How Civilization Survived Its Own Death. The Fall of Rome and the People Who Copied Books in the Dark

Pick up an ordinary Roman pot. Not a treasure – a kitchen bowl, of the kind made by the million. Bryan Ward-Perkins, the archaeologist who gave his life to these fragments, notes that people handed one to hold often remark how modern it feels, and have to be convinced of its true age. The wonder is not beauty. The wonder is that this thing is of good quality and reached even the poor. A peasant in northern Italy might eat off tableware made near Naples and store oil in an amphora carried from North Africa. That is a civilization measured in objects: not the palaces, but what an ordinary person kept in the kitchen.

Beside the Tiber there still stands a hill called Monte Testaccio. It is made entirely of broken oil amphorae – the remains, by estimate, of some fifty-three million vessels, in which around six thousand million litres of olive oil were imported into a single city. "Like us," Ward-Perkins remarks, "the Romans enjoy the dubious distinction of creating a mountain of good-quality rubbish."

And then it stops. In Britain the potter's wheel vanished in the early fifth century and did not return for almost three hundred years. Ward-Perkins insists on the precision of the point: the wheel is not a badge of cultural identity. It is a functional device for turning out thin-walled pots quickly. And it disappeared – because there were no longer enough people with enough wealth to keep even one specialist potter in work. The bones say the same. Zoologists have measured the leg-bones of cattle from datable digs: the Roman cow, bred large on good pasture, shrank back within a few generations to prehistoric size. "This was decline at the baseline of human existence."

The writing goes quiet too. At Pompeii, over eleven thousand inscriptions were scratched and carved into the walls – election posters, and, found in four places in four different hands, a wall complaining about itself: "Wall, I admire you for not collapsing in ruins, when you have to carry so much tedious writing on you." A city literate enough to be bored by its own literacy. Then silence. Casual graffiti almost vanish; of a thousand laymen signing eighth-century Italian charters, fourteen could write their own name.

This is what "the end of civilization" means once you strip the grandeur off the phrase. Not the fall of an idea. The disappearance of comfort, and of the quiet miracle by which a peasant owned things made by strangers a thousand miles away. And the reason it was lost is the sharp part. The Roman economy was so sophisticated, so interlocked, that its very sophistication made it fragile. When the networks broke there was nothing simpler to fall back on, because Roman success had already destroyed the local lower-level skills. Britain sank below the pre-Roman Iron Age. And here Ward-Perkins turns to face us: "We sit in tiny productive pigeon-holes… wholly dependent for our needs on hundreds of thousands of other people… We would be quite incapable of meeting our needs locally, even in an emergency."

The archaeology tells you what was lost. How is Peter Heather's story. In the summer of 376 a vast throng suddenly appeared on the north bank of the Danube: men, women, children, with countless wagons and the animals to pull them. The Huns had just shattered the Gothic world behind them, and this was the first great refugee column in the history of Europe. Rome met it not with fear but with greed: soldiers and gold at once, the emperor's flatterers said. Then Roman officials ran a black market in the starving – selling them dog-flesh to eat and taking their children as the price, into slavery. Two years later, on 9 August 378, at Adrianople, an emperor gave battle in the August heat and the eastern field army died around him: two-thirds killed, sixteen elite regiments never reconstituted, Valens himself struck down by an arrow, his body never found. "The annals," Ammianus wrote, "record no such massacre of a battle except the one at Cannae."

On the last day of 406 a mixed host crossed the Rhine into Gaul and never really left. In 408, 409, and 410 a Goth named Alaric besieged Rome three times – the city itself did not interest him; he wanted a home and a Roman command, and his moderation astonished the negotiators. When Ravenna refused him again and again, the Salarian Gate opened. What followed was, in Heather's words, "one of the most civilized sacks of a city ever witnessed": Christian Goths who named the basilicas of St Peter and St Paul as places of sanctuary. Jerome in Bethlehem wrote it down all the same: "In one city, the whole world perished." And the pagans of Rome had an explanation ready: the city had fallen because it traded its old gods for Christ. A bishop in Roman Africa named Augustine would spend the next thirteen years answering that charge, and the book he wrote to answer it – the City of God – would outlive the empire that occasioned it.

And the end, when it came, was not a battle. It was a pension. In 476 a Germanic general, Odovacar, deposed the last western emperor – a boy nicknamed Augustulus, "little Augustus," who controlled nothing beyond Italy – pensioned him off to an estate in Campania, and mailed the imperial vestments back to Constantinople. Half a millennium of empire ended with a teenager retired to the country and a parcel sent east. Not a bang. A clerk's transaction.

Here two honest historians disagree, and you should hold both. Ward-Perkins, counting the pots, says Rome fell downward – a sophisticated system collapsing below the level it had started from. Heather, telling the story, says Rome was struck from outside while healthy. The eastern empire had all the same "evils" and survived; so nothing internal made the fall inevitable, and it took perhaps a hundred and twenty thousand armed outsiders, driven by the Huns, to bring it down. The deepest irony is Heather's: across four centuries of trade and war the frontier itself had fattened the small tribes of Tacitus's day into the vast peoples who finally carved up the state, so that "the Roman state became its own worst enemy." The two are not rivals. One measures the cost. The other names the cause.

We know this because one man wrote it all down while it was still happening, and loved the thing he was burying. Ammianus Marcellinus – a Greek from Antioch, a career soldier who survived the seventy-three-day siege of Amida and escaped through an unguarded postern into the desert – sat down in Rome and wrote the last great history of the ancient world, in a Latin that was not his own. He signed it plainly: "a former soldier and a Greek." He is our only eyewitness for the years the frontier broke.

His portrait of the Huns is the most chilling ethnography in all of ancient literature, and it works on you because it is a soldier's: exact, without rhetoric. They scar their infants' cheeks so no beard will grow. They warm half-raw meat between their own thigh and the horse's back. They shun houses "like tombs" and feel unsafe under a roof. And then the sentence that is really about civilization, said by describing its absence: "No one in their country ever plows a field or touches a plow-handle. They are all without fixed abode, without hearth, or law, or settled mode of life." That, Ammianus means, is what stood on the far bank of the river.

But here is why he is a great witness and not a propagandist. The same eye that drew the Huns turned on Rome itself, and at the summit it saw rot. In his satire of the capital he shows aristocrats who measure a man by the gilt on his statues and the length of his cloak-fringes, and who, in a food shortage, expelled the foreign teachers and philosophers from the city while "three thousand dancing girls, without even being questioned, remained here with their choruses." His most desolate image: "the libraries are shut up forever like tombs, while water-organs are manufactured and lyres as large as carriages." Both pictures are true at once. The storm was gathering outside the wall, and inside the wall the libraries were already closed. A civilization can be murdered from without and be dying from within, and neither fact cancels the other.

Now the heart of the lecture. Around 480, into a Rome that had already stopped being the capital of anything, was born a man named Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, of the oldest aristocracy, and he grew up to be perhaps the last Latin in the West who could still read Greek fluently and owned the library to prove it. His family knew the cost of the age at close range: a generation earlier, when the last great Roman general, Aetius, was cut down in the palace by the very emperor he had served, the bloodbath that followed took, among others, "a senator by the name of Boethius, grandfather of the famous philosopher." The philosopher's own house had already paid.

Boethius made a choice that is the whole meaning of this lecture. He could have retreated into his books. Instead he served the state that remained – the Italy of the Ostrogothic king Theodoric – rose to be consul, and set himself a task no one else would attempt: to translate all of Plato and all of Aristotle into Latin before the Greek was lost. He finished only a part. His Latin Aristotle was very nearly all the West would have of Aristotle's logic for the next six hundred years – the thin thread by which one ancient mind reached the medieval one.

Then the wheel turned. Accused of treason for defending a senator, he was thrown into a cell at Pavia to await execution. And there, with the axe already promised, he wrote the book for which his name survives – The Consolation of Philosophy. I will not rehearse its argument here; you can read, in his own entry in this archive, how Philosophy comes to him as a stately woman and shows him the wheel of Fortune, and how in the last book he answers the hardest question – whether a God who foreknows everything leaves you free. What matters for us is not the doctrine. It is the gesture. A man with everything taken from him, weeks from death, chose to spend the time he had left thinking clearly and writing beautifully about why none of it had ever truly been his to keep. Christopher Dawson caught exactly what the gesture was: Boethius was "not only the last of the classics, he was also the first of the scholastics." He stands in the doorway between two worlds with a book in his hands.

This is what it looks like when a civilization refuses to die uncivilized. The state had already condemned him and the barbarian kingdom would soon behead him, while the comfortable world of amphorae and public libraries was going out like a lamp. And the last consul of Rome answered the collapse by writing philosophy. He did not save Rome. He saved something Rome had carried, and handed it forward. The Consolation would be copied, and copied, and copied, in monasteries all across the coming dark, until it became one of the most-read books in Europe for a thousand years. He wrote his way out of his own century.

Boethius handed the inheritance forward. Someone had to catch it. The catcher turned out to be an institution nobody had designed for the job. While Boethius was writing in his cell, a man of the same broken Italy named Cassiodorus was serving the same Gothic court – and Cassiodorus lived long enough to grasp what Boethius had no time for. He saw that the State could no longer be the keeper of the higher culture, and that the only institution still strong enough to carry it through the dark was the Church. So he did something quiet and enormous. He retired to his estate at Vivarium and founded a monastery whose rule of study turned monks into copyists – the inheritance of the ancient world "saved," in Dawson's phrase, "by being placed under the tutelage of the Church."

The same years gave the West its lifeboat proper. At Monte Cassino, Benedict wrote his Rule and created what Dawson calls "a nucleus of peace and spiritual order amidst the disasters of the Gothic wars" – an island of order in a drowning country, and, crucially, a durable one, an institution that could outlast any single man. The verdict on what those islands did is not sentimental; it is bibliographic. "It is to the monastic libraries and scriptoria," Dawson writes, "that we owe the preservation of almost the entire body of Latin classical literature that we possess today." Nearly every Latin sentence to reach us from antiquity reaches us because some monk – very often one who was not trying to save civilization at all, but to save his own soul while the world ended – copied it out by hand.

And it very nearly did not survive. Kenneth Clark, standing where the West came closest to going out altogether, chose one image for it: for almost a hundred years, he says, western Christianity hung on "by clinging on to places like Skellig Michael, a pinnacle of rock eighteen miles from the Irish coast, rising seven hundred feet out of the sea." Monks on a spike of Atlantic rock. From Iona, from Ireland, they carried the copied books back into a Europe that had forgotten them – and then the prow of a Viking ship came up the river, "as menacing to her civilisation as the periscope of a nuclear submarine," and the Abbot of Iona fled with the manuscripts, and it was touch and go once more. Clark's whole verdict on how the classical inheritance reached us fits in a handful of words: we got through by the skin of our teeth.

Two philosophers, writing inside the two great catastrophes of the twentieth century, understood this fragility from within – and it is through them that this lecture is philosophy and not only history. In 1930, between the wars, José Ortega y Gasset wrote a sentence worth keeping somewhere you can find it: "Civilisation is not 'just there,' it is not self-supporting. It is artificial… If you want to make use of the advantages of civilisation, but are not prepared to concern yourself with the upholding of civilisation – you are done. In a trice you find yourself left without civilisation. Just a slip, and when you look around everything has vanished into air." Nature keeps itself; a forest needs no one. A civilization is a made thing, and a made thing needs makers who know that it is made. The moment a generation takes it for a fact of nature, like the air, the jungle starts growing back up through the floor.

Ortega saw that the deadliest barbarian is not the one at the frontier. Rome's came over the wall: horizontal, from outside. The modern one, he said, borrowing a phrase, comes up through the floorboards of the theatre – a "vertical invasion of the barbarians," a primitive born inside the city who uses its complexity with no idea that it had to be built and has to be held. He is the heir who behaves as a mere heir: grateful for nothing, certain the house was always there. You can be perfectly educated and be him.

The other man wrote his book under the bombs. R. G. Collingwood, an Oxford philosopher racing a failing body through a series of strokes, finished The New Leviathan while the Luftwaffe was over London – "a book written," he noted, "in great part not (as Hegel boasted) during the cannonade of Jena, but during the bombardment of London." He set out to say, exactly, what civilization is. His answer: civility is treating a person as a free agent – appealing to his intelligence and his will rather than governing him by inflaming his passions and breaking his power of choice. Barbarism is the revolt against that. And barbarism, he argued, is parasitic: it can only ever feed on a civilization it did not make and is busy destroying – it wants "to destroy civilization and batten on the proceeds."

From that he drew a conclusion, and the way he drew it is the point. He did not claim a law of history. He was too honest, and too near death, for comfort. He offered it as a plain rule read off the record of the cases: "barbarists in the end have always been beaten." He added that he did not know why, or even whether there was a why: "I profess only to be a plain man telling a plain story." And then the sentence to hold onto in a bad year: the champions of barbarism "have not so much perished at the stroke of lightning from heaven as withered away in the very hour of their victory," until those who once feared them come to despise, and then to forget, "those who once set themselves up as champions of that which needs no champion." A dying man, under enemy bombs, refuses to promise you that the darkness loses – and tells you, on the evidence, that it always has.

Now for honesty, because this archive does not sell rescues clean. Three things spoil the happy ending, and you should hold all three.

First: the Church that saved the books was also, at times, their enemy. Gregory the Great, who "carried the cares of the whole world on his shoulders while civilisation was falling in ruins around him," was suspicious of pagan learning; he is credited – how fairly is disputed – with destroying volumes of classical literature "lest they seduced men's minds away from the study of holy writ." The rescue was selective. It saved what a monk could read as edifying and let much of the rest go.

Second: even where no one meant to lose it, it was lost. The Latin West kept its literature and let almost all of Greek science slip away – the astronomy and the mathematics that would not be recovered for centuries, some of it only through the Arabic world that preserved what the West could not. Dawson's honest verdict is that a whole tradition of secular learning came within a hair of vanishing entirely, and part of it did. The lamp was relit. It was relit smaller.

And third – the strangest and the darkest: a saved book is not a safe book. Take the one text that underlies much of this lecture's picture of the barbarians – the Germania, Tacitus's little Roman ethnography, which survived antiquity by luck in a single manuscript. It survived the fall it describes. It did not survive its readers. Over the centuries, hands Tacitus could never have imagined bent his moral mirror – held up to shame Rome – into a birth certificate for a master race, until, in 1943, with the Reich collapsing around him, Heinrich Himmler sent an SS detachment into Italy to seize the oldest surviving copy for the "ancestral heritage" of the men who were, at that very moment, running the death camps. They failed; the family had hidden the manuscript, and twenty years later a flood, not the SS, nearly finished the codex off. But the lesson stands, and Christopher Krebs put it exactly: "In the end the Roman historian Tacitus did not write a most dangerous book; his readers made it so." Ideas have body counts. A text is only ever as safe as the reader in front of it. Which means the responsibility does not end when the book is saved. It passes to whoever opens it next. It passes, right now, to you.

I have kept this lecture at a distance from the present for as long as I honestly can. I will stop now.

You are reading this in a country at war with a neighbour that has run Collingwood's playbook to the letter – a power that has set out "to destroy civilization and batten on the proceeds," and that levels a city and calls the silence peace while calling itself the true defender of civilization against a decadent West. Nineteen centuries ago Tacitus put the sentence into the mouth of a barbarian chieftain looking at the Roman army, and there has never been a better description of an aggressor who has learned to talk: "they make a desolation and they call it peace." The playbook is old. It is the oldest there is. And its practitioners, Collingwood noticed from under the bombs, have a habit of withering in the very hour of their victory.

There is a temptation, when you live far from any frontier, to read all of this as someone else's ancient history. Do not. The one thing the fifth century has to say to the twenty-first is the thing Ward-Perkins set at the very end of his book, after three hundred pages of counting broken pots. Civilization is not "just there." Ask the man who ate off African tableware in a British villa and whose grandchildren could not turn a pot on a wheel.

But there is a second date, and it is the sure one. If 476 is the year the lamp went out, then the slow re-lighting – Cassiodorus's monks, Benedict's Rule, Boethius's copied book, the scholars on Skellig Michael – is the year 800 and everything it stands for. And notice what that re-lighting actually consisted of. People copying books and teaching children through the dark, doing the unglamorous upkeep of a civilization on the assumption that someone, someday, would need what they were carrying. The monks with pens held the line more surely than any legion on the Danube. The fight to keep a civilization is not always loud. Sometimes it looks exactly like patient, stubborn work on the record – the kind of work, if you will let me say it once and lightly, that an archive like this one exists to do.

Augustine, who watched the same wreckage from the far side of the Mediterranean and wrote the deepest book of the age about it, said that every city is made by a love: the earthly city by love of self carried as far as contempt of God, the City of God by love of God carried as far as contempt of self. A civilization is ordered by what it loves. A war does not only test how strong your civilization is. It exposes what your civilization loves.

So here is the whole lecture in one instruction. Do not be the heir who thinks the house was always there. Learn how it was built, because it can come down, and keep the record, because the record is the seed of every re-lighting. And remember that the people who saved the West the first time were not its armies. They were its readers.

The book Boethius copied forward – Aristotle's logic in Latin – waited six hundred years in those monastery libraries for a mind big enough to build with it. In the next lecture that mind arrives: a slow, heavy boy they called the Dumb Ox.