James J. O’Donnell’s The Ruin of the Roman Empire is a poorly edited book laced with a tendentious thesis: that Justinian ended a glorious period of multicultural amity and synthesis. The poor editing shows insofar as the book is far too long, and the author is given to prosaic flourishes. The thesis is shoehorned into contemporary sensibilities. In hindsight, the Gothic Wars were a total disaster, but obviously that was not Justinian’s intent.

Obviously Boethius plays a major role in the book. But perhaps more interesting in our current age is Cassiodorus. While Boethius died, and also contributed a philosophical work which influenced early medieval thinkers, Cassiodorus spent his last decades preserving the cultural inheritance of the ancient world. Cassiodorus’ life spanned an enormous cultural distance. He was born in the late 5th century when Rome was still a large city, albeit under Gothic rule. The Gothic hegemony over the West Roman domains can be thought of as analogous to the Arab conquests of the Near East of the 7th century: the fundamental underlying structure of society remained unchanged. It was the wars of the 6th century which wore Italy down to the point where Rome was a shadow of itself by the end of Cassiodorus’s life.

One can make their own judgments of whether Cassiodorus succeeded or not. But he was conscious that something was happening in the West, and he had to do something. A new age of barbarism was being born. Civilization’s locus was moving to the east.

About half a decade ago Steven Pinker wrote The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. There were many criticisms of the book, but on the whole, I think it pushes forward an argument that is a reasonable description of reality: descriptively, violence has declined over the Holocene.

Why? Carl von Clausewitz asserted “war is a continuation of politics by other means.” I think this gets at an important aspect of the “modern way of war”, and the instrumental use of state and social violence: they exist to reinforce a particular social order. And order tends to go along with peace.

I do not think Clausewitz would have correctly described the world 10,000 years ago. In War before Civilization, the author describes a world of great brutality during the early Neolithic. Peter Turchin has criticized Pinker on these grounds, arguing that violence peaked during the early Holocene, during the transition from a world of hunters and gatherers, to a world of farmers. During the Neolithic, war is often best understood not as diplomacy, but pure eliminationist competition. Animal conflict between rival troupes.

Neolithic farmers, who probably had tribal confederacies, engaged in violence against hunter-gatherers. But except for the more dense societies of the coastal fringes, on the whole, the relationship was probably similar to that between European settlers and Australian Aboriginals: they perceived the indigenous European Mesolithic people as vermin or pests, not as other societies which could be bargained with, or absorbed (though the latter did occur). This probably explains the relatively long period of genetic segregation, as there were strong barriers between mixing between the two populations.

As we come closer and closer to the modern age, war became less about elimination, and more about diplomacy, co-option, and absorption. War was a preamble to the next stage of negotiation.

When Genghis Khan conquered northern China he wanted to turn it into pastureland. This would mean a famine to remove the human population of the region. His Khitai advisor, Yelu Chucai, who was stepped in Confucian learning, argued that taxation of the native population would be much more profitable than the Mongols and their allies engaging in primary production through pastoralism. The key to preventing genocide was convincing warlike elites that rents were easier and more profitable than acquiring more land which one had to toil oneself. That is, acquire people, not just land.

I write this in the context of trying to understand the genetic history of India. Why is it that Indo-Aryans contribute at least ~15% of the ancestry on the Gangetic plain, while the later Turco-Muslims contribute almost none? The answer here ventures into ideologically fraught territory because many Hindus take the word of Muslim chroniclers at their word that the predations upon the local population were marked by great brutality and killing.

The northwestern fringe of southern Indian was quite populous during the Indus Valley Civilization period. It was far larger in territory than Mesopotamia or Egypt. In contrast, the Eurasian heartland was always thinly populated. Then, and now. The number of Sintashta descended Indo-Aryans was originally small. It was always reasonable to suppose that their demographic impact was very small. Perhaps like that of the Magyars in Hungary. Ten years ago when the first evidence emerged that India was reshaped by Holocene admixtures I simply refused to believe it at first due to the demographic heft of the region.

So what happened? I think we need to understand that it is likely the early Sintashta warriors did not have Yelu Chucai whispering in their ears. They were horse-warriors par excellence, while the Eurasian oikoumene was relatively underdeveloped compared to what it would be later. There is evidence from Europe that early farming societies underwent massive demographic collapse due to endogenous forces (and perhaps exogenous climate shocks). There is no reason this could not be true elsewhere. Second, aside from the cultural toolkit of farming practices being underdeveloped, ideological justifications for social cohesion were primitive.

When the original Indo-Aryans arrived as agro-pastoralists into a semi-barbarized post-Indus Valley village society I believe they saw pastureland for their cattle and horses! Though some sort of priesthood probably survived, and transmuted into Brahmins (who assimilated many Indo-Aryan priests and shamans), there were no learned advisors handing out ancient traditions of yore. The Indo-Aryans saw an animal battle for resources, and despite their small numbers they “squeezed” the local peasantry (the mtDNA indicates very few Indo-Aryan females, so these were muarading males). This was not an organized ideological genocide, it was simply niche displacement.

In contrast, 2,000 years later when the White Huns arrived from Central Asia, they established themselves as the warrior elite of an already organically elaborated society, with a clear and distinct ideology of self, and local sub-elites which were in place to extract rents from the populace. The Indo-Aryans were more like the Dark Age Greeks, with Odysseus, a “king” still doing some of his own farming and shepherding.

The Turco-Muslims were different in that they had another alternative ideology. They were not uncooked barbarians, they had already been cooked by Islam. They were not absorbed into India because they maintained connections with Iran and Turan, and were part of the broader Dar-ul-Islam. They were in India, but not of India. But, the institutional structures of India were useful for the purposes of extracting rents. India was rich, which for most of history meant rich in people.

The Turco-Muslims came out of a milieu where they were originally slave soldiers of Iranian rulers who lived richly in sumptuous cities. Eventually, they invariably overthrew their masters and moved into the palaces themselves. Unlike the Mongols or their own ancestors, these were not people who had just come out of the tents. They did not have to be educated in the fact that maintaining the mechanisms of the old order would be more profitable than creating from anew.

All this is relevant because some people, Muslim and Hindus, assert that the Turco-Muslims engaged in massive killings and persecutions. The Turco-Muslims themselves claimed to have engaged in incredible violence against the unbelievers, styling themselves ghazis, warriors for the faith. Modern South Asian Muslims implicitly agree with the decimation when they assert that their ancestors were West and Central Asian. Both these contentions are false. The Turco-Muslims, like the Teutonic Knights and Sword Brothers in the Baltic, were proximately motivated by a desire for wealth and leisure. This is clear because the same people spread west out of the fringes of Khorasan, taking over Iranian and Arab polities one after the other through violence. But in the westward movement, there was no religious rationale given, because the Turks were Muslim, and those whom they conquered were mostly Muslim (though the Seljuqs presented themselves as protectors of Sunni Islam, overthrowing the Shia Buywids).

Obviously, this was not the case in India. An idealistic rationale presented itself to mask their avaricious behavior, and they promoted that rationale.

Second, genetically the data is clear that very little ancestry in South Asian Muslims is exogenous. Almost all the ancestors of South Asian Muslims were residents of South Asia 1,000 years ago. Many of the upper-class Muslims who claim West Asian ancestry actually descend from upper-caste Hindus. This is clear when you look at the true Y chromosomal lineages of Syeds, those who claim paternal descent from the lineage of Muhammad’s clan.

From the perspective of Hindus, 30% of the people of the Indian subcontinent are now Muslims. This is a traumatic fact for them. Additionally, between 1200 and 1750 AD Muslims were dominant across most of the subcontinent, and engaged in a project of cultural imperialism and hegemony which left psychic scars on the Indian elites, and physical scars on the architectural landscape. To be entirely frank, a project of coercive, brutal, and violent, conversion to Islam by Turks is in some ways more reassuring to many Indian elites than the fact that there was a softness to the support for native Indian religious views in many parts of the subcontinent. As it is, Hinduism remained the overwhelming religion in the heart of Turco-Muslim power in the upper reaches of the Gangetic plain, with Islam made particular headway in the margins and fringes of South Asia.

The bigger picture here is that human societies and cultural systems evolve, and become more robust. The gap between the Han and  Suit-Tang was more than 300 years. The “handoff” between the Ming and Ching (Manchus) was nearly immediate. The Chinese ideological system of rule became more efficient, more effective, over time. The ideological system of domination and control was perfected. The Manchus placed themselves on top of machinery that they inherited roughly intact from the Ming. This is not to say that they could not employ genocidal brutality. The Oirat Mongols were the last great nomadic polity. To “solve” this problem the Manchus in the 18th century engaged in a program of extermination against the Oirat led Dzhungar confederacy. By some estimates, 90% of the Dzhungars died, whether through direct slaughter, or, more often, starvation.

Of course, the Manchus were not ideologically oriented toward genocide. It was simply an instrument. Nor do I believe that the peoples of the Neolithic and Bronze Age were ideologically oriented toward genocide. The question would not make any sense. Rather, the extermination of other groups was simply an instrument of existence in their lives. They died. Or their enemies died.

The interests of the German peasant-warrior flooding into the Roman territories were to drive off the local peasants and their landlords. The interests of the tribal elite was to increase the number of people whom they ruled and could extract rents from, as well as maintaining the position of some of the older elites as service nobilities and candidates for positions within the Church. Similarly, the English settlers in the New World consistently behaved in a more brutal manner toward the native peoples and attempted to push into the interior far more vigorously, than anything the British crown wished to countenance. In an economic and political world of stability, the British crown would do better, but the interests of the American colonists was toward more aggressive dynamism.

It was the emergence of complex multiethnic imperial systems, along with class stratification and divergence of interests, that the reflex toward genocide declined. A “flat” world is a violent world.

Alan Cameron’s The Last Pagans of Rome is a work of monumental scholarship. The late author was a master of the textual sources to such an extent that no non-specialist can truly comprehend the force of his argument or its veracity in a deep manner. That being said, the book is essential reading in large part because it is an armamentarium against a conventional argument that the victory of Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire was established and sealed by the victory of Theodosius the Great at the Battle of the Frigidus in 394. And, that that victory was contingent upon that battle.

The standard model is that the rise of Christianity among the ruling class of the Roman Empire after the conversion of Constantine in the first decades of the 4th-century triggered a conservative traditionalist reaction, centered around prominent Roman Senators, precipitating out into armed resistance in the 390s. The rebellion against Theodosius is framed as a pagan cause against the devoutly Christian ruler.

Cameron rejects this whole narrative to a great extent as a projection of contemporary sensibilities and preoccupations with the ancient past. The Last Pagans of Rome presents the case that it was Gratian’s removal of public subsidies from the traditional cults in the early 380s which marked the turning point.

The term “case” must be used because the author is so convinced of his argument and conclusions (reached after a lifetime of scholarship), that the text comes across as almost lawyerly in its tone. At some point, you realize that whenever there is ambiguity and uncertainty, the conclusion will always be drawn in a way so as to buttress the thesis favored by the author, rather than simply leaving the uncertainty as is. Whereas those presenting the contrasting thesis (that pagan revival and resistance was real in the 390s)  might assume that a particular individual was a pagan, Cameron points out various reasons to be uncertain about this inference, and often will conclude “it is just as likely or perhaps more like that this person was a Christian!”

In the footnotes of The Final Pagan Generation, a more sober work, you actually see comments which argue that Cameron pushes his case for the decline and extinction of paganism too far.

Despite this qualm, I believe that Cameron’s thesis is broadly correct. First, it is entirely reasonable to suggest and suspect that modern authors are laundering their own romantic preoccupations into their interpretation of the past. I myself have been known to portray Quintus Aurelius Symmachus as a paragon of broad-minded latitudinarian tolerance, in sharp contrast with the narrow-minded intolerant scold, St. Ambrose. This is a common reflex among those given nourishment by the values of the Enlightenment.  The Last Pagans of Rome casts doubt on the way in which these men have been depicted historically, suggesting that their own self-conceptions and place in society was fundamentally different from what we might assume (to obtain powerful Christian sympathy, Symmachus had to portray himself as a tolerant individual. To maintain Christian respect, Ambrose had to show that he was a zealot).

Second, our understanding of the anthropology of religion of the past flattens the true realities and imposes cartoonish identities which likely did not correspond with anything real. Our modern idea of religion and society is conditioned on the sectarian conflicts in the West in the wake of the Reformation, as well as the formal separation of confessions enriched in the legal framework of Islam. That is, individuals are seen to have delimited and exclusive identities. Though this framework is somewhat a difficult fit in South and East Asian societies, they have nevertheless integrated and accepted it in some fashion due to the hegemonic influence of the modern West, and in South Asia the historical legacy of Islamic rule.

Obviously none of this applied to the late Roman Empire. Though Christianity made exclusive claims upon its believers, just as the Jewish God made exclusive claims on the Jews, pagan religiosity was pluralistic and promiscuous. It was integrative, non-exclusive, and diffusely delimited. This was, in fact, one of the reasons that Judaism and Christianity became influential and widely practiced in the ancient world. In The Fate of Rome, the author suggests that civic public paganism declined in the late 3rd-century, after the Plague of Cyprian, and well before Constantine’s conversion. One could argue that the centrality and dominance of Christianity in the 4th-century had less to do with victory in the competition with paganism, than the fact that there was a vacuum at the center of the state which Christianity was suited to fill.

In The Last Pagans of Rome  Cameron suggests that the elite pagans of the late 4th-century were not religious fanatics. On the contrary, their priestly duties were hereditary marks of prestige and status, rather than earned piety. One of the major reasons that they likely lagged in their adherence to the new favored religion was that it did not have a patina of prestige. As noted in Through the Eye of the Needle and The Making of the Christian Aristocracy, class prejudice, and snobbery against the decidedly middle-brow character of Christianity retarded adoption by the elite. The class origins of the early Christians was evident in the early translations of the Bibles into Latin: they were not of the aristocratic variant, but a more common register. Only when aristocrats began to convert to Christianity and join the Church in large numbers did the religion become part and parcel of the identity of elite society.

The elite of the Roman world had seen sects and cults come and go. In the late 1st-century, Vespasian brought an affection for Isis to the center of the Roman world, while in the early 3rd-century a priestly Syrian family ascended to the purple. In the late 3rd-century Solar religion and Mithraism became quite popular. It is entirely likely that the many 4th-century Roman Senators viewed the rise of Christianity as just another religion, that would have its time in the sun and fade.

Cameron in The Last Pagans of Rome argues that rather than Christian and pagan (the latter being a set defined by all those who were not Christian or Jewish), many people in the 4th-century occupied a range of views in terms of religion and identity. Some individuals were exclusive and devout Christians, while others were convinced pagans. But many individuals were nominal and mercenary about their religious affiliation, moving with the winds. This is important because it implies that not all identified Christians would be unremittingly hostile toward pagan religion due to deep ideological commitments. The 4th-century man of letters, Ausonius, is perceived by many to have been Christian primarily due to its social advantage.

Conversely, many who were nominally pagans may have not had much opposition to becoming Christian in regards to their beliefs, but were held back by other considerations. For example, perhaps their role as pagan priests was socially advantageous in the locality to a far greater extent than the low probability of obtaining favor from the imperial center through conversion to the favored imperial religion. This example then suggests why the cessation of subsidies to the pagan cults in the 380s was so essential and critical: without public funds, the maintenance of the urban and elite segment of the old religions would fall back on the wealthy families. Instead of being a social boon obtained at no personal cost, the old religion would become a fiscal burden upon the traditional elites.

For many Westerners, the premodern shift of religious identity is framed by the Reformation. Religious lands were seized and secularized. Monks were defrocked. To a great extent, it was a rupture and a forcible one. This has analogs in other societies. China in the 9th-century saw the evisceration of the Buddhist establishment by Emperors who feared an over-mighty “First Estate.” Similarly, Oda Nobunaga in the 16th-century literally burned down the Buddhist monasteries of  Japan because so many had become laws unto themselves. Cameron’s argument in The Last Pagans of Rome is that paganism in the Roman Empire expired of natural causes. It was not killed. The assault on the Serapeum was the exception, not the rule. Though some Christians in the 4th-century began to make the case for coercion in religious belief, this seems to have been rare (in contrast, practices offensive to Christians, such as animal sacrifice, were clearly sharply curtailed).

To understand what happened in the 4th-century, and later, it is useful to look at analogies in other societies and at other times. Both Tibet and Japan saw strong reactions against the adoption of Buddhism by elements of the nobility. This is strikingly similar to what reputedly occurred in the Late Roman Empire. There was resistance to the move away from Roman Catholicism in England in the 16th-century, from principled intellectuals such as St. Thomas More, to aristocrats such as the Duke of Norfolk, and peasants in the northern English countryside. In the Indian subcontinent, a succession of Muslim monarchs and elites presented the native peoples with a religious vision sharply distinct from the customs and traditions of the local religious movements. Finally, in Germany in the 17th-century several lines of rulers changed from the religion of their subjects, but were unable to convert any of their subjects.

In Tibet and Japan, the anti-Buddhist faction initially succeeded, arresting or reversing the spread of the religion, but ultimately failed in changing the long-term religious arc of the society. In India, the Muslims only converted a minority of the population, and those conversions were regionally concentrated (Islam was much more successful in the far west and east of the subcontinent). In England, there was a gradual shift toward Protestantism in the 16th-century, though a minority always remained Roman Catholic. Finally, in Germany, the confessional identities were deeply rooted enough that elite preferences were irrelevant.

It is clear that deeply rooted mass confessional identity in a modern sense did not exist in the ancient world. Some Protestant thinkers go so far as to assert that Europeans were not truly Christian until after the Protestant Reformation, which forced individuals into personal religious faith. This seems to go too far in light of broad-based popular religious movements in the late medieval period, but the relatively muted reaction of the peasantry of the rapid shift to Protestantism triggered by elite conversion and identification strongly indicate that religious identity was weak and diffuse in the pre-modern period. In the ancient world, Christians introduced a sharp and clear religious identity, but to a great extent, this was a feature of urban areas and urban sub-elites (see Rodney Stark’s unfortunately polemical Cities of God). Similarly, in the early modern period, Protestantism was initially rooted in urban areas around cultural and socio-political elites, only slowly transforming the religious life of peasants with a new sort of piety.

So the issue then is not the whole society, it is the nature of the conversion of the political and cultural elite of the Roman world. The Neoplatonists of the 6th-century remained non-Christian because their metaphysical system could not be fully integrated into Christianity (though it clearly influenced Christianity). In contrast, it seems that the social and political elite became predominantly Christian much earlier. Why? As suggested above the disconnect between the state and traditional religion starved the old cults of fiscal support, and their withering removed any prestige accrued to elite lineages through patronage and priestly duties. Additionally, it took several generations after the initial patronage of Constantine for Christianity to produce the sort of highly cultured elite individuals which added a luster of cultivation to the religion which was attractive to the sensibilities of the aristocracy. It was a much easier task to convert nobles if those who preached Christianity to them were from their own class, sharing broad values and educations.

The spread of Christianity can be analogized to the spread of Islam in the Christian and Zoroastrian world in the 7th and 8th-centuries. Aristocratic Christians such as John of Damascus had a role within the Islamic polity so long as Greek language and forms were the dominant administrative culture of the Ummayyad state. The shift to Arabic changed the incentive structure. In The Rise of Western Christendom Peter Brown contends that the movement to Arabic by Christians was the dominant variable in the conversion of the Near East. In Iran, the emergence of Islam as a majority religion was coincident with the conversion of the local nobility and the defeat of the last independent Zoroastrian warlords.

We tend to carve reality into distinct and striking categories. The Last Pagans of Rome argue that the categories “pagan” and “Christian” divided into two classes what was really a spectrum. Similarly, the Christianization of antiquity was a gradual affair, and numerically the punctuated nature of events such as the Battle of Frigidus was probably far less striking than we wish them to be.

There are similarities to the situation of early Muslims in India to early imperial Christians in Late Antiquity. Islam in the subcontinent was very much a court religion. Though Hindu rulers persisted around the peripheries for nearly the whole time, the pinnacle of rule by and large took on a Turkic and Islamic cast in the subcontinent for many centuries. And yet Hinduism, or what we call Hinduism, but was truly a multiplicity of native Indian religious forms, persisted in the face of Islam. This is a contrast to Zoroastrianism and Christianity, which eventually lost their demographic preponderance in the face of Islam.

The situation of ancient paganism may have been even more hopeless. Rather than terming these “pagans,” an appellation that some Christians might apply to Hindus and Buddhists, I think a better way to think of the Greco-Roman traditional religions is that they were tribal religions. The Greco-Romans had a sophisticated set of metaphysics and ethics elucidated in their philosophies, but these remained sealed off from the traditional religion. Christianity integrated some elements of philosophy into the tribal religion of the Jews and then universalized it. In the short term, there were strong incentives for individuals and communities to resist Christianity, but its cultural innovativeness made its final victory likely inevitable, just as in Tibet and Japan Buddhism returned after the initial persecution.

India and China both resisted assimilation by foreign religions because they had more than simply tribal religions. In China Buddhism in the 9th-century became overbearing, which resulted in concerted persecution by the state (a practice which would reemergence several times in Chinese history). But there was also a strong anti-Buddhist elite critique from Neo-Confucians. Neo-Confucianism presented itself as a better alternative, rather than simply a reversion to a tribal religion. In China, the tribal religion persists in the form of local folk religion. But this is an entirely plebian affair. In India the religious traditions were fertile and robust, giving birth to the first world religion in the form of Buddhism, and pioneering the idea of the mobile religious community, the sangha. Some of the same could be said of the Hinduism of the period, which had integrated insights from Buddhism, and developed a complex fusion of philosophy and spirituality that became the Vedanta. The Hindu-Muslim tension and conflict which has been a feature of Indian history in various forms emerges from the fact that the assimilation of Hindus into Islam as converted Muslims is not inevitable due to the latter’s clearly superior sophistication over the former.

The Last Pagans of Rome describe a world in which inchoate and decentralized paganism was confronted with a new cultural innovation, a universally oriented exclusive religious community that synthesized popular devotionalism with elite rationality. The Christianization of the aristocracy was a matter of establishing the details of the accommodation, not whether that accommodation would happen.

Back in the 1990s I read David Wingrove’s Chung Kuo series of future history science fiction.* Set in the year 2200, Wingrove depicts a world in which China is not only ascendant but in some ways the world is China.

For me, an implausible “twist” is that the political and cultural elite of this period falsified history. In this future history, the past 2,000 years has been erased from memory. China under the Han dynasty expanded westward under leaders such as Ban Chao and conquered the Roman Empire. Organized and institutional religion (Christianity and Buddhism), the rise of the West, and eventually the decline of China, never happened. Within the series itself, the rulers know the real history. Additionally, through a process of investigation and deeper analysis, bright individuals can also piece together the past. But the vast majority of humanity is totally unaware that only a few centuries ago the world was radically different.

At the time this was the most unbelievable aspect of Wingrove’s future history. How could the history of the world be so radically rewritten? Today my views are different. I have come to understand that most people do not engage in active critical-rationalism. Rather, they look to authorities from whom they can receive enlightenment, or be initiated into esoteric truths. For them, history is not a set of facts and processes about the past, but a narrative and framework which is a handmaid to an ideological project.

The examples are legion. The American Founders were white supremacists. The American Founders were devout Christians. The American Founders were radical progressives. The truth of the matter of these claims is less important than the symbolic value of the idea of who the American Founders were. The truth is secondary to the utility of the message.

This has always been, and will always be. What I am less sure of is whether today people are more ignorant of the past, or, if more people feel confident in expressing opinions about the past despite little solid knowledge about the past. Either way, this is concerning, because the truth is a critical antidote to totalitarian temptations. A smugly ignorant populace is manipulable populace.

* The original publisher gave up on the series after book seven, and Wingrove wrote a hasty and bizarre eight novel to complete the series. More recently has been rewriting the series to give in a more definitive conclusion.