Disasters in Late Antique Rome: Problems and Interpretations

Faculty: Samuel Cohen

History

College of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts

My summer 2024 research considered how disaster is represented and retrospectively constructed in late antique literary sources, with particular attention to the methodological challenges such sources present. While events like famine, siege, and military defeat were undoubtedly traumatic for those who endured them, their portrayal in surviving texts often reflects narrative and ideological aims as much as historical fact. Descriptions of catastrophe—whether in the context of war, food shortages, or urban destruction—lend themselves to evocative storytelling and frequently become focal points for interpreting broader historical change. Yet such portrayals risk distorting our understanding of the past. Disasters tend to pull events into their explanatory orbit, encouraging overly deterministic narratives centered on sudden rupture. This paper explores how literary accounts of disaster may exaggerate decline, obscure long-term continuities, or retrospectively reframe the past to elevate certain actors—especially religious authorities—as heroic agents of survival or renewal. In particular, claims about the collapse or resurgence of urban activity in post-imperial Rome are often shaped less by contemporary documentation than by later efforts to craft coherent and authoritative histories. By analyzing how scale, perspective, and literary form influence the depiction of disaster, this paper argues for a more cautious and contextual reading of late antique sources. It highlights the need to disentangle rhetorical construction from material reality, and to recognize that the centrality of a disaster in historical interpretation often owes more to narrative convention than to empirical rupture.