 So Dr. Salisman, welcome to the show. Hello. Thank you for having me. You note in the book that there are three paradigms when talking about the rise and fall of Rome that are usually predominant in scholarship. So I didn't know if you could discuss these a little bit further. I should clarify that these are my sort of general categories, but other historians have also talked about these approaches to understanding the divine fall of the Roman empire. So the sort of biological metaphor that the rise and fall of Rome were somehow inevitable really is part of what we call the kind of catastrophist mentality that this was something that was doomed in some sense or faded to happen. And so it's just sort of watching it play out across the empire writ large. The transformationalist paradigm has certain permutations as it were, you know, that the Roman empire never really fell. It kept on changing, continuing, transforming, becoming the Byzantine empire in the east or the Germanic kingdoms, but that the essential Roman empire ideas of Romani Taas or what meant to be Roman continued. Again, those are loosely characterizing the empire. Then there is the more recent approach which would say, well, the Roman empire is like many other empires we have to look at whatever happened in Rome within the context of a global transformation, what's happening in China, the Huns, you know, various ways against that in a comparative perspective. And these were paradigms that also were used to explain what happened in particular to the city of Rome, which is what I was sort of testing my ideas out on. And I focused on the city of Rome, because there is a natural slippage and the ancients use it as well. Rome, the city, Rome, the empire, they fell into the same sort of thought category and political category. Of course, Rome as the capital, the traditional capital of the Roman empire, was the symbolic heart of Rome of the empire. And it was still the largest city in the Western Mediterranean. Even after the foundation of the Constantinople by Constantine, and its growth into the new Rome, there was still a sense that what happened to the city of Rome was essential to the empire as a whole. So I applied these different paradigms that I usually apply to understanding the Roman empire, to looking at what happened to the city of Rome itself, which remained and continued to be a focus in particular for the West. And these paradigms about Rome, the transformation, or cash-to-fist, the transformationist, or world's historical, really are focusing primarily on what's happening to the Western Roman empire. Because as we all know, the Eastern empire maintained its integrity, some would say, down to the taking of Constantinople by the Turks. So it was really what's happening in the Western Roman empire that these paradigms are applied to. My frustration with these paradigms was that they don't reflect what I see happening in particular places, and in particular in the city of Rome, which remains such a central, mediating influence on the West. And so that's why I began by talking about these and applying them to the way people talk about life in the city of Rome. The model you offer as an alternative is that of resiliency, that of the senatorial and the noble elites working together, both within themselves and also with the emperor, with the military, to bring Rome back after invasions and crises that happened. How does this model differ from the traditional narratives? Traditional narratives about the city of Rome or that Rome was sacked and the city fell quickly into decline. It was given, allegedly was inspired to write his decline for a Rome sitting on the capital hill and looking at the friars singing and the destruction of the city below him. So that a cash-to-fist model is also applied to what happened to the actual city of Rome, which I say is the largest city estimates about its population in the fourth century. Very population estimates are really hard to come by because we have to use a lot of proxy factors like grain supply, for instance. We don't have real population. Subway in between 700,000 to a million people was a huge city by pre-modern standards, even by mine standards. Even 600, 700,000 quid a lot. So that's the model. One way of looking at what's happening to Rome is there's this destruction. There are these multiple sacks or what I call captures of the city by, for instance, by the vandals in 455. And afterwards there's a huge economic decline, population decline. And this is all inevitably a result of these military political failures. So that's one model of looking at the vitality and the willingness of elites to reinvest in their cities after moments of crisis. So neither does in my frustration with the sort of transformationalist narrative, the idea that, oh yes, the city fell on hard times, but it became a Christian city and the church and the bishops and the sort of Christian identity is what saved the city from despair or destruction and that the bishops were the primary restorers of the city, both in terms of its urban structure and its pastoral care for the poor. And that also doesn't really jive with the evidence that we have, not even the evidence of pro-Christian evidence. There's a very important source of information of biographies of popes called the Book of the Popes, the Libo Ponticalis, which records donations, building, constructions by all of the bishops of the city of Rome. The earlier bishops are fanciful, but in the fourth and fifth centuries we use that as a way of understanding what bishops were spending their money on to a large degree. They're not really spending their money on rebuilding the city, so even that notion of transformation into a Christian city, it doesn't really work well. It didn't, from my reading of the evidence. And I also think that, again, the sort of global or all the struggle perspective just doesn't give enough to work with. It sort of diminishes the particular importance that the city of Rome has in trade networks and political networks. So it's very hard to use that to explain what's happening in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. So what did strike me, and here I'm inspired by the work of social scientists who talk about resilient civilizations in terms of climate change, and also historians like Kyle Hopper who has tried to adapt that to understand the impact of disease and how societies deal with those kind of natural disasters. But since the events that overcome room in the fourth and fifth centuries are man-made, that model really wasn't completely satisfactory because it's talking about climate change. And those are relevant factors, but I want to understand the human reactions to these events that historians see as really having huge impacts on what happens to the city of Rome. And the city of Rome really stands in for the Western Roman Empire. So the resilience model is adapted from social scientists and climate change people to understand responses to political and military crises. And I think that has not been utilized before. The book is structured around these different crises which have traditionally been seen as kind of ending points either in the catastrophes model or moments of huge transition for the transformationalist model. For instance, after the Sack of Rome in 410, I do look at the ways in which the rebuilding that takes place on the ground and look at who's doing the rebuilding, who's paying for it, who's actually meeting the restorations of structures that have been either fallen due to fire or statues that have been broken and have to be resided. So there are ways to measure these kinds of human interventions. That's where I think I differ. Whereas I thought at the beginning I could just look at burn layers, you know, the Sack of Rome in 410. I'll just find the burn layer in the Roman farm and that'll be it. But time again, it was impossible and you have this sort of circular way of explaining the world. You know, archaeologists would say, oh, it must have burned it 410 because we'd have a burn layer. But they couldn't date it beyond that. So for instance, in the Roman farm, and then even if there is a burn layer, you know, what is the impact on society? It's not just the event. It's the reaction to the event. And so what I did was to look at the 10 years after each of these various crises, the Sack of Rome in 410, the capture of Rome by the vandals in 495, the removal of the last Western emperor from the Western administration in 476 or 480. So these are pivotal moments. And I looked very precisely at the decade or two after them to see who was responsible for restoring government and security to some degree. And so that was where the resilience model became very important. And it was surprising because earlier in my first book, I did think that the church just moved in and that there was a melding of these two aristocracies, the church aristocracy and the senatorials, the secular aristocracy. But as I did more research into the later periods in the fifth and the sixth century, what I was very struck by was how very different these career paths are. So secular elites were still interested in working for the government. But by the fourth century, senators are not leading armies anymore. They've not led armies, since the late third century. But they are very interested in certain secular honors and offices. Being urban prefect was the pinnacle of the senatorial civic career, or holding the consulship for a year was a distinct honor. That was something that goes way back to the Roman Republic when there were two councils who actually did a military action. By the fourth century, becoming a consul is very much a great honor. You have the year and eight after year. It's a terrific public recognition. The emperor might be your co-consul even. It could happen. But it was something that you see senators striving for. But the senators were not the people who were becoming the bishops of the head of the Christian communities. So the first bishops of Rome who were really aristocrats and senators don't happen until early in my view in the sixth century when we have, as a result of the Catholic Wars, when there is really a closure of opportunities. So rather than having a fusion of senatorial aristocrats and bishops in the church, as many people have said, as I have previously said, what I really see is secular senator aristocrats still devoting their lives to the kinds of honors, becoming patrons, holding office, and admittedly doing charity as well. But also many of the senators still trying to emulate what their ancestors had done generations before. And that the church, the men and women who go into the church, men as bishops and deacons, are from very different sorts of families. Many of them not from Italy, but also they work their way up through a different sort of administrative cycle. And we don't see the fusion of the two really until the sixth century. I think Bighilius is, I think, one of the first. So it's a very different model than what you see in many other historians. All the offices you were talking about are part of what's called the curses on our own. It started back in the Republic, obviously, with military service. And then you go through the ranks until you reach that prefect stage. And there's, of course, the assorted honors that go along with that. Like you were saying, into the fourth, fifth, sixth centuries, these elites are still striving for these honors in this highly competitive agonistic culture. With the rise of emperors like Constantine later, what happens is the bureaucratic machinery expands. And so you have these, for lack of a better term, traditional elite families and senatorial elites trying to differentiate themselves. I didn't know if you could talk about how the curses on our own changed. How did these bureaucratic changes affect this competitive culture? It's actually critical to understanding what's happening to these elites. What it meant to be a senator really did shift with Constantine onward. I would argue that up until that point, being a senator was not really hereditary. That is, you needed a certain level of wealth and you needed to come from a respectable family. But after Constantine, he makes this a kind of hereditary position into some degree. But you are born into the senatorial. You have the possibility of becoming a senator. But in order to do so, you have to have a certain level of office. And there aren't elections anymore. You don't have to circulate and try to get votes from the people as you did in the republic. But you do have to be approved by other senators and by the emperor. And so the offices still sound pretty much the same. There's the quister, there's the preter, financial offices. You might be a paternal prefect. Constantine reorganizes the administration of certain provinces, making certain areas senatorial ranked positions. So there's a huge increase in the number of positions that now give senatorial status. And with senatorial status comes certain perks, certain privileges in terms of what you could wear, wear purple stripe on your toga, also protection from certain kinds of punishments, also certain kinds of taxes. So senatorial status is a desirable status. But you have to attain an office in order to become a senator from Constantine on. And what Constantine does, it's also unusual, is that he allows or expands the possibilities of having senatorial status. So someone working in the imperial bureaucracy, if they go high enough, can also attain senatorial status. So if you're working in the imperial consistory and you're like the count of finances, you also have senatorial status. You're not a senator necessarily in terms of being allowed to vote in the senate, but you have senatorial status. So you have a lot more people who are claiming senatorial status all across the empire. But in Rome, and the families that I was looking at in particular, they are being elected to these offices. I should say also that high ranking generals in the army also have senatorial status. So there are three different career paths, the gaming hours through the military, high enough through the imperial administration and through the civic offices. And it's those civic offices that I've been particularly focused on because these are the administrators, you know, ever since the late third century on, there's increasingly a split between civic administration and the military. And so it's the civic administrators, provincial governors who are of senatorial rank or various different positions like prefectively orient, you have the east. If you are high enough in the administration, then you are definitely senatorial status. So there's this expansion of opportunities for men from all different backgrounds to attain senatorial status. But to sit in the senate in Rome or the senate in Constantinople, you have to be approved by all the senators. And so it's a kind of more immediate connection that is very important to understanding really this competitive culture that flourishes, blossoms that leads many of these senatorial families to want to serve the government and to want to take on these positions. Because if you become a senator and you become a provincial governor of Africa, as did one of the great Roman aristocrats, Quintus Aurelius Semicus, whose letters I translated. So he served in Africa and he was honored with this statue. And so there's this personal honor, but also he could make certain connections for his clients, which would also make him more powerful when he returned to Rome, made good marriage, and then eventually he will become urban prefect of the city of Rome in 384. And so there are these ideals and values that have driven Roman senators ever since the early republic. But from Constantinon, most senators are not willing or not interested in serving in the military, which has become much more highly professionalized. But they do have competition and they can act out their desires on an urban civic stage. And that's why Rome remains such an important place for the mobility for the attainment of these honors. Similarly in Constantinople, although somewhat less so because in Constantinople has a different kind of aristocracy. It doesn't have these long traditions. And of course, the emperor is residing in Constantinople with his court from the three eighties on. So there is less independence of the Senate there. And what you really see, what's so exciting to me is seeing the Senate attaining much more autonomy and independence, especially in the fourth and the fifth centuries, when the emperors are no longer and haven't resided in the city of Rome for a long time. But what's different now is that senators can have highly important political roles, both in Rome and across the empire, that Constantine's revision of how you get to be a senator opened up. And his son, Constantius II. Also, even though Constantius II resided in the east, mostly in Antioch and then Constantinople, but he appointed Western senators all over the empire. So there's old notion that there was a real split between what the Roman Senate visited in Rome and what happened in the east. And doesn't really happen until much later, fifth century, fifth, sixth century. That's one thing that comes up again and again. Instead of seeing the crises of the fifth and sixth centuries as catastrophic irreversible doomsday blows to the city, you emphasize that Rome, because it has such symbolic capital. This was like the stage, right? This is where all the senatorial elites could play out their ambitions and competition on this stage. The myriad of archaeological epigraphical evidence that you used to point out that, as opposed to a relative decline and abandonment of the city, they're coming back time and time again. And they're using often their own funds to repair the city, do these things? Yeah, there are lots of little details. And if that until you pull them all together that you can see when you have an inscription here, an inscription there, it's not until you see larger patterns from all the least small details that you can see that kind of devotion. So for instance, after the Alec-Sax ticks room in 410 and certain parts of the city burnt, we know that there had to be repairs. And so where do you repair first after you have massive areas? And one of the key interesting places that is next to the Senate House in a building called the Secretarium, which is where senators would judge each other, supposedly, that is repaired by an inscription just in the year 414 by Epiphanius, who's an urban prefect. And he's repairing a statue that a previous senator, one of his relatives had put up. So there's a double connection. And what you see is this emphasis on the repairer, even though you have to do all this work for the amperes, right? And he's probably using imperial funding because he's the urban prefect. So he has access to state funds. But as we all know, there are choices where you use your funding. And so the choices that urban prefects make like Epiphanius on repairing a important area in this room and form next to the Senate House is a very pointed message about what really matters and how we're coming back. So I think that is one good example of the kind of selective restoration that Senator O'Rourke and Mr. Cutts could undertake. And we hear about, you know, baths being repaired and statues being moved in certain areas. And we hear the dedicator being named, for instance, in the DC embass. There is an urban prefect who moves the statues and he puts up an inscription, the statue is gone, but the inscription is preserved saying, I've done this and there's a sort of honor and it makes you realize, oh, these people were concerned that their baths look appropriate, that they have a statue, even if they are Christians, they still have statues. And so we really see this willingness to step up and to remake or repair the city to make it look as good as possible. So I think another good example would be the way after 410, the statues, dedications, Colorism and Childhood has sort of quantified, I think it's a really compelling number. The number of statues dedicated between 337, 410, about 13 of 21 are to emperors, but after 410, none in the Roman form. But we do have statue dedications to senators and to generals. So there's a kind of displacement in a certain sense of who is central to the sort of political identity on a local level. Again, what's surprising is who's leading the effort. It's the urban prefects who are involved in restoring the city of Rome time and time again, especially over the course of the 5th century. But it's not the bishops. And that I think is another important distinction in my work. The bishops have liturgical responses when the vandals captured and remained in Rome for almost two weeks in the year 455 as a result of political upheavals. Then Bishop at the time, Leo, who is a very powerful bishop, says actually nothing about repairs. There's nothing on the record about his efforts to restore the city other than that he melts down a water jug in order to replace it with more liturgical vessels. And that's great. I mean, Rome means more liturgical vessels because most of them have been robbed by the vandal, but he's not rebuilding the urban structures. Whereas we do know of other urban prefects who in the wake of 455 are doing just that repairing statues, etc. So that's, for me, a really important distinction about the restoration of the urban fabric. The bishop in Rome doesn't really have access to the same resources as the senatorial elites. He doesn't have that kind of power. He has to depend on the senatorial elites to donate the money or donate the buildings. Oh, and the Empress, after around 440 or so, the Western Emperor Valentin III comes back to Rome. And we know that he and his mother, and Gallup, were very involved in supporting the church. So, you know, it is true that the bishops of Rome have access through their imperial patrons as it were, and they do increasingly acquire wealth and land. I wouldn't say that they don't, but they also, with the demise of Valentin III, the emperors in the second half of the fifth century are not as wealthy or as able, or as interested in donating to the church. And they don't last for very long. You know, the key continuity in the second half of the fifth century in Rome really is the presence of Rickimer, who is a major general, who does dedicate an area in church in Rome. So again, not something that the bishop of Rome would want to be associated with necessarily. So, there is that possibility. Bishops do have imperial patrons. I wouldn't say it's only reliant, but once the emperors leave after 455, the bishops are very much dependent upon sanctuary aristocrats for political protection, support, and economic support too. I wouldn't want to say the church has not accrued interest, but after the capture of Rome by the Vanals in 455, we don't hear of the church building major large churches in the second half of the fifth century, or of huge ransoming efforts even. You know, the bishops of Rome would have been expected to ransom back their captives, but it's not mentioned by Leo in his letters. It is mentioned by other bishops at other times. And the fact that he had to melt down a water jug, given allegedly by Constantine, suggests that the church is having its own sort of financial difficulties. Certainly, in my view, an important indication of their reliance or their need for financial support from those who can. And in the West, it's primarily the center aristocracy and some military figures. The trouble is that most of the military were Aryan Christians, or Hawaiian, as we might say today. And so limited number of patrons from back to us during the bishops' perspective. The bishop in Rome has to contend not just with the situation outside of the church, but he has ambitious bishops and deacons inside the church who are vying for power. There are other games in town, so to speak, like you were just mentioning, all the Rick and Mer, Aryan Christians, these are Aryan Christians. They're not a Calisthenia Christian would consider a orthodont. And as you mentioned before, he has to assert his authority through what you call topography and liturgical vehicles. This is a point in time where not everybody was expected, like you said in the book, to attend Mass every Sunday. But he gathers people in certain places, and that's a way of asserting his authority. I think Leo, who was Pope in the middle of the fifth century, I call it his liturgical topography, because he is the first Bishop of Rome. We call them Popes, but they weren't really called Popes until the sixth century. And Popes just meant father figure. But he has made his sermons survive. And he's the first Pope we know who gave sermons on a regular basis, but not in terms of the Christological year, but not in terms of weekly sermons per se. But that he would move people to various churches we can gather from where we know these sermons were delivered. It was a sign of his influence. And it's a sign of his willingness to try to take on a more public role. I don't doubt that, but he's not there. And that's why it's all the most striking. He's not there after the capture of the city by the vandals in 455. And even though Leo is famously said to have stopped the Toll of the Hun from attacking Rome, which is the sort of myth of Leo's holding up his hands against the Hun and all these Aryan types, the vandals, the pagans, he was just part of a delegation, including senators who were there to help pay off Attila so that he wouldn't come further south. It's a wonderful story, but it's not the simple story of a heel alone holding up the cross and preventing Attila from coming. He was part of a senatorial delegation. And so that's really what the book is really trying to do is to recover the agency of senators, because so many books look only at the military and see it as a military crisis brought on by the barbarians. Peter Heather, for instance, has said that without the barbarians, the fall of the west wouldn't have happened. But what I see happening in Rome is very much an alliance, especially in the second half of the fifth and sixth century, between senators and the military at times against the Eastern Emperor and at times against other barbarians, but it's not just the barbarian presence that created the circumcenters under which we see senators taking an important political role in these events. I spend a lot of time on the politics of what happened after 476. 476 is, of course, a traditional date for the fall of the Western Roman Empire because that's the date that Romulus Augustulus, the little boy son of the General Arrestes, is removed from power. And there is actually an Eastern Emperor, Nepos, who loses power and goes into exile in Dalmatia. And in 476, there's a delegation of senators that goes to the Eastern Emperor, Xeno, saying, we don't need a Western Emperor anymore. We just want to recognize you in the East. We're fine. We want this general, Oderacher is his name, who was a great military man, and who, as they, as the source Melchus, leader source says, experienced in political and military matters to represent us. And so, at that point in 476, the central aristocracy are really representing the, well, Italy, and basically wanting to align themselves with a strong, capable military person, Oderacher. And that kind of political engagement is often dismissed. Many historians would say, oh, they were forced to do so, or they had no actor role, you know, Oderacher forced them. But I tried to show in the book that that's not true, that over the 20 years after the last of the Valentinian's death, there is a growing disenchantment with the need for having a Western Emperor, and that the senators are feeling more and more the need for simply having a secure and strong military presence, like the general Wikimer, or subsequently the general Oderacher, so that they become the political voice as it were for the civic administration. So it's an irony that it goes back to being really to the early republic where the senators have a political role. But what's different is that they don't have a military role now. The military really does throw a wrench in this power dynamic, and the senatorial class has to respond. They respond to that through their engagement and negotiation with these military elites as well. Intermarrying, things like that, which I think really is a super important aspect of your book. You know, the book goes until the 7th century, and I wanted to see what happens to these senatorial aristocrats. And one thing that I would like to add is what happens in the 6th century. The Gothic Wars, the 20-year wars that the Emperor Justinians launches to take over Italy, is often seen as the final nail in the coffin for the city of Rome. And it certainly is true that it was terribly destructive. The city was captured and sacked several times over the course of those 20 years, and it would never recover in quite the same way. But what is, I think, different in my approach is that that's where, you know, Theodoric and the Ostrogoths, the Roman senators have been working with Theodoric and the Ostrogoths, and Justinians reconquest of Italy, brought about the demise of the Ostrogoths, and Justinians was recovering Italy as a resort to restore the empire as a whole. That's his view of it, the Eastern view of it, which was used to justify the reconquest. What is so striking to me is that even after that disastrous crisis, there were a senatorial families who we can trace on the ground who were in Rome, and many of them admittedly fled to the east of Constantinople or fled to Sicily or to Campania. But there was the possibility of there perhaps, you know, recovering, coming back to Rome and rebuilding even after the Gothic Wars, but the ways in which the Eastern Emperor Justinian and his successor, Justin II, restored order to the West really undermined the possibility of the recovery of this cursesome arm of these honors and offices. So Justinian and his successor Justin did not allow for the Senate to have the same kind of powerful voice, the same kind of office-holding patterns. What we see in Italy is a new official called an Exoc, who is appointed by the Byzantine Emperor, who has military and civic authority, and the Office of Urban Prefect, which is so critical for the sort of recovery of honor and acting out honor on the stage. That declines in importance. The men who hold it, the last man, I think his name is John, is someone who really resides in Modena. It doesn't have ties the way earlier urban prefects had to these senatorial families. So it really was a system that was undermined in part by the war, no doubt, but the real demise of the Senate, which we can trace into the early seventh century, is the result of the way Justinian had restored his control that undermined the traditional administration, the traditional honors that Senators had strove for before. That's just me. Really, the potential for recovery, even after the Gothic Wars, had there been a willing partner, had the Emperor Justinian been more willing to recover that. But as I show through looking at who were the consuls, what were the honors, Justinian did not want the Western Senators to become a powerful voice again. For me, that's kind of the end of the story of these senatorial families. And what happens in the seventh century is something quite different. I also should say that the cover of the book shows the doors of the Senate House, which are now on the ladder, which is kind of what happens. I think simply as I said that I think, you know, Rome is not a papal city until the demise of the Senate. And with that is the loss of an alternative political voice. So, you know, this easy slide, or, you know, the quick transformation is not really demonstrated by the evidence that we have. I have to admire the resilience and creativity of senatorial Urisica, who awaited to an idea of service to the state that goes back for centuries, even as they change what that service looked like. That's admirable. And they are no less than persistent, for better or for worse. Well, Dr. Salisman, thank you so much for this rich conversation. Maybe a great time too. It's really fun to talk. We'll see you next time. Okay. Bye-bye.