Sessa 2019

The New Environmental Fall of Rome: A Methodological
Consideration
Kristina Sessa
Journal of Late Antiquity, Volume 12, Number 1, Spring 2019, pp. 211-255
(Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jla.2019.0008
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/725298
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Kristina Sessa
The New Environmental Fall of Rome:

A Methodological Consideration
A series of recent publications, both scholarly and popular, has identi-
fied the physical environment as a primary historical agent in the Roman
Empire’s development and decline as a major (and distinct) political, cul-
tural, and economic entity. This essay presents a critical review of the pro-
fessional scholarship that argues for Rome’s putative “decline and fall” due
to major environmental crises, namely climate change and the first global
pandemic of the bubonic plague. Particular attention is given to the prob-
lems of historical agency and causation, environmental determinism, inter-
disciplinarity, and the role of discourse in studying the human experience of
environmental change in Late Antiquity. It offers some preliminary sugges-
tions for a “second phase” of scholarship, which could potentially correct
current methodological problems and offer a path toward understanding
the irreducibly complex relationship between human and non-human his-
torical agents.
The last days of the Roman Empire have never been more popular. “Six Ways
Climate Change and Disease Helped Topple the Roman Empire.” “Was the
Roman Empire a Victim of Climate Change?” “The Real Reason for the Fall
of Rome: Climate Change.” “Climate and the Fall of Rome.” “How Climate
Change and Plague Helped Bring Down the Roman Empire.” “Climate a Fac-
tor in Rome’s Rise and Fall.”1 What arguably makes these titles so astound-
ing is the fact that each appears in a mainstream media outlet, from PBS
and The Smithsonian Magazine to Reuters, Vox, and The Spectator. Broader
I thank Kim Bowes, John Brooke, Cam Grey, Adam Izdebski, Anthony Kaldellis, Chris Otter,
and the two anonymous reviewers for JLA for their suggestions and insights. All errors of fact and
interpretation remain my own.
1
For the headlines, see: https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/10/30/16568716/six-ways-climate
-change-disease-toppled-roman-empire; http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/environment/was
-the-roman-empire-a-victim-of-climate-change/6724/; https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/12/famine
-fever-and-the-fall-of-rome/; https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/climate-and-the-fall
-of-the-roman-empire-42171285/; https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-climate
-change-and-disease-helped-fall-rome-180967591/; https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climate-romans
/climate-a-factor-in-romes-rise-and-fall-study-idUSTRE70C5DY20110113.
Journal of Late Antiquity 12.1 (Spring): 211–255 © 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press 211
212 Journal of Late Antiquity
public interest in our field’s history is certainly welcome, even if it is moti-

vated by contemporary fears of climate change rather than a deep apprecia-
tion for the humanities. Yet, the fact that this particular story of the later
Roman Empire—its supposed demise at the hands of environmental agents
and forces—has reached the general public should prompt professional schol-
ars to look closely at its claims and analytic framework.
Presented as a fresh approach to the old declensionist narrative, these new
studies cast the physical environment and non-human agents as the stars in
the story of Rome’s decline and fall. To be clear, the idea that environmental
factors were the root causes of Rome’s imperial demise is itself not entirely
novel. Ellsworth Huntington argued in 1917 that the Empire’s decline was
due to climate change, specifically to drought, agricultural “exhaustion,”
and to the subsequent demise of Roman racial purity (too much mixing with
barbarians).2 But monumental advances in environmental science, genetics,
and big data over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have
provided historians with evidence and hypotheses that Huntington could only
have dreamed of. Moreover, the burgeoning field of environmental studies has
developed some of the critical tools needed to avoid Huntington’s most egre-
gious sins, namely a race-based analysis of material decline and an explicit
framework of environmental determinism.
Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of Empire
is the most recent and complete study of environmental factors and the fall of
Rome, and it is part of a larger body of scholarship produced over the last two
decades which seeks to rewrite the history of the later Roman Empire from
the angle of climate change and biological crisis.3 According to a recent bib-
liometric study, the topic has yielded no fewer than eighty-five journal articles
appearing in both scientific and humanistic publications.4 From Joel Gunn’s
project on the dust veil event of 536 ce to Lester Little’s revisionist volume
on the Justinianic Plague and Frederic Cheyette’s environmental explana-
tion of declining settlement patterns, these scholars foreground the material
environment rather than anthropogenic factors in their analyses of Rome’s
late history and its post-classical transition.5 “The rise and fall of Rome,”
2
Huntington 1917.
3
See also Harper 2016a.
4
Marx, Haunschild, and Bornmann 2018. Note that this study exclusively examines journal
articles on climate change and the fall of the western Empire, and the finally tally of eighty-five
publications does not include books or book chapters. The total number of studies on environmen-
tal factors their putative link to the fall of Rome, therefore, is considerably higher.
5
Gunn 2000; Little 2007; Cheyette 2008. Climate scientists have in turn linked their data to the
fall of Rome (among other major historical developments, such as the fall of the Sasanian Empire):
see Büntgen et al. 2016. For a neutral description of this larger body of scholarship, see Decker 2017.
SESSA ^ The New Environmental Fall of Rome 213
writes Harper, “remind us that the story of human civilization is, through and
through, an environmental drama.”6
In retelling Rome’s late history as an environmental drama, scholars
feature two primary non-human protagonists: the first great pandemic of
bubonic plague, popularly known as “the Justinianic Plague,” which reached
the Roman Empire in the early 540s and reoccurred sporadically throughout
the next two centuries7; and a transitional set of climatic conditions dated
from roughly 250 to 650 ce.8 While the precise features of this new climatic
regime remain under investigation, recent studies typically emphasize the
following: an overall increased instability in weather, with longer and more
intense periods of either rainfall or drought, and a general decrease in tempera-
tures across the Empire, especially in comparison to the warmer temperatures
associated with the so-called Roman Optimum (from about 250 bce to 150
ce). Within this longer era of climate change, scholars have isolated a more
pronounced cooling period during the sixth and seventh centuries known the
“Late Antique Little Ice Age” (or LALIA).9 According to a team lead by den-
drochronologist Ulf Büntgen, the LALIA followed several massive volcanic
eruptions in the 530s and 540s ce that emitted ash and other particles into the
atmosphere, thus leading to colder temperatures across the Empire.10 These
general conditions notwithstanding, many scholars emphasize that climate
and weather in Late Antiquity varied enormously from region to region and
from year to year.11
If not already clear, this new historical scholarship relies heavily on scien-
tific knowledge, studies and data produced by climate scientists, geneticists,
and geologists using a range of modern instruments, laboratory practices, and
quantitative modeling techniques that obviously did not exist (or were even
conceivable) in Late Antiquity. Indeed our modern definition of climate as “the
6
Harper 2017, 22.
7
The literature on the first plague pandemic is vast, but see the essays in Little 2007 along with
older studies such as Biraben and Le Goff 1969, Allen 1979, Harrison 1993, and Sarris 2002. For
recent scientific literature, see below.
8
There is an ever growing body research on late Roman climate change, but accessible syntheses
can be found in McCormick et al. 2012, Manning 2013, and Decker 2017. Izdebski and Mulryan
2019 appeared too late for consideration in this review in any depth, but it is another even more
substantial publication.
9
Büntgen et al. 2016 and 2017 date the LALIA from 536 to around 660 ce. Another team of
palaeoclimate scientists has recently challenged these chronological parameters and restrict the
LALIA to the second half of the sixth century. See Helama et al. 2017.
10
Büntgen et al. 2016. For the identification of the volcanic eruptions, see Sigl et al. 2015. There
seems to be a consensus forming that late Roman volcanic forcings led to both climate change and
new disease scenarios. See Newfield and Labuhn 2017 and Newfield 2019. For an analysis of the
historical evidence for the dust veil event(s), see Arjava 2005.
11
As emphasized in Haldon et al. 2014; Izdebski et al. 2016; Haldon et al. 2018a.
long term pattern of temperature and precipitation averages and extremes at

a location” aligns poorly, if at all, with what the Greeks and Romans called
climate.12 What is more, for the study of ancient climate change, scientists
rely exclusively on proxy evidence, natural materials such as ice cores, tree
rings, sub-fossil pollen, speleotherms (mineral deposits from caves), and sedi-
mentary deposits from marine basins and lakes that are used to approximate
pre-instrumental period climate conditions.
While many historians may balk at the notion of building an argument
around proxies, models, and modern definitions, the scholars of Rome’s
environmental fall have boldly embraced it. Among other advantages, such
evidence offers a largely continuous record of climate and other environmen-
tal phenomena that were undeniably part of the late ancient landscape, even
if late Romans were unable to measure or conceptualize this record in the
manner that we can today. In this respect, scholars such as Harper poten-
tially stake out new methodological ground. In fact, according to historian
Michael McCormick, a leading voice among the new environmental histori-
ans of Rome’s fall, a scientifically guided approach to Rome’s past constitutes
nothing short of a methodological revolution. With it, he proclaims, we have
entered “a dawning age of consilient interdisciplinary investigation of the
human and natural past,” wherein scientific and historical data can be syn-
thesized, with the resulting knowledge enabling us to better understand the
course of the late Roman Empire and the lives of those who lived through it.13
The recent spate of multi-authored publications featuring scientists alongside
historians (many with historians as the lead authors) certainly suggests that
we have entered a new phase of interdisciplinary investigation.14
Armed with this data and following a “consilient” approach, scholars
have drawn a wide range of connections between the late Empire’s historical
and environmental trajectories. A general outline of this work is as follows.
On the one hand, many studies are deliberately narrow in scope, limiting their
conclusions to specific documents, geographic regions, or periods. McCor-
mick, for instance, has argued that proxy evidence for climate change indi-
cates a drought in the northwest Empire in 371 ce, scientific information
that he then uses to more accurately date the composition of a well-known
12
Definition from NOAA (see: www.climate.gov/taxonomy/term/3434). For late Romans, “cli-
mate” (klima in Greek, clima in Latin) referred to belts of the earth’s surface (five and later seven in
number) extending from West to East that corresponded with levels of solar intensity, along with
distinct cultural characteristics. See Hulme 2015, discussed below.
13
McCormick et al. 2012, 207. See also McCormick 2011 and 2013, and with Büntgen et al.
2011.
14
For example: McCormick et al. 2012; Büntgen et al. 2011 and 2016; Haldon et al. 2014; Izdeb-
ski et al. 2016; Fuks et al. 2017; Haldon et al. 2018a and 2018b.
poem.15 Archaeologist Daniel Fuks and his co-authors (which include several
geologists) maintain that regional economic decline in the southern Levant
is best explained by adverse climate conditions triggered by the 536 Dust
Veil event, while Peter Sarris and Hugh Kennedy argue that the catastrophic
demographic impact of the initial outbreak of the plague between 541 and
543 ce caused an abrupt shrinkage in the labor market, changes in land ten-
ancy arrangements, acute economic crises, and the cessation of new building
activity in particular regions of the East during the second half of the sixth
century.16 And in a detailed, multi-authored study of climate change and the
paleoecological record in western and central Anatolia, John Haldon and co-
authors suggest that a wetter, cooler climate in the years around 500 to 700
ce may be linked to a more “simplified” agricultural regime, marked by less
intensive farming (and now primarily of cereals, instead of grapes or olives),
pastoralism, and the regrowth of pine forests, though with several important
regional exceptions emphasized (for example, northwest Anatolia, near Con-
stantinople). As they note, “the overall picture appears to fit well with the
textual and archaeological evidence about the collapse of established urban
and agricultural customs, the downward demographic trend, and the general
militarization of the Empire’s provincial society.”17 Local cultural changes too
have been causally linked to specific environmental events. In a recent article,
for instance, Henry Gruber argues that the initial outbreak of the plague in
the early 540s compelled a council of Spanish bishops in Valencia to recon-
sider their own burial customs.18
On the other hand, some of these scholars draw broad, macroscalar con-
nections between historical and environmental change:
Specific climate conditions as experienced by different regions [suggests

McCormick] coincide with, and probably help to explain, the early expan-
sion of the Roman Empire and the later success of the eastern Roman Empire
while its western counterpart declined . . . [as well as] the migration of the
Huns and Avars that brought turmoil to the Roman Empire.19
Others argue that environmental crisis drove deep cultural transformations.

In The Fate of Rome, Harper contends that climate change in combination
15
McCormick 2013, 63–69.
16
Fuks et al. 2017 (numismatic effects in the Levant); Sarris 2002 (economic impacts in Egypt
and Asia Minor); and Kennedy 2007 (collapse of new building in Syria).
17
Haldon et al. 2014, 140.
18
Gruber 2018, discussing Canon 4 of the Council of Valencia (dated to either 546 or 549 ce).
19
McCormick et al. 2012, 202–3. The argument that climate change forced the Huns (and later
the Avars) out of Asia and into the Roman Empire is frequently made: see Harper 2017, 191–97;
Büntgen et al. 2016, 4–5; Cook 2013.
with plague led to the rise of Christianity in the third century and to an
intensification of apocalyptic thinking across the sixth-century Empire that
culminated with the spread of Islam in the seventh.20 Similarly, Bo Gräsland
and Neil Price, specialists in Iron Age Scandinavia, have argued that the Dust
Veil Event of 536 left both a physical mark on the landscape and a deep scar
on the religious psyche, causing sixth-century Scandinavians to reject the sun
as an object of spiritual power, and even shaping a later Nordic myth of a
wintery catastrophe that preluded the Ragnarök. “It seems,” they write, “that
whatever happened in the mid ad 500s not only devastated the rural economy
and population, but also resulted in a change of religious ideas in which the
sun suggestively fell out of favor.”21
For Mischa Meier, the author of several studies on the “Justinianic” plague
and its effects on the eastern Empire, plague produced nothing short of a cul-
tural caesura that ushered in the end of classical Rome and the beginning of
what he calls “Byzantine” society.22 This new Byzantine society, he argues,
is marked by an increased religiosity amongst its leaders, especially in their
modes of public self-presentation, a sharp turn away from secular writing, and
a marked rise in icon and Marian devotion—all starting, Meier insists, pre-
cisely in the 540s, with the first major wave of the plague in the East. “[T]he
answer,” he writes, “to the question of the significance of the pandemic is
self-evident: it was to a large extent jointly responsible for a process of cul-
tural reconstruction that formed part of the transition from late antiquity to
the early Middle Ages.”23 For medievalist Lester Little, editor and author of
the introduction to a major study of the first bubonic plague pandemic, the
disease event(s) led to changes in perceptions of labor, and the emergence of
something like a work ethic, whereby mass death and population decimation
caused elite late Romans both to perceive manual labor as a morally positive
activity and to become more “pious” in their daily lives.24 Little too contends
that, “plague helped carry out Antiquity and usher in the Middle Ages.”25 In
fact, the idea that plague brought about the end of the Roman Empire and the
20
Harper’s connection between climate change, the Plague of Cyprian, and the rise Christian-
ity is basically a scientifically souped-up version of Stark 1996. See Harper 2017, 153–58 and 12:
“Everywhere apocalyptic fear reigned, in Christendom and formative Islam. The end of the world
felt nigh.” Harper’s analysis of apocalyptic thought as a response to the environmental crises of the
sixth century is discussed further below.
21
Gräslund and Price 2012, 438.
22
Meier 2016. See also Meier 2005 and 2003. Rosen 2007, a more popular work, makes a simi-
lar argument to Meier 2016 and Little 2007 with regard to the plague and cultural change.
23
Meier 2016, 291. An expanded argument to this effect appears in Meier 2012.
24
Little 2007, 3–32, especially 23.
25
Little 2007, xi.
beginning of the Middle Ages has become so normalized in the scholarship

that it is cited as the ultimate cause of Rome’s fall in general accounts of global
environmental history.26
These are ambitious studies to say the least, and the authors cited above are
unquestionably forging new ground by approaching the late Roman physical
world not as an inert backdrop to human history, but as an active agent in its
development. At their best, they delineate the dizzyingly complex and some-
times non-linear chain of events, agents, impacts, and contexts that contrib-
ute to historical change.27 Moreover, their insistence on taking non-human
agency seriously, and on integrating evidence from the physical environment
into the study of Late Antiquity, offer an important corrective to generations
of scholarship that has focused largely, if not exclusively, on human actors and
their texts. Nevertheless, there are reasons to exercise caution with respect not
only to some of the individual historical claims made in these studies but also
to their broader historiographical and methodological goals, especially what
McCormick calls “consilience,” that is, the synthesis of modern scientific data
with late Roman evidence. We should be particularly wary of identifying any
of set of physical phenomena as “causes” of Rome’s fall tout court, particu-
larly when it comes to cultural developments.
The purpose of this essay is not to debunk individual arguments in spe-
cific studies. I leave this task, to whatever degree it should be done, largely
to book reviewers and area specialists. Nor is it to critique the science per se.
It is written from the perspective of neither a climate scientist nor an expert
in environmental studies but of a cultural historian deeply interested in the
so-called material turn who accepts the propositions that environmental and
non-human agency is real, and that history is not the production of humans
alone. Among the most exciting historiographical developments over the
past few decades has been the production of models of knowledge, ontol-
ogy, and analysis that are not oriented exclusively around social construction
and language. The idea that objects, animals, and other non-human entities
(volcanoes, oak trees, and solar radiation, for instance) shape the develop-
ment of human affairs, that they possess historical agency in some form, has
forced scholars to rethink some of their basic assumptions about government,
26
Brooke 2014, 343. For Brooke, the “Justinianic Plague” was the third “devastating epidemic
disease” (following the Antonine and Cyprianic Plagues) that hit the Empire, caused catastrophic
demographic decline, and thus led to its demise.
27
Harper’s account of the origins and early transmission of the first plague pandemic from Asia
to the eastern Roman Empire is a model of this kind of multi-faceted historical narrative. See
Harper 2017, 206–45.
power, and culture.28 Yet, how we are to understand, and study, this irreduc-
ibly complex relationship between human and non-human remains a chal-
lenge especially for ancient historians, for reasons outlined above. The new
environmental historians of Rome’s fall have broached, but not resolved, this
key methodological quandary.
If the work of these historians has collectively produced a crucial “first
phase” of scholarship on the relationship between non-human and human
history, which lays out some general questions and groundwork and draws
attention to places where the natural and historical archives appear to over-
lap, then this essay endeavors to initiate a “second phase” of the project. This
proposed second phase begins with a critical inquiry into the methodological
tools, analytic frameworks, and interpretive assumptions that underpin this
first wave of scholarship.29 It invites scholars to reexamine the study of the
material environment in late Roman history, especially as an agent of change
on the levels of individual experience, social organization, and culture. How,
if at all, can we talk about environmental variables as “causes” of change on
these different levels of human interaction with the physical world? And what
are the intellectual roots and heuristic problems concomitant with McCor-
mick’s “age of consilience?” Is it so easy, as McCormick and others suggest, to
fuse the natural sciences with humanistic studies? Alternatively, do historians
need to change the way that they interpret the historical evidence, that is, how
they read texts in response or relation to the scientific data? As we shall see,
the question of textual interpretation is at best an afterthought in the work of
the new environmental historians of Rome’s fall, though it is a crucial mat-
ter that demands our close attention.30 The twinned issues of language and
discourse will be directly addressed in a later section on the purported links
between environmental crisis and apocalypticism.
What follows are more observations than answers, though by challenging
these scholars on certain points, I hope to encourage more productive, self-
reflexive dialogue with respect to the methods and frames that we historians
use to examine the transformations of the late Roman world. Such dialogue
is necessary if we are to push the findings of this first wave of scholarship
further and come to a deeper, more complex, and multi-variable understand-
ing of how late Roman men, women, and children shaped—and were shaped
by—their ever-changing physical environments.
28
Latour 2005; Otter 2008 and 2010.
29
This essay does not inaugurate such inquiry, but it is the first presented by a cultural historian.
For earlier attempts at methodological investigation with respect to pre-modern European history
and climate change, see McCormick 2011 and 2013; Izdebski et al. 2016; Haldon et al. 2018a.
30
As recently noted, to my knowledge for the first time, by Haldon et al. 2018b in their review
of Harper 2017.
Science and Historical Causation

How to explain non-human agency in history, and how to interpret its impact
and force on human practices, ideas, and development, are arguably the two
greatest analytic challenges for environmental historians. The specter of envi-
ronmental determinism—that is, the notion that the physical environment
exerts a primary, independent influence on human development and can pre-
dispose societies toward particular outcomes (whether flourishing continuity
or collapse)—has long plagued the field, and scholars of the new environ-
mental history of Rome’s fall are acutely aware of the pitfalls before them.31
Most of the scholars cited above explicitly disclaim the notion that any single
non-human agent, or even any single chain of environmental developments,
mono-causally brought about Rome’s demise and fall.32 In this respect, it is
unfair to compare their work with the reductionist arguments put forward
by authors such as David Keys or M. G. L. Baillie, who have argued that
Rome’s imperial demise was a direct result of the Dust Veil Event of 536
ce.33 Moreover, many categorically reject the very concept of “societal col-
lapse” which still animates some of the scholarship (for instance, Büntgen et
al. 2011), though in this case, only John Haldon’s study of the post-classical
Byzantine Empire, aptly titled The Empire that Would Not Die, gives full cre-
dence to a resilience paradigm.34 Nevertheless, as other scholars have noted,
an enviro-reductive framework remains operative in many of these studies,
what Catherine Kearns calls “implicit determinism . . . when we take up the
environment as an explanans . . .”35
The crucial methodological issues in my mind, therefore, do not stem
from a lack of awareness regarding the problem of reductive or mono-causal
31
Like any scholarly concept, “environmental determinism” has a long intellectual history with
numerous definitions appearing over the years. See Coombes and Barber 2005, for a brief history
of the term, and Meyer and Guss 2017, 5–28, who wish to reclaim “environmental determinism”
with revised definitions.
32
Virtually every study discussed in this essay presents a disclaimer or acknowledgement of
the pitfalls of reductive and deterministic arguments about environmental cause and effect. See,
for example, McCormick 2011, 254 and 2013, 81–82; Haldon et al. 2014, 115–56; Harper 2017,
20–21, 260; Meier 2016, 270; Stathakopoulos 2007, 99, 117–18. Yet, none of these authors inter-
rogates the term or explains from which definition of “environmental determinism” he is distanc-
ing himself.
33
Keys 1999; Baillie 1999.
34
Haldon 2016. By resilience paradigm, I mean a model of historical change that captures the
“persistence, adaptability and, transformability of complex adaptive social-ecological systems”
(Folke 2016) of, for example, the post-classical eastern Roman Empire. See also Izdebski et al.
2018.
35
Kearns 2017, 4. On the implicit determinism that characterizes the scholarship under review
here, see also Grey, forthcoming and Haldon et al. 2018b, specifically on Harper, The Fate of
Rome.
historical argumentation; most of the historians discussed in this essay

acknowledge and claim to avoid such errors. Yet, environmental determinism
nevertheless persists, even if the authors avoid its blatant application by sub-
stituting vague yet expansive expressions of causation. To cite Harper: “We
shall not shy away from attributing great causal influence to natural forces,
even as we strive to avoid flattening out the texture of events in a reduction-
ist fashion.”36 The fact that their analyses are often ultimately deterministic
points to deeper critical issues, specifically the lack of engagement with the
very questions of causality, linearity, and the “synthesis” of modern science
with historical investigation. For the most part, these studies collectively fail
to ruminate on, or even seriously consider, how one should relate non-human
agency—which scientists study using radically different epistemological tools
from historians—to human agency in the deep past of Late Antiquity.37 Put
another way, the historians of the new environmental fall of Rome typically
acknowledge what arguments not to make (even if they do not always success-
fully avoid them); but they have dedicated relatively little time to developing
new interpretive methods and critical analytic frameworks, which are needed
to push the historical inquiry further.
Metaphor instead of Method

Consider the places where scholars do address method and the critical ques-
tion of historical causality. The following passage from Harper’s The Fate
of Rome offers a representative example of the sort of interpretive work per-
formed in these studies:
Historical change is neither sudden nor tidy. The twin catastrophes of plague
and ice age did not collapse the Roman Empire in a clean blow. They did
not even topple the regime of Justinian . . . But environmental degradation
sapped the vitality of the empire. In the long run, the forces of dissolution
prevailed. Sometime in the years spanned by John the Almsgiver’s life, in the
second half of the sixth century and the first years of the seventh, the empire
crossed a tipping point. Different regions of the empire responded to the
shocks of mortality and climate change at their own rhythm. Some wilted
without delay, others withstood the winds of change for a time . . . Like a
towering oak drawing its last nourishment from a decaying root system, the
36
Harper 2017, 20. See also Cheyette 2008, 162–63 for very explicit statements of climatic
determinism, with no corresponding disclaimer, and Gruber 2018, who argues that the first wave
of the plague pandemic independently caused bishops in Spain to legislate emergency episcopal
burial customs.
37
Izdebski et al. 2016, 7–9 is an important exception, though I disagree with some of their obser-
vations, as discussed more fully below.
empire died from the inside, slowly. Only then was it felled by a swift blow
from without [by the Persian and Arab armies].38
Like Gibbon’s famous narrative of Rome’s demise—on which Harper appears

to be modeling his own prose, if not his larger catastrophist argument—this
passage from The Fate of Rome paints a stirring image of the Empire’s late
trajectory and the nature of historical change. The image is not entirely wrong;
historical change is indeed slow and messy. But Harper skirts the problem of
causality altogether by substituting a string of metaphors (culminating with
an environmentally-pummeled tree ultimately cut down by human agency) for
an actual analysis.
In fact, when faced with the challenging task of explaining the historical
impact or meaning of environmental agency and its effect on human action, the
scholars of Rome’s environmental fall typically lean more on metaphor than
method. Sometimes they describe environmental agency in thespian terms,
as playing “the protagonist’s role” in historical developments.39 Other times
they emphasize its contingent force with words like “wild card” or as acting
with humans in an “unintended conspiracy.”40 Abstract terms borrowed from
biology are also used: natural disasters, one author writes, “provided vital
impulses for the development of the Byzantine cult of images.”41 Ecology and
systems theory are also popular, and scholars use phrases like “concatena-
tion,” “feed-back loop,” and “tipping point” to denote links of cause and
effect or moments of abrupt rupture.42 Alternatively, they might emphasize
agency through recourse to anthropomorphizing rhetoric, describing bacte-
ria, for instance, as “agents acting in their own interest” and as “a thief in
the night” that “in an instant . . . reversed the collective, painful effort of two
centuries of demographic growth.”43 Humans, conversely, can be stripped of
their intentionality to become “unwitting agents” in their own history.44 Or
perhaps there is a see-saw relationship between the two: “If the environment
had receded for a little while and let human actions take center stage, nature
was about to reassume the protagonist’s role.”45 Still others stress coincidence,
38
Harper 2017, 260.
39
Harper 2017, 198.
40
Harper 2017, 15 and 5, respectively.
41
Meier 2001, 191 n. 52.
42
Harper 2017, 260 (“tipping point); 21, 22, and passim (“concatenation”); Cheyette 2008, 164
(“feed-back loop”). See also Büntgen et al. 2016, 4, where climate is a “trigger for political, soci-
etal, and economic turmoil,” and Cook 2013, 101, where it is a “mechanism that could have incited
the Huns and Avars to migrate west and invade late-Roman Europe . . .”
43
Harper 2017, 291 and 232, respectively.
44
Harper 2017, 5.
45
Harper 2017, 198.
obviating the question of causation altogether or, conversely, actually positing

that coincidence itself holds possible explanatory power.46 Sometimes causa-
tion is simply implied, and writers only discuss “effects” of environmental
agency on human history.47 In many cases, the same author mixes all of these
metaphors and degrees of causation, leaving the reader puzzling over pre-
cisely how she should understand the relationship between environmental and
human agency, science and history.
Perhaps this is their point: causality is not only a multi-variable phenom-
enon but it is also marked by a variety of relations between cause and effect,
some direct, others indirect, non-linear, or even unintended, and still oth-
ers based upon utterly contingent circumstances. Indeed some scholars of the
ancient environment, such as Sturt Manning, describe the environment not as
a cause or agent of change but as “a context for human society, lives, inter-
actions, and decisions, and potentially provides opportunities or challenges
which may influence both small scale and macro scale human history.”48
But none of the historians of Rome’s environmental fall actually states this
proposition; instead they present their conclusions using imprecise figura-
tive language, which often masks a decidedly deterministic model of causal-
ity and obviates entirely the crucial matter of method.49 Moreover, they fail
to acknowledge that this language does not derive from ancient authors, for
whom scientific concepts such as “ecosystem” and “tipping point” did not
exist. In many cases, the scholars appear to choose their words for dramatic
effect rather than historical accuracy or analytic precision, an understand-
able decision given the aims of some, such as Harper, to reach non-specialist
46
See, for example, McCormick et al. 2012, 202, cited above, page 215. See also Büntgen et al.
2011, 580, where the authors state that climate change “paralleled” certain socio-political and
economic crises.
47
McCormick et al. 2012, 170, 186. See also Little 2007, 23; Manning 2013, 104; Meier 2016,
subtitle of part three: “The long-term perspective: the effects on mentalités of the Justinianic
Plague.”
48
Manning 2013, 117. Manning, interestingly, is among the co-authors of McCormick et al.
2012 and Haldon et al. 2014, though here I cite an independently authored essay, wherein he dis-
cusses method.
49
Harper 2017, 20–21 (emphasis added) comes the closest to articulating his method: “The
end of the Roman Empire, as contemplated here, was not a continuous decline leading to inevi-
table ruin, but a long, circuitous, and circumstantial story in which a resilient political formation
endured and reorganized itself, until it fell apart, first in the west and then in the east. This pattern
of change will always be presented as a highly circumstantial interplay between nature, demog-
raphy, economy, politics, and even, we will argue, something so ethereal and quixotic as systems
of belief, which were repeatedly unsettled and reconfigured in the course of these centuries. The
charge of history is to interweave these threads of the story in the right way, with a healthy respect
for the realm of freedom and contingency, and a strong dose of sympathy for the humans who made
their lives under the circumstances they were given.” But what precisely constitutes “the right way”
to weave these threads together?
audiences. Nevertheless, in light of the historiographical claims at stake (the

very “decline and fall” of Rome), scholars need to offer more robust method-
ological reflection. For in the end, one is left with a uselessly capacious model
of environmental causality.
To the extent that this first phase of scholarship has generated method-
ological reflection, it has typically involved calls for the integration of an
increasingly extensive scientific archive with the historical record in order
to elicit a causal link between environmental developments and historical
change. Consider, for example, a recent discussion of environmental agency
and historical method by McCormick, a pioneering scholar of this first phase
of research:
Today the evidence is insufficient to claim that climate anomalies determined

the course of empires and civilizations. Nevertheless climate change certainly
was capable of playing a role in the complex unfolding of human history by
changing the background environmental conditions . . . The task before us is
to identify and date rigorously such moments, factors and actors in the grow-
ing record of ancient and medieval environmental history. Only then can we
begin to understand their implications for our broader task of explaining the
lives of the women and men who have preceded us.50
As is clear from this quote, a pervasive scientism runs through McCormick’s

thought, expressed here as a belief that with better scientific data (especially
with higher resolution to allow for more precise chronological synchroniza-
tion), future historians will be able to demonstrate causal links between envi-
ronmental and historical change, even if “[t]oday the evidence is insufficient.”51
For McCormick, it remains premature to assign causality to the environment
as an explanatory framework for human affairs, but he remains assured of
its privileged interpretive power, provable at some future date. “For the his-
torian,” he writes elsewhere, “these new scientific data unveil intelligible pat-
terns of cause and effect in a succession of devastating climate anomalies
that occurred on a transcontinental scale. For the scientist, such a historical
study demonstrates the influence of a known climate mechanism on people’s
lives.”52 In the end, it seems that for McCormick historians stand to learn
a great deal more from scientists and their physical data (the lofty promise
of “intelligible patterns of cause and effect”) than scientists will take from
50
McCormick 2013, 88, emphasis in original.
51
See also McCormick 2011, 253–54. By “scientism” I refer to the excessive belief in the meth-
ods of the natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, and so on) to explain all realities and forms
of knowledge.
52
McCormick 2011, 256, emphasis added.
historians, with their dusty texts and pot sherds (the rather banal insight that
climate impacts people’s lives).
If scientific data ultimately drive historical investigation, then what inter-
pretive work is left for historians according to McCormick’s proposed model?
While acknowledging that historians possess unique technical skills (paleog-
raphy, knowledge of ancient languages, and so forth), he recommends that
our present role is essentially to corroborate the scientific data:
To explore the historical problem of societal response to climate change,

we need to proceed on at least two levels. We need to select examples of
specific, securely demonstrated and understood climate change with high
chronological resolution in specific geographic regions, and analyze in their
light relevant historical and archaeological data, for instance, about food
production or water supply.53
Elsewhere in this study, McCormick cross-references proxy evidence (from

tree-rings) that points to an especially dry period in the late fourth century
with a brief allusion in Ausonius’ poem the Mosella to a “drought-stricken”
(arens) Roman settlement between the Rhine and Moselle Rivers.54 Armed
with this apparent correspondence between scientific data and poetic allusion,
he concludes not only that Ausonius recorded an actual drought in his poem
(an assumption reached through a positivistic reading of the text driven by the
dendrochronological evidence, as discussed below), but also that this newly
acquired fact warrants re-dating the poem’s composition. Elsewhere, he talks
about the importance of historians “validating” the results of the scientists,
proving, as it were, that their models of climate change or contagion have a
basis in the past.55 For McCormick, in other words, historical evidence is
largely a way to prove or verify what the more privileged scientific informa-
tion suggests.
Consider another essay in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, this
one co-authored by McCormick, other historians (including Harper), and a
group of climate scientists.56 Despite its bold claim to showcase the possibili-
ties of interdisciplinary scholarship, the argument for the cooling and instabil-
ity of the late ancient climate rests almost entirely on the authors’ reading of
natural-scientific proxy evidence. Historical sources enter the discussion only
by way of the occasional footnote, which, for example, summarizes a handful
53
McCormick 2013, 82, emphasis added.
54
McCormick 2013, 63–69. Note that the Latin for “dry” or “parched” (arens) becomes the
more specific “drought-stricken” in McCormick’s translation.
55
McCormick 2011, 255.
56
McCormick et al. 2012.
of literary references to flooding in late sixth-century Gaul. As McCormick

and co-authors state, the function of these references in the essay is simply to
“corroborate . . . the new annual record of early summer precipitation recently
established from tree rings of northeastern France.”57
Perhaps the best example of McCormick’s deterministic method and his
perception of historical sources as second-order evidence is the “Geodatabase
of Historical Evidence on Roman and Post-Roman Climate, 100 BC to 800
ad.”58 The database, designed and compiled by McCormick with his students
(including Kyle Harper), remains publicly accessible on the Harvard University
website for the Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilizations (DARMA)
project (https://darmc.harvard.edu/data-availability), though it appears to
have been last updated in 2014. The database is an Excel spread sheet that
includes: names of authors (both ancient and modern), titles of works (both
primary and secondary), the type of environmental phenomenon referenced
by the author, its possible dates, its geographical location, its strength (ranked
on a scale of one to four), whether it is “confirmed or contradicted by natural
scientific evidence” (under the label, “consilience”), and a “certainty” evalu-
ation, in which the creators of the database rank the historical likelihood of
the reference on a scale of one to four. While the database is a great place to
begin a study of potential human or textual responses to ancient and medieval
environmental phenomena, cultural historians will find many of its features
frustrating. First, the database in some places fails to distinguish between an
ancient reference to an environmental event and a modern reconstruction of it
from proxy data (as is the case with most of the late antique references to Nile
flooding59). Second, neither the website nor McCormick’s related publications
present criteria for how the “certainty” of a particular reference was deter-
mined, leaving us in the dark with regards to the methods used for evaluating
veracity and accuracy. Third, the database fails to differentiate among the ref-
erences in primary sources in terms of their literary genres; here, a poem and
a chronicle are treated as if they were indistinguishable types of texts. Fourth,
and most problematically in my opinion, the database implies that all material
crises are necessarily climate events. For instance, “food shortages” (one of
the categories of crisis events in the database) were not always or even usually
the result of environmental conditions in antiquity.60 In sum, McCormick’s
57
McCormick et al. 2012, 196, with n. 21.
58
A description of the database appears in McCormick et al. 2012, 207–9.
59
McCormick et al. 2012, 208 notes that the “post-Roman data [for the Nile flooding] have
yet to be fully tested for authenticity,” but users of the database would not immediately know this
unless familiar with McCormick et al. 2012 and 2013, which explain that the records of the Nile’s
flooding for the years between 300 to around 622 ce must be reconstructed from proxies.
60
Most historians of famine argue that food shortages are always political.
geodatabase of historical evidence on climate is effectively a list of implied

facts excised from their historical context, which seem to have been collected
not for analysis on their own terms but to “offer a powerful eyewitness check
on indices deduced from natural-scientific evidence.”61
McCormick’s method thus privileges an environmental event or phenom-
enon, first and presumably best understood by scientists using proxy data,
models, and modern instruments. Historical sources come second in the
interpretive process, and their analysis seems to constitute little more than
searching for textual references or material traces from the archaeological
record, highlighting primarily, if not exclusively, positive “matches” between
the science and the history.62 For McCormick, historical evidence (whether
material or textual) appears to offer little more than a means of authenticating
whatever data can be gleaned from the so-called natural archives; it is noth-
ing more nor less than “the ultimate proxy evidence of climate change in the
pre-instrumental era.”63
To be clear, McCormick’s response to the challenge of integrating sci-
entific with historical evidence is not entirely representative of pre-modern
European environmental history. For example, in one multi-authored essay
featuring Byzantinist John Haldon as lead author, historians, climate scien-
tists, and archaeologists underscore the very different ways in which histo-
rians and scientists approach agency as well as cause and effect (“scientists
seek to reduce causality to simple terms, such as temporal coincidence or sta-
tistical correlation, whereas historians deal with complex processes and are
wary of oversimplification”).64 They also fully acknowledge that we remain
a long way from fully unpacking “the causal relationship between environ-
mental, political, socio-economic, and cultural developments,” though deter-
mining causation nevertheless remains a primary goal.65 In another article
by members of a Princeton University working group on climate change and
history, Haldon and co-authors explain why scholars must also consider cul-
tural and ideological factors, since “how people understood what happens in
their world directly determines how they respond and how they transform
61
McCormick et al. 2012, 207.
62
While his analyses only discuss correspondences, McCormick acknowledges the importance
of disjunctures in the evidence: “Contradiction should be expected, but it, too, can be instructive.”
However, he does not explain the place of these contradictions in “consilience.” See McCormick
2011, 271.
63
McCormick 2011, 256 and McCormick et al. 2007. See, however, McCormick 2011, 270
where he proclaims (weakly, in my opinion) that science does not trump history in its importance.
64
Haldon et al. 2014, 115–20, at 120.
65
Haldon et al. 2014, 119. See also Izdebski et al. 2016, and Haldon et al. 2018a.
their environment”—an angle of analysis that seems difficult to achieve with

McCormick’s heavily scientistic and positivistic approach.66
Consilience and Interdisciplinarity in Late Antique

Environmental History
Nevertheless, all of these scholars—McCormick, Haldon, along with their
respective co-authors—maintain a deep faith in the possibilities for synthe-
sizing scientific and humanistic knowledge. They speak frequently and opti-
mistically of what McCormick calls “the emerging consilient approach to
interdisciplinary history,” that is, an imagined methodological framework
wherein natural scientists and humanists fuse the otherwise disparate evi-
dence, methods, and outcomes of their respective disciplines through delib-
erate and thoughtful cooperation.67 The case for what Adam Izdebski (a
Byzantine historian and member of the Princeton working group) names “the
consilience project” rests upon two different but intersecting concepts, consil-
ience and interdisciplinarity. Both terms demand our close attention, as they
appear in published methodological considerations by leading scholars in the
fields of pre-modern European environmental history as well as in the litera-
ture on Rome’s environmental fall.68
The less familiar concept used to denote this synthetic approach to inquiry
is consilience. The term itself was coined in the nineteenth century, but its
contemporary currency dates to 1998 with Edward O. Wilson’s publication of
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Wilson, a highly regarded entomolo-
gist who helped found the field of sociobiology, wrote Consilience as a sort of
epistemological manifesto, a call to scientists and humanistic scholars to join
forces in the search for truth. “Only fluency across the boundaries,” Wilson
proclaims, “will provide a clear view of the world as it really is, not as seen
through the lens of ideologies and religious dogmas or commanded by myopic
response to immediate need.”69 For Wilson, the “world as it really is” is part
of universe governed by—and ultimately reducible to—the natural sciences.
Human history and physical history are one: “The central idea of the consil-
ience world view is that all tangible phenomena, from the birth of the stars
66
Haldon et al. 2018a, 3211.
67
The phrase is part of the title of McCormick 2011.
68
McCormick 2011, 2013; Harper 2017; Fuks et al. 2017. Significantly, members of Princeton
University’s “Climate Change and History Research Initiative” have embraced the concept of “con-
silience” as their methodological loadstar. See Izdebski et al. 2016; Newfield and Labahn 2017;
Newfield 2019; Haldon et al. 2018a and 2018b.
69
Wilson 1998, 14.
to the working of social institutions, are based on material processes that are
ultimately reducible, however long and tortuous the sequences, to the laws of
physics.”70 Denigrating cultural and social theory of all flavors for its obses-
sion with language, the discursive construction of scientific truth, and power
(with particular animosity voiced toward Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault,
and Bruno Latour), Wilson advocates a single explanatory framework that
is expressly positivistic in method and anchored in a physicalist ontology.
“There is only one class of explanation,” he concludes. “It traverses the scales
of space, time, and complexity to unite the disparate facts of the disciplines by
consilience, the perception of a seamless web of cause and effect.”71
Is this what scholars have in mind when they cite Wilson’s 1998 book and
pin their analytic hopes on the possibilities of “consilience”? McCormick at
least appears to follow the general lines of Wilson’s thought on the singular-
ity of knowledge and reality. “Today,” writes McCormick, “consilience refers
to the quality of investigations that draw conclusions from forms of evidence
that are epistemologically distinct . . . consilience points to areas of underlying
unity of humanistic and scientific investigation—a unity arising from that of
reality itself.”72 “Consilience,” he claims elsewhere, “occurs when evidence of
two completely different origins ‘jumps together.’ Epistemologically distinct,
the two pieces of evidence come together because the reality from which they
stem is one.”73 Adam Izdebski and co-authors, too, invoke Wilson 1998 and
his “conviction that human knowledge is a unity.”74 While voicing some con-
cern with the reductive nature of Wilson’s model, they nevertheless embrace
the concept’s potential as the starting point for what they call “the consilience
project.”75 Others, however, work with a less ontologically-loaded notion of
the term, understanding consilience as a collaborative process, wherein disci-
plines are combined to answer shared questions. Thus Haldon and co-authors
speak of “an approach that integrates societal and environmental factors
70
Wilson 1998, 291. And again at 292: “The main thrust of the consilience world view . . . is that
culture and hence the unique qualities of the human species will make complete sense only when
linked in causal explanation to the natural sciences.”
71
Wilson 1998, 291. Interestingly, more recent work on Wilson’s model of consilience has scaled
back this absolute proclamation and allows for multiple explanatory frameworks operating at vari-
ous levels of organization, time, and so on. See Slingerland and Collard 2012, 17.
72
McCormick 2011, 257. McCormick refers explicitly to Wilson 1998 in this essay.
73
McCormick 2013, 68–69. Elsewhere in this same essay, however, “consilience” seems to mean
something more prosaic, namely, independent attribution from multiple sources. See McCormick
2013, 76. Note too that in the “Geodatabase” each identified environmental event is evaluated in
terms of “consilience,” for which it is given a “Y” [yes], “N” [no], or “?” [uncertain]. Fuks et al.
2017, 1 also use the term as a synonym for a synchronization of sources.
74
Izdebski et al. 2016, 8–9.
75
See also Fuks et al. 2017, 1 –2, who cite Izdebski et al. 2016, McCormick 2011, and Wilson
1999 [sic] in their presentation of “consilience” as a guiding concept.
through consilience, that is, using different disciplines to examine the same
question.”76 Harper too cites “consilience” as a guiding methodological con-
cept in his attempted synthesis of scientific and historical data, just as Timothy
Newfield hails its possibilities as a method for “synthesizing . . . evidence and
interweaving the methods and results of different fields of study.”77
If understood in the strict Wilsonian sense, consilience is an intellectually
challenging concept for historians, given its epistemological and ontological
premises. For this author at least, it is hard to accept a grand unified theory
of knowledge that is deeply scientistic, dismissive of key insights from modern
social theory and the linguistic turn, and reduces all history (all human activ-
ity for that matter) to the laws of physics. I would, therefore, urge scholars
who use the term in this manner to reflect more deeply on its implications.
However, if interpreted more broadly as “interdisciplinarity,” another con-
cept that frequents the scholarship under review here, then consilience-qua-
interdisciplinarity is a potentially fruitful, if not undertheorized term that
nevertheless warrants analysis.
The idea of integrating fields for the purpose of undertaking common
research projects has long been part of the western academic tradition. While
“interdisciplinarity” can sometimes feel like an empty slogan favored by uni-
versity administrators, it is a concept that has led to concrete collaborations
across disciplines, including between the sciences and the humanities. Joint
initiatives between archaeologists and natural scientists are arguably the most
successful set of examples relevant to us here, even if the collaborative process
has been slow to develop.78 But as always, the devil is in the details; the prac-
tical instantiation of interdisciplinarity ranges more broadly than one might
think. Institutional obstacles are legion, as are the language barriers that sep-
arate Classicists from chemists.79 What is more, the interdisciplinary process
itself is not singular. One recent empirical study of interdisciplinary initiatives
and publications, for instance, outlines three different modes of interdiscipli-
narity, including one called the “subordination-service mode,” which neatly
captures McCormick’s hierarchical approach of privileging scientific over his-
torical data.80 Moreover, not all scholars believe that the goal of interdiscipli-
narity ought to be synthesis or unity. Rather, interdisciplinarity can also be
conceived and carried out as an agonistic or antagonistic process, whereby the
76
Haldon et al. 2018a, 3211. In Haldon et al. 2018b, parts 1and 2, consilience is defined as
“the effort to unify different methodologies that address similar problems . . . [citing Izdebski et
al. 2016].”
77
Harper 2017, 19; Newfield 2019, 109.
78
Pollard and Bray 2007.
79
As Izdebski et al. 2016.
80
Barry, Born, and Weszkalnys 2008, 28.
goal is not synthetic unity but the clarification of difference, whether we are
talking about research methods or results.81
For all of these reasons, the scholars of Rome’s new environmental fall
would do well to ruminate further on what precisely they mean when they call
for “consilience” and interdisciplinary collaboration. Contrary to McCormick,
distinct epistemological fields do not simply “jump together,” the Latin roots
of the word consilience notwithstanding.82 Nor, as Izdebski and co-authors
claim, are the differences separating paleoscientists and historians more appar-
ent than real. While it is true that they share an interest in the past and use lan-
guage and narrative to communicate their ideas, these are rather basic points
of methodological intersection.83 Significantly, these scholars collectively fail
to address the fact that scientists and historians study radically different types
of evidence (ice cores versus poems, for example) and use radically different
methods of analysis to evaluate them (assessing the results produced by mass
spectrometers versus, for instance, textual interpretation). Moving forward,
we may wish to consider how an agonistic or antagonistic mode of interdis-
ciplinarity may ultimately prove a better fit for approaching the study of the
ancient environment and its relationship to the humans who inhabited it.
In sum, although they call for increased interdisciplinary collaboration,
the writing of more co-authored papers, and highlight the need for advancing
our investigations on more granular geographic scales, these studies offer no
working model for the integration of what remain distinct forms of knowl-
edge beyond the practice of looking for matches between one kind of data
and another as a means of asserting possible causal relationships. In this first
phase of scholarship on late Roman environmental and human history, there-
fore, the science (and the work of scientists) ultimately drives the inquiry,
while historical evidence (and the work of historians) serves largely to validate
their hypotheses. As we move toward the second phase, several root problems
remain, to which we shall now turn: the matter of discordant evidence (the
“messiness” of history to which Harper alluded, when distinct epistemologi-
cal fields do not seamlessly align) and the crucial issue of language and dis-
course in the constitution of historical reality.
Addressing Disjuncture and Discourse

Perhaps one contribution we humanistic scholars can make is to highlight
places where the environmental proxy record and the historical archives are
at odds, where one finds not corroboration between the data, but disjuncture
81
Barry, Born, and Weszkalnys 2008.
82
McCormick 2011, 257.
83
Izdebski et al. 2016, 7–9.
and disagreement. In a forthcoming article, for instance, late Roman histo-

rian Cam Grey (who also holds an MS in environmental studies) highlights
the messy reality of synthesizing environmental science and historical evi-
dence, especially with respect to the linked issues of the use of proxies and
the mismatch of scale.84 As noted above, because the Romans had no tools
for direct meteorological measurement, climate scientists necessarily rely on
indirect physical evidence from the environment, much of which post-dates
the Roman period or derives from regions outside the Mediterranean basin,
making it in early medievalist Paolo Squatriti’s words, “really ‘proxy’ data.”85
As Squatriti notes, “climatological and historical timescales are not always
congruent and compatible, and our attempts to make them so can cause
confusion.”86 For example, Ulf Büntgen’s widely cited dendrochronological
study, which argues for pan-European cooling during Late Antiquity, relies
on tree ring series provenanced from central Europe (the Alps) and southeast-
ern Russia (the Altai).87 Given the radical regional variation of climate and
weather patterns, scholars have rightly questioned the universal applicability
of the study’s conclusions, at least with respect to individual regions around
the eastern Mediterranean.88 Chronological scale also remains a problem.
While some of this proxy evidence produces high-resolution data (tree rings,
for example, which can be used to approximate precipitation on a decadal or
even annual basis), most are still fairly low-resolution with respect to chronol-
ogy, making their application to historical investigation more difficult.89 Then
there are what archaeologist and climate historian Sturt Manning calls “the
differential impacts” of climate episodes, such as the North Atlantic Oscilla-
tion (NAO), that is, the fluctuations in atmospheric pressure between two dif-
ferent climate zones in the North Atlantic, which affects precipitation in the
Mediterranean. As Manning shows, depending on the scientist’s chronologi-
cal perspective, the NAO is seen to produce different precipitation patterns in
the eastern versus western Mediterranean.90 In short, a problem with using
climate data in historical inquiry is that it is often both right and wrong at
the same time: correct on one level of analysis but incorrect or misleading on
another. Scale thus remains an interpretive challenge.
84
Grey, forthcoming.
85
Squatriti 2010, 812, emphasis in original.
86
Squatriti 2010, 809.
87
Büntgen et al. 2011, 579, with Fig. 1.
88
Manning 2013, 143–45.
89
The mismatch between low-resolution climate data and high-resolution historical data is well
known and frequently discussed. See Manning 2013, 170; McCormick et al. 2012; McCormick
2011 and 2013; Haldon et al. 2014.
90
Manning 2013, 106–8.
Moreover, the historical material record itself often fails to neatly mir-
ror the science. In fact, some of the most trenchant counter-arguments to
this new scholarship come from Roman and early medieval archaeologists,
whose work, we noted above, often integrates scientific methods and data.91
Their skepticism is in part due to the fact that the historical material record is
exceedingly varied and differentiated, changing from region to region, micro-
locality to micro-locality, year to year, and revealing not of events but long-
term processes. While the claims of climate scientists that the late Roman
Empire was wetter and colder may be broadly correct for the years 500–600
ce, these generalities break down quickly when highly localized and precisely
stratified archaeological evidence comes into play.
In a study of ancient settlement patterns in Jordan, archaeologist Paula
Kouki decided to run a test, wherein she would compare paleoclimate data—
derived not from local sources, which were unavailable, but from the Dead
Sea and northern Israel—with evidence for local settlement patterns in several
areas in Petra’s hinterland, two considerably more marginal than the other.92
She began with the sensible hypothesis that in the zones where there was evi-
dence of increased humidity (what scholars call “favorable climate”), settle-
ment would increase or remain continuous, while settlement would contract in
areas that experienced aridification. However, after completing the research,
the results were, in her words, “surprising.”93 While periods of increased
humidity (known from proxy evidence) led initially to an expansion of human
settlement in the first century in all areas (though several centuries after the
start of this wetter phase), settlement overall contracted from the third cen-
tury, even when there were additional phases of increased precipitation and
“a relatively favourable climate.”94 And while periods of increased aridity
from the fifth century led to an overall reduction of settlement, archaeological
evidence suggests that one of the more marginal zones actually witnessed an
increase in settlement through the sixth century.95 “Such developments seem
to match poorly with the evidence for a drying climate, when an opposite
phenomenon could be expected.”96
In the end, Kouki was “not able to establish a connection between the
archaeological settlement pattern and climatic change in the Petra region for
the Nabataean-Roman through the Byzantine periods.”97 In her conclusion,
91
See above, page 229.
92
These are Wadi ‘Arabah and the Eastern Highlands versus Jabal ash-Sharah.
93
Kouki 2013, 205.
94
Kouki 2013, 210.
95
Specifically, in the Eastern Highlands. See Kouki 2013, 208–9.
96
Kouki 2013, 209.
97
Kouki 2013, 210.
she questions the results further, and offers a number of explanations for why
the climate data matched so poorly with the archaeology. The data itself may
have been incorrect or were inapplicable to the areas she surveyed in Jordan
because they were derived from Israel. She also draws attention to the un-
nuanced nature of the very concept of “favorable climate,” which focuses
solely on measurable rainfall, and fails to consider key locally-specific envi-
ronmental variables, such as timing of the rain, its spatial distribution, the
mode of rainfall, and ground temperature, which affects evaporation. Again,
when we move from the macro- to the micro-regional level, it is increasingly
clear that climatic and human activity often bear little causal relationship to
each other.
Another multi-proxy study of evidence from the Apennine Mountains in
central Italy found that changes in vegetation were more likely the result of
human activity than climate change, showing again that correlation does not
imply causation.98 Analysis of pollen recovered from sediments in this region
from throughout the Holocene period suggested that the growth or decline of
certain trees in that area were more likely driven by human activity, namely
clearance and centuriation, than by climate change. In fact, the authors of
the study found this especially to be the case beginning in the years between
500 and 600 ce, and hence in the midst of the LALIA, when large areas were
intensely cleared, perhaps in order to provide building materials and fuel for
the growing number of mountainous settlements during what was a century
of nearly ceaseless warfare. Similarly, although the cooler and unstable cli-
mate that our proxies demonstrate may suggest impacts such as the regrowth
of forests and the cessation of traditional forms of agriculture centered on
cereal, grape, and olive production, mirco-regional studies once again chal-
lenge the universality of this hypothesis. In Puglia, for example, olive tree
cultivation appears to have increased from about 500 ce, while a recent study
of late Roman and early medieval landscape patterns in Britain has broadly
undermined the claim that climate change led to large-scale reforestation and
the end of Roman-style agricultural practices.99
In addition to underplaying (or ignoring) archaeological evidence that fails
to corroborate the scientific data (and thus challenging its causational explan-
atory force), historians of Rome’s environmental fall are also guilty of inter-
pretive and statistical sleights of hand when it comes to the material record
98
Brown 2013. See also Pasquale, et al. 2014, 1499, who conclude that, “in general, the changes
in vegetation cover which we found all appear independent of climate and strictly connected to
economic and social dynamics characterising the history of this part of Etruria.”
99
Pollen evidence from Puglia shows an increasing amount of olive trees (De Rita and Magri
2009). For evidence against reforestation in Britain, see Rippon, Smart, and Pears 2015.
and its alleged demonstration of Rome’s decline through biological forcings.

A case in point is the evidence for the first great pandemic of bubonic plague
dating from roughly 541 to 750 ce and its proposed catastrophic demographic
and societal impact. Recent investigations by paleogeneticists have contrib-
uted nothing short of a breakthrough in our understanding of the plague. By
positively identifying the DNA for the bacillus Yersinia pestis in sixth-century
skeletal remains, scientists have demonstrated that the sickness described by
contemporary witnesses such as Procopius (500 to 554 ce) and John of Ephe-
sus (507 to 586 ce), with its fevers, hallucinations, swollen buboes, and swift
death, was the bubonic plague.100 They have also delineated a phylogenetic
profile for our particular strand of bubonic plague that places its origins in
Asia.101 But the conclusions that are drawn by historians from this scientific
knowledge (catastrophic and universal demographic impact, sharp economic
decline, wide-scale settlement abandonment, the end of Antiquity) demand
closer scrutiny.
Any societal conclusion drawn about the impact of the first plague pan-
demic depends directly on the answer to the question of mortality rates: how
many people died? To estimate death tolls for the initial outbreak of the plague
in the 540s, which have recently been placed at half to sixty-percent of the
Empire’s total population (fifteen to twenty million, in other words),102 histo-
rians rely almost exclusively on epidemiological and demographic modeling,
not actual bodies.103 This is because, as of this essay going to press, we possess
the physical remains of precisely ten people whom we know died of plague in
the sixth century, and they were discovered in late Roman cemeteries in Ger-
many, far from the eastern epicenters described in our historical sources.104
100
Wiechmann and Grupe 2005; Harbeck et al. 2013; Wagner et al. 2014; and Feldman et al.
2016.
101
Feldman et al. 2016 and Wagner et al. 2014; Harbeck et al. 2013.
102
Harper 2017, 226, 234, 244–45 (including Fig. 6.6) for claims that fifty to sixty percent of
Constantinople’s population died in the plague, which would mean approximately 250,000 to
300,000 people, and that half of the imperial population perished overall during the first wave in
the 540s. His catastrophic figures are derived from estimates for death rates during the Black Death
in the fourteenth century, for which we have considerable physical and textual evidence.
103
Late Roman estimations of plague deaths exist in the historical record, but these literary
references strike me as potentially more problematic than the use of epidemiological modeling. Of
course, all estimations of demographic impact from disease rely in part on modeling, but with so
small a sample size of physical evidence and with such complex (and sparse) textual records, one
wonders how accurate such modeling can be for Late Antiquity. Furthermore, extension of so cata-
strophic a mortality rate (fifty percent of the population) to the West is especially problematic given
the far lower population density in western regions, which were historically less urbanized than
their eastern counterparts. The spread of the disease depends upon a certain demographic density,
and the West did not support the same conditions as the East.
104
Harbeck et al. 2013: eight of nineteen tested skeletons with Y. pestis DNA (Aschheim). Feld-
man et al. 2016: two of ten tested skeletons (Altenerding). The number of plague victims for the
On the one hand, we could interpret this physical evidence as proof of the
plague’s enormous geographic extent and destruction, or as Harper puts it,
“[i]t is hard to overstate the ramifications of finding the plague in a remote,
rural outpost in the West. If the plague was here, it must have been in many
other places which lie in the dark zones on our map.”105 On the other hand,
what if these ten bodies are outliers? Can a sample size of ten be statistically
meaningful within a total population of thirty or forty million?
Plague maximalists may ultimately prove correct in their estimations,
or certainly more correct than the overly skeptical, minimalizing argu-
ments made by Jean Durliat in the late 1980s, before the DNA work was
done.106 McCormick’s recently published catalogue of late and post-Roman
mass burials can certainly provide guidance for scientists hoping to gener-
ate more paleomolecular data on the plague’s transmission and mortality, if
the expensive testing is undertaken.107 Nevertheless, the relative paucity of
mass burials dating to the sixth century—McCormick’s study identifies only
twenty-four, most containing between five and nine bodies108 —when half
of the Empire’s population is proposed to have perished, remains a stum-
bling block for plague maximalists, even if we speculate about the use of
unorthodox means to dispose of bodies.109 At this juncture, therefore, we
should resist concluding that the first plague pandemic was everywhere and
equally potent, or for that matter, that it constituted the catastrophic event
Aschheim cemetery may be fewer than eight; when four of these eight were tested in an indepen-
dent lab, only one (A120) revealed plague DNA, though the testing techniques were not identical.
I have omitted the 2005 study that presented the first supposed pandemic plague victims from
Sens, France because the process was contaminated, and the findings have been widely disputed.
See Harbeck et al. 2013. Readers should note that I have not included the potentially important
new findings of Keller et al. 2018 (published online but not yet peer-reviewed), who have identified
Y. pestis DNA in seventeen additional individuals from Britain, France, Spain, and Germany. The
remains all date to the first pandemic from about 541 to 750 ce, but not all appear to coincide with
the initial outbreak in 541 ce.
105
Harper 2017, 230 (author’s emphasis).
106
Durliat 1989. For a summary of Durliat’s thesis and recent responses to it, see Meier 2016,
272–82.
107
McCormick 2015 and 2016. Keller et al. 2018, once peer-reviewed, could greatly enhance our
understanding of the history and micro-diversity of the first plague pandemic.
108
McCormick 2015, 356, Fig. 3. Readers should note that this figure is based on McCormick’s
proration to the sixth century of the total number of burials (36) whose dating range falls between
the sixth and seventh centuries. The number of actual sixth-century burials, therefore, may be
lower.
109
There are plausible explanations for what happened to the remaining bodies: many could
have been disposed of haphazardly (as Procopius and other sources attest), perhaps burned or cov-
ered in lime and hence now disintegrated; in places where everyone had died, there was no one to
bury bodies, and the dead would have naturally decomposed in the elements or were consumed by
scavenging animals; and of course, we may simply have not properly identified them yet.
that brought about “the end of Antiquity” when our physical evidentiary
base remains as small as it is.110
Suck-in, Smear, and the “Justinianic” Plague

To this last point, historians may wish to reconsider the enormous explana-
tory power currently given to the initial outbreak of the first plague pandemic
in the early 540s, which has been cited as the cause of everything from a
temporary fiscal crisis during Justinian’s regime (a highly plausible connec-
tion) to more transformational, longue durée phenomena, such the crash of
the late Roman economy, the abandonment of cities, and the Christianization
of Roman culture.111 I think it is fairly uncontroversial to assert that none
of these three developments can be compactly dated from the second half of
the sixth century, that evidence for all three appears from at least the third
century, if not earlier. Moreover, other than our ten German plague victims—
whose precise dates of death remain only approximate—none of the historical
evidence for these phenomena can be linked directly to the crisis. There are no
late Roman plague churches or even plague saints (as the martyr St. Sebastian
later became); no concrete connections between the abandonment of a settle-
ment and the arrival of pandemic; and no factual reason to believe that the
entire ancient economy entered a tailspin starting in 541 ce.112
In other words, we must resist the gravitational pull of the 540s (or any
particular date when our historical sources mention a plague outbreak), and
what M. G. L. Baillie calls the interpretive fallacies of “suck-in and smear.”113
Because the best witnessed, and purportedly most extreme, outbreak of the
plague occurred during the reign of Justinian (from 527 to 565), scholars link a
wide range of different evidence to this specific time and event. Developments,
for example, in the built environment that archaeologists date broadly to the
second half of the sixth century get “sucked in” to the explanatory vortex
of the “Justinianic Plague,” which functions not only as a dating anchor but
110
Better are the sobering remarks of Stathakopoulos 2007, 115: “I certainly do not want to
be ‘revisionistic’ by implying that the sixth-to-eighth century plague did not have catastrophic
results or that we should not use modern epidemiology to shed light on its impact, only that we
should be cautious in not accepting percentages and numbers a priori only because they make
our work easier by complying to either modern epidemiological data or the rhetorical zeal of our
sources.”
111
For the plague and a short-term fiscal crisis in the East, see Sarris 2002.
112
Note Little’s observation to this effect, though he insists that “negative evidence” is still pro-
bative of depopulation from the plague (Little 2007, 15). I am also not convinced by Harper that
the Virgin Mary functioned as a plague saint in late ancient Constantinople (see Harper 2017, 276).
More on Mary below.
113
Baillie 1991.
also as the cause of any change.114 Moreover, the first plague pandemic was
not a single event; rather, it was a series of events that took place in varying
degrees and in different locations, between roughly 541 and 750 ce.115 In this
respect, scholars “smear” these different outbreaks into a single event when
they characterize the entire first plague pandemic as the “Justinianic Plague,”
even though Justinian died in 565 ce, and not all outbreaks occurred during
his reign. The fact that the label “Justinianic Plague” has entered into the
scientific literature is both an example of this “smearing” phenomenon and
a point of concern.116 Among other implications, the “sucking-in and smear-
ing” of an episodic pandemic into a single sixth-century event encourages the
periodization of the mid-sixth century as a sort of bookend, demarcating the
“end of Antiquity” from the “beginning of the Middle Ages.” Without deny-
ing the catastrophic impact of the plague in parts of the Empire during the
sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, historians should reconsider accepting so
simple (though undeniably elegant) a solution to the “end” of Rome.
The Environment and Late Ancient Apocalyptic Discourse

How did environmental catastrophe feel? This is not a question scientists typi-
cally ask, but historians have posed it regularly. Perhaps the most audacious,
and arguably the most problematic, claim presented by some new environ-
mental historians of Rome’s fall is that catastrophic changes in the physical
world led to transformations in human mood and social meaning. Culture
and mentalité, in other words, are part of the environmental drama. It is with
this move that our scholars shift away from Wilson’s reductive, scientistic
model of consilience toward a more humanistically oriented analytic frame-
work, one that is closer to the thought of Fernand Braudel and members of the
114
Harper writes: “The combination of war, plague, and climate changed proved overwhelm-
ing. The mid sixth century represents a sharp turning point for most of Italy. A hesitant recovery
was strangled in the cradle. A break is visible in both town and country” (Harper 2017, 262–63).
Kennedy’s study of Syrian settlements and the “Justinianic Plague,” cited by Harper, makes the
following claim (and follows a similarly faulty logic): “The expansion of settlement that had char-
acterized much of rural and urban Syria in the fifth and early sixth centuries came to an abrupt end
after the middle of the sixth century. There is evidence that housing starts almost ceased, although
renovations and additions to houses did continue in rural areas . . . The archaeology is entirely con-
sistent with a pandemic that caused a massive loss of life on repeated occasions. It does not prove
positively that this was the case, but it does not provide any evidence against this” (Kennedy 2007,
95). See Gruber 2018 for another example of “sucking in” alleged changes in Spanish episcopal
burial customs to the 540s plague event.
115
Stathakopoulos counts approximately eighteen outbreaks between 541 and 750 ce. Statha-
kopoulos 2007, 105.
116
See Wagner et al. 2014 and Harbeck et al. 2013, who routinely refer to the multi-century first
plague pandemic as “the Justinianic Plague” or “the Plague of Justinian.”
Annales school, especially the work of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. Braudel’s

famous study of the Mediterranean world during the reign of Philip II broke
ground in its multi-scalar approach to history by linking environmental shifts
measured in geological time to cultural developments over centuries to spe-
cific annular events, such as warfare.117 Le Roy Ladurie specifically brought
the study of climate change to questions of local historical development, espe-
cially to the economies, social relations, and thought-worlds of pre-modern
(French) non-elites.118 His integration of psychology, anthropology, and cul-
tural theory into the microhistory of landscape, climate, and socio-economic
relations helped pave the way for scholars who endeavor to understand the
complex relationship between transformations in the physical environment
and collective thought.
Consider in fuller detail Mischa Meier’s argument that the plague was the
defining event in the history of the eastern Empire, a crisis that caused a last-
ing “reorientation” and “reformation” of Roman society:
If one bears in mind the matters mentioned above, that is, the Marian cult,
iconolatry, sacralization of the emperor, the disappearance of classical secular
historiography, and lastly the comprehensive liturgification of east Roman/
Byzantine society that ultimately rolled all these phenomena into one, and if
one further imagines the prominent role that the plague must have assumed
in people’s minds, then the answer to the question of the significance of the
pandemic is self-evident: it was to a large extent jointly responsible for a pro-
cess of cultural reconstruction that formed part of the transition from late
antiquity to the early Middle Ages.119
Harper, who widely cites Meier’s work, makes similar claims about the envi-
ronment’s influence on the hearts and minds of late Romans: “Gregory [the
Great]’s eschatology,” he writes, “is the thread that holds together the entire
fabric of his thought and career. If we wish to understand his view of the
world, we must appreciate his certainty that it was in its last hours. This sen-
sibility was a direct response to his experience of the natural environment.”120
Roman society, he explains, had entered into a new emotional and reli-
gious phase conditioned by the cruel turns of the natural world, when “[f]or
the first time in history, an apocalyptic mood came to permeate a large,
complex society.”121
117
Braudel 1972–1973.
118
Le Roy Ladurie 1959, 1974, and 1978.
119
Meier 2016, 291.
120
Harper 2017, 247 (emphasis added).
121
Harper 2017, 249.
Let us consider Harper and Meier’s claims more closely by way of a dis-
cussion of language and discourse, two analytic categories that receive very
little attention from our new historians of Rome’s environmental fall. In a
sense, the failure to address the discursive is not surprising given the heavy
scientism that pervades these studies. As we have seen, the historical record is
often treated like a referential body of evidence, whose purpose is to corrobo-
rate the “natural” archives. Yet, if we truly want to achieve interdisciplinarity
in this line of historical investigation, it is imperative that we reflect on our
approach to the historical sources, especially literary evidence, which is com-
plex, contextually situated, and polysemic. More to the point, if our goal is to
understand the human experience of environmental crisis—a goal that many
historians share with McCormick, Meier, and Harper—then our reading of
the human-generated artifacts of these physical events and developments is
a primary consideration. What follows stakes out some ground for a critical
second phase of scholarship.
As yet, none of these scholars have brought the advances of the linguis-
tic turn and cultural theory to bear on their work. McCormick’s reading
of Ausonius’ Mosella is essentially an exercise in unreconstructed positiv-
ism, wherein he treats a work of literature as a repository of potential facts
about the way history “really happened.” (It is also an exercise in circu-
lar reasoning: the dendrochronology indicates drought, and sure enough,
McCormick found one in the poem, which he claims in turn supports the
tree ring evidence).122 For McCormick, the literary nature of the evidence, all
the complex cultural variables that contribute to the writing and historical
meaning of a poem, is irrelevant, since ultimately a poem like the Mosella
serves simply to confirm what science has otherwise proven.123 Harper, alter-
natively, acknowledges that late antique authors such as Basil of Caesarea,
Procopius, and John of Ephesus engage in rhetorical writing, especially when
describing crisis events.124 But rather than examine the form and meaning of
122
See also the circular logic of Gruber 2018, who begins with the assumption that the plague
had specifically reached Valencia in the early 540s ce (for which there is no evidence), interprets
a document dated to 546 ce according to this assumed “epidemiological context,” and then con-
cludes that the document further supports the existence of plague in the region at that time (for
example, page 210). That Keller et al. 2018 cite Gruber’s essay to further support their dating of
DNA evidence for Y. pestis in Valencia to the early 540s is obviously problematic and hopefully
will be resolved during the peer-review process.
123
To be fair, McCormick 2013, 62 concedes that “the different sorts of evidence [including
literary] are immensely complicated. How many climate scientists can scan the meter of Ausonius’
allusive poetry to determine the ambivalent grammatical case of a particular Latin word, and so
understand his phrase correctly?” Nonetheless, meter and scansion play no role in McCormick’s
own analysis of the poem.
124
For example, Harper 2017, 170–71, 221.
that rhetoric, which involves comparing it with contemporary authors’ writ-

ing in similar genres and placing the text within a broader context of thought
and literature, he offers thinly veiled positivist readings of texts layered with
biblical imagery, historiographical allusion, and inherited cultural tropes.125
Perhaps the most problematic example of this vein of positivistic interpreta-
tion is the tendency of some to accept the plague death toll estimates of our
late ancient sources at face value, as Harper ultimately does in his study of
the first plague events in the 540s.126
The shortcomings of this anemic approach to the literary evidence are
especially apparent in the discussions of apocalypticism that appear in studies
by Meier and Harper. In them, apocalypticism functions as little more than
a collective reaction to material crisis that in turn leads to an intensified reli-
giosity. Plague and climate change, they contend, caused “fear,” “collective
distress,” “collective insecurity,” or even “full blown mass hysteria,” which
subsequently propelled people toward Christianity and the church.127 Accord-
ing to Meier, the plague built on an already “off the rails” anticipation of End
Times, set in play by the coming and going of the year 500, to then “unleash
its particular force” on the still quasi-Roman citizens of the later sixth cen-
tury.128 While some returned to their ancestral religions (what Meier calls
“repaganization”), others doubled down in their commitment to Christianity,
rejecting secular constructs and practices for good and embracing icon devo-
tion, especially images of the Virgin Mary, with a desperate force.129 Because
of the plague and the concomitant fears of the apocalypse, “religion,” Meier
concludes, “plainly occupies a more significant role in every aspect of social
life from the 540s than before.”130 Harper argues similarly. “The combination
125
See Harper 2017, 170–71, where despite voicing “caution” with regards to Basil’s account of
a “climate-induced” food shortage in Cappadocia in 368 and 369 ce, he goes on to read it at face
value, because “the natural archives, and the general atmospheric regime of the fourth century,
provide a realistic context for just this sort of acute crisis in Anatolia.” See also Harper 2017, 156:
“In folk legends that attached to the local hero of the faith, Gregory the Wonderworker, the plague
was a pivotal episode in the Christianization of the community. The mass mortality painfully
showed up the inefficacy of the ancestral gods and put on exhibit the virtues of the Christian faith.
However stylized the tale may be, it preserves a kernel of historical recollection about the plague’s
role in the religious transformation of the community.”
126
Harper 2017, 226, where “respect and caution” seem to have been tossed aside when it comes
to the figures offered by John of Ephesus for mortality rates in Constantinople. Significantly, many
historians treat these numbers with a healthy dose of suspicion. See Stathakopoulos 2007, 114–15;
Meier 2016, 271.
127
Harper 2017, 12 (“fear”) and 277 (“collective distress”) with Meier 2016, 283 (“collective
insecurity” and “full-blown mass hysteria”).
128
Meier 2016, 284.
129
Meier 2016, 284 and passim.
130
Meier 2016, 288.
of plague and climate change,” he states, “sapped the strength of the empire.
The unaccountable grief and fear left the survivors with the shuddering feeling
that time itself was drawing to a close.”131 These “[f]ears of the sixth century
generated an organized ecclesiastical response in the form of liturgical roga-
tions, great communal rituals organized to ward off the pestilence.”132 Later
sixth-century church building, he claims, was catalyzed by a potent mixture
of environmental catastrophe and eschatological anticipation.133
The evidence that Harper and Meier cite to support their claims is both
thinner and more complex than they acknowledge. Consider, as a single
example, their argument that apocalyptic fears generated by the “Justini-
anic Plague” caused a qualitative shift and quantitative intensity in Marian
devotion.134 In an essay published in 1978, Averil Cameron noted that the
conceptual development of the Virgin Mary as the powerful protector of Con-
stantinople (which she dates from around 550 to 626, the year when Mary
is expressly venerated as the city’s patron saint against the besieging Avars
and Persians) overlapped with the plague, and asked whether there might be
a connection.135 The timing, as Cameron observes, is suggestive, but there is
actually no late ancient evidence that eastern Romans prayed to the Virgin en
masse for her protection from this particular disease during the second half
of the sixth or seventh century.136 That the Virgin Mary was increasingly seen
as a possible source of protection from illness, among other perils, is certainly
plausible; that the first plague pandemic—as opposed to the other myriad of
infectious maladies that sickened and killed late Romans in the second half of
131
Harper 2017, 245.
132
Harper 2017, 278.
133
Harper 2017, 279.
134
Meier 2016, 284–85; Harper 2017, 276–80.
135
Cameron 1978.
136
The evidence Meier cites linking Mary to plague protection in Constantinople comes from
the Marian legends by the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman writer William Adgar (he quotes the
German edition of Neuhaus 1886, 220). Meier makes no attempt to consider the many layers of
historical accretion and rhetorical development that helped create this high medieval legendary
source and the particular connection it draws between Mary, Justinian, and the plague. Equally
unpersuasive is Meier’s contention that Justinian’s movement of the date of the Hypapante festival
from 14 February to 2 February in 542 was “carried out . . . expressly as a measure to alleviate the
plague” (Meier 2016, 285 and 2003, 570–86). Harper makes his case drawing from Meier’s work,
adding to the argument several additional sources of alleged evidence, including a “possible sixth-
century original” icon of the Virgin, known as the Salus populi Romani, which presently hangs in
the Borghese chapel at St. Maria Maggiore in Rome. Harper claims the icon is proof of the Mary-
End Times-Justinianic Plague connection in the West. Even if this is a sixth-century image (debate
over its dating remains), the epigram associated with it, Salus populi Romani (Harper’s smoking
gun), is a nineteenth-century coinage (see Noreen 2005, 660). Moreover, the “health” that Mary is
thought to protect or insure seems to me a generic votive response, not a specific plea for protection
from the “Justinianic Plague” (or any particular disease).
the sixth and seventh centuries—caused this particular cultural development

is at best an unsubstantiated hypothesis.
Weak evidence aside, the real problem vitiating this line of argument is the
authors’ understanding of eschatological thought and apocalyptic writing in
Late Antiquity. As scholars of religion have long observed, apocalyptic texts
and eschatological beliefs are not simply religiously conditioned expressions of
fear or hysteria generated in the face of crisis.137 They are not, in other words,
mere responses to external catastrophes, whether environmentally driven or
manmade, that take the form of religious action.138 Rather, they are historically
anchored discourses, that is, modes of argument and frameworks of interpre-
tation that shape, and are shaped by, a range of social, political, intellectual,
cultural, and material factors.139 To be sure, apocalyptic Christian discourses
are based on the widely held and deeply ingrained eschatological assumption
that sin is ubiquitous, that it has led to God’s punishment experienced in the
form of a particular crisis (whether moral, political, physical, or environmen-
tal), and that this sin must therefore be atoned for in light of a forthcoming
Judgment Day.140 But apocalyptic discourses were more than just narratives
about atonement and cosmic time; they were also rhetorical tools employed in
the exercise of power.141 During Late Antiquity, James Palmer observes,
apocalypse framed the nature, experience, and direction of the Christian

community. It was more than a matter of expecting the world to end . . . with
the fall of Rome we see how crisis could be met with varieties of apocalyptic
thought, in order to change behavior (the moral dimension), and to redefine
political and religious ideals with conceptualizing Others (heretics). In short,
while the fall was a political event, it was also an apocalyptic discourse about
the changing nature of power and identity.142
In this crucial respect, the linear chain of causation drawn by Meier and
Harper (from environmental crisis to apocalyptic thought to increased reli-
gious devotion) vastly oversimplifies the cultural and political work that apoc-
alyptic discourses performed in late ancient society. Crisis, in other words,
does not determine the content or outcome of an apocalyptic discourse; rather,
it creates contexts in which the discourse is developed, confirmed, contested,
137
The work that put this putative connection on the map, Barkun 1974, has been widely cri-
tiqued. See, for instance, O’Leary 1994, 9, 233–34 n. 35.
138
Palmer 2014, 1–24, and passim.
139
O’Leary 1994 and Palmer 2014, 19 and passim.
140
In fact, Christianity is essentially an eschatological religion, oriented around the notion that
the world as we know it will end with the second coming of Christ. See McGinn 1979, 3–6.
141
Palmer 2014 but also Watts 2009.
142
Palmer 2014, 54.
and even rejected altogether.143 Meier and Harper’s analyses of late sixth- and
seventh-century religious thought and practice lack such historical texture.
Moreover, the tendency to focus exclusively on the apocalyptic writ-
ings of later sixth-century eschatological thinkers misrepresents what was a
much broader and more varied conceptual phenomenon in Late Antiquity. As
Palmer’s observation implies, eschatological thinking captured the interest of
numerous patristic thinkers, even if they differed in terms of their understand-
ing of the End’s imminence or legibility (note Lactantius, Sulpicius Severus,
Jerome, Tyconius, Salvian, and most significantly, Augustine in the West; Ori-
gen, Methodius, the authors of the Apocalypse of Paul and the Apocalypse of
Thomas in the East).144 And more specifically, as Meier observes, there was
also a considerable groundswell in millennialist thought around and about
the year 500 ce. This wider—and earlier—intellectual history is important
for two reasons. First, every late sixth-century apocalyptic writer is in part
the product of a longer tradition, which was grounded not only in biblical
passages but also in patristic precedents.145 Gregory the Great’s thought, for
example, is directly related to Augustine’s, who lived through neither the first
plague pandemic nor the Late Antique Little Ice Age.146 To sever Gregory
from this intellectual matrix is an artificial heuristic operation that gives the
false impression that he was solely (or even largely) shaped by his immediate
theological, and in Harper’s case, environmental context. Second, by tak-
ing account of the larger intellectual history of apocalypticism and eschatol-
ogy in early Christianity, scholars cannot so easily propose that apocalyptic
thinking “intensified” in character from the second half of the sixth century.
Gregory, for all of his doomsday images of floods and plague, is typically
seen as having a “moderate apocalyptic perspective,” grounded in Augustine’s
rather strident anti-apocalyptic eschatology (Augustine famously refused to
proffer any precise timeframe for Judgment Day, averring only that it would
come eventually).147 The only way to argue for a shift in the nature or mean-
ing of apocalyptic thought is to study the history of apocalyptic thought,
which neither author does in the body of their studies or even in the footnotes.
143
For an example of scholarship that demonstrates the extraordinary array of religious responses
to crisis, and the deep connections between these responses and other prevailing discourses of the
day, see Hilton 1986, especially chapters 3 and 6, which deal with famine and poverty.
144
Daley 1998 and 2008, 91–112, and also McGinn 1979, which traces the deep intellectual
trajectory of apocalyptic thought in the western tradition.
145
Both Harper and Meier generally acknowledge this earlier literature but neither performs an
analysis of it or explores its intellectual links to the writings of later sixth-century authors such as
Gregory and John of Ephesus.
146
See, for instance, Conrad Leyser’s more layered intellectual history of Gregory’s eschatology
and its relation to his understanding of the monastic institution in Leyser 2000, 151–59.
147
Daley 2007, 104.
Cherry-picking evidence may support sensationalist links to environmental

catastrophes, but it hardly does justice to Gregory, John of Ephesus, and their
experiences of the world.
Conclusions: Toward a Second Phase of Scholarship

Let me conclude with a question that Meier poses in his study of the plague
and its causational impact on the birth of “Byzantine” society: “Can subse-
quent developments in various areas,” he asks, “be traced back to the effects of
the scourge, or should we instead regard the outbreak of the first of the three
plague pandemics in human history as inconsequential from the perspective
of the longue durée?”148 The question is obviously rhetorical, and the rest
of the essay argues vociferously for a cause and effect relationship between
environmental catastrophe and cultural change. But the binary structure of
the question itself, its either/or proposition, strikes at the heart of one analytic
problem at the center of this new scholarship on Rome’s “fall.” It is not a
question of an environmental agent either being a direct cause or having no
relationship whatsoever to broader historical developments. To argue for one
of these propositions over the other is certainly wrong.149 The key to under-
standing the relationship between human and non-human agency and the role
of physical events in the development of human experience is to interrogate
that messier middle ground, which lies somewhere between environmental
determinism and social construction. Here we find no elegant, simple solu-
tions but the bewildering non-linear interplay of context and contingency,
wherein human agents are both creators and creations of discourses that are
themselves shaped in various ways by the agency of the physical world.150
The material turn, a recent historiographical phenomenon that (among
other insights) offers important limits on an exclusively cultural interpretation
of the past, has enlivened the study of Late Antiquity. As Harper correctly
insists, we can no longer ignore the physical world and non-human agents as
if they were mere scenery in an exclusively human narrative studied through
rhetorical analysis.151 Yet, however important these correctives to the cultural
148
Meier 2016, 269.
149
I am hardly the first scholar to point this out. See, for instance, Rosen and Rosen 2001. Social
geographers and anthropologists have been especially observant on this issue; see Ingold 2000;
Butzer 2012.
150
Very recent work on resilience in the eastern Mediterranean (including the late Roman East)
offers some potential theoretical insights into this very theoretical issue: see the collective essays
on resilience in the eastern Mediterranean in Human Ecology 46.3 (2018), especially Haldon and
Rosen 2018.
151
Animal studies, for instance, has recently entered the discussion of early Christian literature
with fascinating results. See Miller 2018.
and literary turn of the 1980s and 1990s may be, we must not throw the
baby out with the bathwater. The absence of cultural theory in these stud-
ies, or even the reluctance to engage with the most basic insights of the lin-
guistic turn, strikes me as missed opportunities. While none of the authors
surveyed here states his hostility to the cultural turn outright (as does E. O.
Wilson), each fails to acknowledge the heuristic restraints that it has placed
on historical interpretation: we can no longer simply read a text as if it were a
straightforward window into the past, or for that matter, as an uncomplicated
record of environmental change. More significantly, by ignoring the methods
of cultural analysis, the authors miss all the possibilities that these approaches
have opened up for recovering aspects of the late ancient world that were hith-
erto occluded, such as gender, identity, race, and, most important, relations
of power.152 Whatever a “consilient approach” may ultimately turn out to be,
it cannot be anchored in a system of knowledge that neglects the role of lan-
guage in the generation of structures of power, identities, and worldviews. For
as decades of sophisticated, erudite scholarship has shown—some of which
was written by the very authors reviewed in this study—language too consti-
tutes historical reality; it is a fact as real as a tree ring.153
What will a more discursively oriented second phase of late Roman envi-
ronmental history look like? One possibility, presented by geographer Mike
Hulme, is to approach environmental phenomena such as climate as “ideas”
that are irreducible to culture but tethered to culture nonetheless. “[H]uman
beings,” Hulme observes, “live in climates—amidst the particular fluxes of
weather that they encounter in different places, visceral experiences which are
interpreted through their imaginative worlds.”154 Climate and culture, Hulme
suggests, are not binary opposites; rather, they exist in a dyadic relationship,
whereby climate operates culturally as an ordering principle, which allows
humans to handle the unpredictable physical experience of weather with
greater ease and stability. “Climate performs this function whether defined
formally through statistics and science . . . or tacitly through the human senses
and imagination (i.e. approached through studying culture).”155 As Hulme
points out, Greco-Roman thinkers explicitly linked climate with culture, and
the ancients recognized climate’s dual significance as both an index (wherein
it describes weather patterns in places) and agent (even if its agency was often
seen as secondary to that of divine forces or fate—a point not considered by
152
I also wonder: is it significant that nearly every historian of Rome’s alleged environmental
decline and fall is male?
153
See, for example, McCormick 1990; Harper 2016b.
154
Hulme 2015, 2.
155
Hulme 2015, 5.
Hulme). Climate, in other words, has a cultural history that is inextricably

interwoven with its physical history.
If this is the case, then we might start to read narrative descriptions of
environmental events in new ways, not only as culturally-encoded images full
of symbolic meaning but also as images embedded within a physical world
that must also be understood if we are to make sense of what environmental
conditions meant to late ancient humans. Thus, what this physical world actu-
ally looked like—its precipitation and temperature patterns, geological and
landscape features, along with its biological characteristics, from large animals
to microbes—matters if we want to understand how environmental agents
related to the lives and imaginations of real people in Late Antiquity.156 But our
analyses cannot exclude or demote the many other agents at play in the devel-
opment of late Roman communal and individual responses to this physical
environment. Pre-existing belief systems, social relations, economic structures,
and power relations must figure prominently, even dominantly, in any attempt
to discern the human experience of environmental events in Late Antiquity.157
Building on Hulme’s ideas about the dyadic relationship between environ-
mental phenomena and culture as one possible interpretive path, let us experi-
ment with a single literary example taken from a Christian hagiographical
text. Written in the early sixth century in southern Italy, the Commemorato-
rium of Saint Severinus (or, Vita Severini) presents the later years and death
in 482 ce of an ambitious holy man from Noricum who used his prophetic
powers to warn, and often to save, Roman communities inhabiting the Dan-
ube frontier.158 The author of the text, the abbot Eugippius (around 460 to
535 ce), had been a member of Severinus’ community in Noricum and was
thus an eyewitness not only to the saint’s life, but also to physical and politi-
cal world they both inhabited, which by all accounts had become increasingly
unstable. In addition to the gradual disappearance of Roman military protec-
tion and administrative oversight, and frequent conflict with barbarian war
bands, Eugippius’ text depicts a number of challenging environment condi-
tions that impacted the Roman communities still residing in the region. In one
anecdote, Eugippius relates the story of a small, fortified town (castellum) in
Raetia Secunda, which a tributary of the Danube regularly flooded, forcing
156
See also White 2015 for another promising example of how we might better integrate envi-
ronmental agency into the study of premodern culture and religion.
157
Of course, the environment can be studied historically without any consideration of human
experience. Most historians, however, remain interested in people and their responses to their
worlds.
158
More precisely, the Commemoratorium was likely composed in around 511 ce at Castellum
Lucullanum outside Naples, where its author, Eugippius, had founded a monastery following his
migration south from Noricum with Severinus’ remains.
the inhabitants to make adaptations to their built environment.159 Specifically,

we are told, they had constructed their church on posts driven into the river-
bed, and instead of laying an expensive pavement, they built a simple wooden
flooring which could better withstand high water. When Severinus visited the
church and noticed the floor, he commanded the people to install a pavement,
for “now henceforth you shall see that, on heaven’s command, the river will
be held back.”160 After the pavement was laid, Severinus ventured beneath the
church in a boat, where he struck a cross into the posts with an axe, calling
upon Christ to prevent the water from ever rising above his mark. Henceforth,
whenever the river would rise, it remained low beneath the church, never sur-
passing Severinus’ sign.
To begin, we would need to know more about the hydrological conditions
of late fifth-century Raetia Secunda and Noricum, and specifically about the
flood patterns of this particular region of the Danube—had it always been a
flood zone? Or is there evidence of more extreme flooding during the second
half of the fifth century? In other words, is Eugippius representing one of the
many constant environmental emergencies that beset late ancient communi-
ties or is he depicting an anomalous set of weather conditions that may have
brought the problem of water and church building into higher focus? Eugip-
pius clearly wants his audience (fellow elite Christians in southern Italy) to
see this event as a critical religious crisis, but it is important for historians to
know whether the physical events he depicts were due to an unusual climate
pattern or simply represent normal flooding conditions. Put simply, is Eugip-
pius creating a crisis in both the religious and environmental sense?
Second, we must thoroughly contextualize Severinus’ response to the
flooding within both the broader narrative of the text and a larger body of late
ancient hagiographic literature. Like all Roman authors, Eugippius worked
within a set of generic traditions; many of Severinus’ qualities as a holy man
are essentially stock features. But how common was it at this time to depict
a Christian saint as marshaling the power of Christ to adapt church build-
ings to environmental conditions? Third, we must consider how Eugippius
variously understands the environment to be both index and agent. What
general conditions does the flooding describe, both physically and symboli-
cally? To what extent does the story of a saint and a church on stilts inflect
material changes in the built and natural environment? And how should we
interpret the hierarchy of agency that Eugippius presents with respect to the
relationship between God, holy man, and the forces of nature? How might
Eugipp. V. Sev. 15 (ed. Régeret, SC 374: 221–23).

159
Eugipp. V. Sev. 15.1 (ed. Régeret, SC 374: 221): Iam videbitis amodo fluvium caelesti iussione
160
prohibitum.
this conceptualization relate to the author’s strong adherence to Augustinian

theology and cosmology? Given that he was an abbot when he composed the
text, what does it tell us about his vision of the ideal monastic community?
Finally, Eugippius deliberately chose crisis (religious, political, military, eco-
nomic, and environmental) as his primary discourse in the Commemorato-
rium precisely because he deemed it to be the most persuasive framework for
depicting not only Severinus’ holiness but also the problems that vexed him
and his present monastic community, who were living on property possibly
owned by the family of the deposed western emperor Romulus Augustulus
but within the Ostrogothic kingdom.161 What political factors, social rela-
tions, and economic conditions might be mediating Eugippius’ “rhetoric of
crisis” in the Commemoratorium?
Attention to discourse, as provisionally outlined, has several advantages.
Significantly, such an approach avoids the trap of environmental determinism,
for at no moment do we consider whether flooding or climate change indepen-
dently caused Eugippius to write the Commemoratorium or to imagine Sev-
erinus as having power over the river. Yet, the river’s agency remains part of
the analysis, as it constituted the real physical context in which holy man and
author lived, and is part of story’s cosmological framework. Moreover, adding
discourse to the analysis takes us well beyond the crude positivism of many
earlier studies, which often do little more than offer affirmative “matches”
between scientific and literary evidence. Indeed, rather than endeavoring to
synthesize scientific with historical data and methods via the goals of “consil-
ience,” the approach proposed here attends to possible points of disjuncture,
to places where the natural archive, and how it is studied, may be at odds
with the historical record. In sum, an analysis that incorporates discourse
potentially helps us to understand the many historical implications of the data
gathered and analyzed by both scientists and historians without reducing that
data to any single cause of change in the past—an interpretive shortcut that
grossly oversimplifies the sophistication and nuance of all disciplines.
Moving forward, late Roman historians committed to understanding
the significance of environmental agency might also do well to rethink the
assumption that ultimately animates their investigations: that “the Roman
Empire” did, in fact, decline and fall.162 The greatest shortcoming of much
161
The Campanian property on which Eugippius settled and established his monastery was
owned by a femina illustris named Barbaria, who has been tentatively identified as the mother of
Romulus Augustulus and the widow of Orestes. See Nathan 1992.
162
As one of the anonymous readers noted, the scholarship on this topic is often frustratingly
vague and inconsistent in how it understands the “Roman Empire,” and what it means to say that
it fell, given the very different trajectories of eastern and western regions.
of the scholarship arguably lies in the authors’ dogged commitment to this

very premise. Without succumbing to Pollyannaish assertions about the politi-
cal, economic, or even social continuity of the late ancient world, one should
object to “decline and fall” as a narrative framework for a number of reasons.
For one, it is tied to the tired analytic binary of “continuity and change,”
wherein our role as historians is reduced to ferreting out similarities and dif-
ferences between yesterday and the day before. Indeed one could argue that
everything in history is always changing and staying the same, and that we
get further in our investigations of Late Antiquity by quickly accepting this
proposition and “focusing instead on producing coherent analyses evaluated
on their own terms.”163 Moreover, “continuity and change” may be an espe-
cially problematic analytic binary for studying the relationship between late
ancient society and climate, because climate scientists tend only to examine
change, even though continuity can also be perceived in the paleoclimatic
record.164 Finally, the history of Rome’s “decline and fall” is hardly a neutral
scholarly narrative; rather, it is a freighted trope that has entered our contem-
porary public discourse as a sort of warning sign of the “dangers” inherent to
developments such as multiculturalism, global migration, and more benignly,
climate change.165 The fact that neo-conservatives such as Niall Ferguson have
invoked Rome’s fall to warn western society to fear immigrants and a mul-
ticultural society lest they wind up like the Romans should give us pause in
using the narrative, especially in publications aimed at a general audience.166
It may sell books and attract attention from journalists, but the “decline and
fall of Rome” is an overworked idea that has been put to deeply problematic
uses.167 It certainly brings us no closer to understanding how late ancient
Romans experienced the many crises that befell them.
The Ohio State University

sessa.3@osu.edu
163
Bowes and Gutteridge 2005, 407. As the authors note, Late Antiquity’s periodization as a
“liminal” era wedged between an end (Antiquity) and a beginning (the Middle Ages) has a great
deal to do with the continued historiographic obsession with evaluating the period in terms of
change or continuity. See also Grey, forthcoming on this very point.
164
Manning 2013, 104.
165
See Gillett 2017.
166
Ferguson invoked the trope in an opinion essay entitled “Paris and the Fall of Rome,” pub-
lished two days after the 13 November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks. See Gillett 2017.
167
As Christie 2011, 6 notes: “Ward-Perkins deliberately and provocatively uses these words in
his title, and Heather’s popular works—like this one—still draw on the long-established Gibbo-
nian phrase to grab attention . . .”
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The New Environmental Fall of Rome: A Methodological

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

The New Environmental Fall of Rome:

public interest in our field’s history is certainly welcome, even if it is moti-

long term pattern of temperature and precipitation averages and extremes at

Specific climate conditions as experienced by different regions [suggests

Others argue that environmental crisis drove deep cultural transformations.

beginning of the Middle Ages has become so normalized in the scholarship

Science and Historical Causation

historical argumentation; most of the historians discussed in this essay

Metaphor instead of Method

Like Gibbon’s famous narrative of Rome’s demise—on which Harper appears

obviating the question of causation altogether or, conversely, actually positing

audiences. Nevertheless, in light of the historiographical claims at stake (the

Today the evidence is insufficient to claim that climate anomalies determined

As is clear from this quote, a pervasive scientism runs through McCormick’s

To explore the historical problem of societal response to climate change,

Elsewhere in this study, McCormick cross-references proxy evidence (from

of literary references to flooding in late sixth-century Gaul. As McCormick

geodatabase of historical evidence on climate is effectively a list of implied

their environment”—an angle of analysis that seems difficult to achieve with

Consilience and Interdisciplinarity in Late Antique

Addressing Disjuncture and Discourse

and disagreement. In a forthcoming article, for instance, late Roman histo-

and its alleged demonstration of Rome’s decline through biological forcings.

Suck-in, Smear, and the “Justinianic” Plague

The Environment and Late Ancient Apocalyptic Discourse

Annales school, especially the work of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. Braudel’s

that rhetoric, which involves comparing it with contemporary authors’ writ-

the sixth and seventh centuries—caused this particular cultural development

apocalypse framed the nature, experience, and direction of the Christian

Cherry-picking evidence may support sensationalist links to environmental

Conclusions: Toward a Second Phase of Scholarship

Hulme). Climate, in other words, has a cultural history that is inextricably

the inhabitants to make adaptations to their built environment.159 Specifically,

Eugipp. V. Sev. 15 (ed. Régeret, SC 374: 221–23).

this conceptualization relate to the author’s strong adherence to Augustinian

of the scholarship arguably lies in the authors’ dogged commitment to this

The Ohio State University

Daley, Brian. 1998. “Apocalypticism in Early Christian Theology.” In The Ency-

Pasquale, Gaetano et al. 2014. “Human-derived Landscape Changes on the North-

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