Frédéric Wilner explores new theories highlighting the role of climate change and epidemics in the “fall” of Rome.
by Catherine Pacary
Among the great mysteries of humanity, the fall of the Roman Empire occupies a place of choice. Qualified as “the most important event in universal history” by the historian Eduard Meyer, he tickles curiosity since Petrarch (1304-1374), one of the first humanists to wonder about the writings and vestiges of Antiquity Roman discovered in Italy.
Since then, theories have multiplied to try to explain the inexplicable. The German Alexander asked for no less than two hundred and ten in 1984, a figure widely exceeded today. With a common point: that of reflecting contemporary problems of the time of their authors.
Thus, if the story of the decadence and the fall of the Roman Empire (1776), of the British Edward Gibbon, remains a reference, “annexes” and sometimes anecdotal causes, as the appearance of the iron to horse, are defended. Social conflicts and monetary collapse are also mentioned.
In 2016, the American Kyle Harper marked the spirits by evoking the effects of climate change and epidemics. Six years later, the prolific documentary maker Frédéric Wilner follows him with this question (without answer): “Who killed the Roman Empire?”.
He goes in search of environmental and health causes of the famous decline, initiated, according to the documentary, in 165, while the emperors Marc Aurèle and Lucius Verus control an empire which extends from the Maghreb to Anatolia.
The investigation begins in a necropolis which houses hundreds of skeletons, whose meticulous study (illustrated by the decomposition of the bodies reconstituted in digital images) will lead to the “great pestilence” which appeared in 167 – the “plague antonine ” – And described by the Galien doctor.
search for indices
Each important event is examined in terms of epidemiological or climatic facts sought, and contextualized by the historian Benoît Rossignol: clashes on the banks of the Danube; Pillage of the Roman temple of Eleusis; Andrinople defeat in 378 which, followed by the Rome bag in 410 and the loss of North Africa, acts the beginning of the end.
As much as the conclusions, the search for indices and the techniques used. In particular to assess the weather from cores in the trees of the magnificent Altai forest (between Russia, China and Mongolia current) and fine slices of fossilized wood.
The quest does not stop on the theoretical long date of the fall of the West Roman Empire (476), to be interested in the reconquest started in 535 by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian, brutally interrupted From 536 by a “night which falls for six months”, according to the writings; then to a new epidemic of plague detected from 541.
The enthusiasts will carefully follow the long search for DNA from a sawn tooth, all will appreciate the trip to Haluza and Shivta, two former cities of Israel, whose vestiges testify to the last moments of the Empire West, around 540. Pending new theories. “We, civilizations, we now know that we are deadly,” noted Paul Valéry in 1919, in the aftermath of the Great War.