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.

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