Decline and Fall

1936 ◽  
Vol 5 (14) ◽  
pp. 65-72
Author(s):  
R. W. Moore

‘Decline and Fall’ has been a favourite heading with historians ever since the modern world undertook to chronicle the history of the ancient. It is more than a heading; it is an attitude. Gibbon first popularized it, and the phrase enjoyed a steady prosperity until the archaeologists towards the end of the last century began to redress the balance by calling in more concrete evidence than the moralizings of philosophers. Here, as in other fields, ancient history owes a great debt to Mommsen. But the old attitude has been long in dying and is not yet dead. Gibbon in envisaging the whole history of the Roman Empire from the settlement of Augustus to the coming of the Ottomans was no doubt justified in using the title he did. But his manner left no doubt that even in the days of her first princeps Rome was declining and falling hard. And his attitude is followed consciously and unconsciously by many later historians who limited their surveys to the first two or three centuries of the Empire. In schools, though it may be the fault of curricular limitations and the setters of syllabuses, it is still hard for the pupil to avoid the impression that the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome ended abruptly at 323 and 31 b.c. respectively.

1936 ◽  
Vol 5 (14) ◽  
pp. 65-72
Author(s):  
R. W. Moore

‘Decline and Fall’ has been a favourite heading with historians ever since the modern world undertook to chronicle the history of the ancient. It is more than a heading; it is an attitude. Gibbon first popularized it, and the phrase enjoyed a steady prosperity until the archaeologists towards the end of the last century began to redress the balance by calling in more concrete evidence than the moralizings of philosophers. Here, as in other fields, ancient history owes a great debt to Mommsen. But the old attitude has been long in dying and is not yet dead. Gibbon in envisaging the whole history of the Roman Empire from the settlement of Augustus to the coming of the Ottomans was no doubt justified in using the title he did. But his manner left no doubt that even in the days of her first princeps Rome was declining and falling hard. And his attitude is followed consciously and unconsciously by many later historians who limited their surveys to the first two or three centuries of the Empire. In schools, though it may be the fault of curricular limitations and the setters of syllabuses, it is still hard for the pupil to avoid the impression that the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome ended abruptly at 323 and 31 b.c. respectively.


Classics ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Potter

The history of the Roman Empire is the history of one of the largest and most enduring multiethnic states in the history of the world, making it an area of study that continues to have great relevance to the modern world. Principal areas of investigation for those drawn to the study of the Roman Empire include the development of institutions needed to govern such a state, the behavior of those institutions, the dialogue of cultures within the empire (especially issues of assimilation, resistance, and evolution between dominant and subaltern groups), and the relationship between Rome and its neighbors. It is also a period that saw significant developments in art, literature, and the history of thought, shaping the heritage of classical Antiquity that has survived through the Middle Ages to help shape the Western tradition of rational thought. It is also a very colorful period, whose leading figures, ranging from Marcus Aurelius and Jesus of Nazareth to Nero and Commodus, continue to excite great interest for their own sake.


Author(s):  
W. V. Harris

Morris Keith Hopkins (1934–2004), a Fellow of the British Academy, played a key role in broadening the study of ancient history, particularly the history of Rome. Having learned historical sociology, Hopkins was able to conduct a series of structural analyses of Roman society such as had rarely if ever been attempted by previous historians. Hopkins became a real sociologist in Hong Kong, whose massive housing problem he studied. He also spent time in North America; he was a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 1974. Two major schemes occupied Hopkins’s scholarly energies during the 1970s: one was to put together the structural and sociological account of the Roman Empire which he had already been working on at intervals for several years — this was eventually to become both Conquerors and Slaves and Death and Renewal. Throughout his career as a scholar, Hopkins strove to solve fundamental and very difficult historical problems, and to do this in an exciting and immediate fashion.


1999 ◽  
pp. 55-59
Author(s):  
M. I. Loboda

Our research is based on a rather large "library" of various works by M. Drahomanov, which contains his views on religion. Among them: Paradise and Progress, From the History of Relations Between Church and State in Western Europe, Faith and Public Affairs, Fight for Spiritual Power and Freedom of Conscience in the 16th - 17th Centuries, , "Church and State in the Roman Empire", "The Status and Tasks of the Science of Ancient History," "Evangelical Faith in Old England," "Populism and Popular Progress in Austrian Rus, Austrian-Russian Remembrance (1867- 1877)," "Pious The Legend of the Bulgarians "," The Issues of Religious Freedom in Russia, "" On the Brotherhood of the Baptist or the Baptist in Ukraine, "" The Foreword (to the Community of 1878), " Shevchenko, Ukrainianophiles and Socialism "," Wonderful thoughts about the Ukrainian national affair "," Zazdri gods "," Slavic variants of one Gospel legend "," Resurrection of Christ (folklore record) ", etc.


2021 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 44-59
Author(s):  
David Do Paço

This article analyses how food, recipes, and techniques and manners introduced as foreign were integrated in eighteenth-century German cookbooks. Doing so it intends to transfer a methodology recently developed in social history to history of food in order to get a better understanding of how eighteenth-century European societies defined foreignness. It claims that cookbooks should be considered as topographies of the table and presents the Holy Roman Empire as a particularly rich field of study for history of circulation in the early modern world. 


Author(s):  
Luca Scholz

The enclosure of movement in the Holy Roman Empire, studied here through the lens of safe conduct, engendered a highly contingent interplay of obstructive and accelerating factors that affected the geography and temporality of different forms of movement in different ways. Spatially, these efforts were not concentrated at territorial borders but at settlements, toll stations, and other choke points, indicating that late modern border talk is unsuitable for understanding the ordering of movement before the mid-eighteenth century. The fact that early modern freedoms of movement, however poorly enforced, did not exist by default but by deliberate design challenges the image of the early modern ‘state’ as a preventer of mobility. This conclusion places the book’s findings in a broader perspective and argues that the history of the Holy Roman Empire offers an alternative framework not just for understanding other parts of the early modern world but also for appreciating ambiguities inherent in the late modern border regime.


Author(s):  
DANIJEL DŽINO

Appian’s Illyrian book (Illyrike) was originally intended to be just an appendix to his Macedonian book and today remains the only extant ancient work dealing with the early history of Illyricum which is preserved in its entirety. In this short work Appian puts together different local and regional histories in order to create a unified historical narrative and determines the historical and mythological coordinates of Illyricum inside the ancient world. This paper will discuss Illyrike in the context of the Roman construction of Illyricum as a provincial space, similar to some other regions in continental Europe such as, for example, Gaul or Britain. They were all firstly created through the needs of Roman political geography and later written into literary knowledge through the works of ancient history and ethnography. This paper will argue that Appian’s Illyrike represented the final stage of the Roman construction of Illyricum from an imaginary to a provincial space, which was the point of its full coming of age as an integral part of the ancient world and the Roman Empire.


2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-182
Author(s):  
Annelies Lannoy ◽  
Corinne Bonnet

Abstract:In their grand narratives on the ancient history of religions, the Belgian historian of religions, Franz Cumont (1868 – 1947) and his French colleague and correspondent, Alfred Loisy (1857 – 1940) both assigned a prominent place to the so-called pagan mystery religions. This paper seeks to identify the specific theories of religion and the deeper motivations underpinning Cumont’s and Loisy’s historiographical construction of the mystery cults as a distinct type of religion within their evolutionary accounts of the history of religions. Through a comparative analysis of their rich correspondence (1908 – 1940) and a selection of their publications, we demonstrate how their historical studies of the religious transformations in the Roman Empire, their in-depth dialogues in the troubled times in which they lived, and their philosophical views on the overall history and future of religion, were in fact mutually constitutive.


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