback)

Historians analyzing the fall of Rome tend to fall into two camps -- the gradualists and the catastrophists. The former see the so-called "fall of Rome" as the gradual and continuous transformation of the Western Empire into various dark-age kingdoms, without any clear break marking that transformation. The latter see the fall as a signal event, marking the rapid collapse of a way of life and the substitution of a radically different one. Schiavone is clearly in the catastrophist camp, but with a difference. Unlike most catastrophists who bewail the wreckage of a magnificent human creation, Schiavone sees the collapse of the Western Empire as a good thing. He claims that Rome's fall cleared away a stagnant and regressive system and made room for a more dynamic and progressive Europe. If the Western Empire had really been continuous with its successor entities, like the Eastern Empire was, it would suffered the sort of zombieque half-life the Balkans endured for ten centuries.

I wish I could remember the citation, but I can remember being struck by a historian who claimed that while approximately 600 inventions during the Roman Empire would be considered "patentable" under modern law, about 1,000 such inventions were produced in Europe in the 10th century alone. Schiavone suggests that once the trauma of the Barbarian invasions and the depopulation of the Western provinces had run its course, life spans were longer, people were healthier and better-fed, and a basis was being laid for exconomic and social expansion.

Most of Schiavone's attention, however, is devoted to an analysis of the reasons why the Roman system was not viable. The predatory nature of imperial economics, the anti-technological and anti-merchantile nature of the economy, the fragility of an urban society lacking urban technology, and above all the moral and economic drag of a slave-based economy isnured that once Romes's foreign conquests ceased, the empire was subsisting on (and slowly devouring) its looted capital. This sort of society, Schiavone suggests, could not endure indefinitely, and if Rome had not dissolved in the fifth century, it would have in the sixth or seventh. Or, if it had not be subjected to significant foreign pressure, it would have shriveled up and faded away before it was finally destroyed, like the Byzantine Empire.

Shiavone brings a large number of important ideas to bear on the "fall of Rome" debate. He is one of those who believes Rome's fall to have been inevitable, that its fall was inherent in the very nature of the imperial Roman state, and that the Roman Empire contributed far less to the modern world than its ostensible legacy would suggest. He almost goes so far as to say that the greatest favor Rome did to the future was to collapse so thoroughly that it made the type of civilization it had built impossible (and undesireable) to recreate. The detritus of the empire's fall permanently blocked a road to nowhere.

There is so much suggestive thinking in this short book that it deserves to be set beside Gibbon and Bury. While the notion that the economic basis of the empire was the cause of its collapse is not new, the idea that this collapse was both beneficial and necessary is. No one interested in the end of the Western Empire should overlook this book.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Helpful though needlessly academic, January 3, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The End of the Past: Ancient Rome and the Modern West (Revealing Antiquity) (Paperback)

Although I'm not a classicist by specialization, I have taught a one-semester college survey course in ancient Rome for twenty-six years. Schiavone, whose self described "difficult Italian" has been translated for this volume, has provided me with a number of significant insights that I hope to use in future lectures--notably ideas from Chapter 9, "Slaves, Nature, Machines."

Nevertheless, the book is too long by about half and filled with academic name dropping. The author spends overmuch time trying to convince his readers that he has a thorough command of his sources in all languages. He does. But that's what footnotes are for. Furthermore, dragging in moderns like Marx, Hegel, and Weber does little to advance his argument--although it may have encouraged Harvard to accept this book for its list. Even more strained is Schiavone's argument that at the end of the Republic there was a window of opportunity for Rome to have abandoned its slave-based economy and to have moved towards a more modern notion of productivity.