The more things change, the more they stay the same...

In AD 430, Rome was still an impressive city. It probably still had a half-million or so inhabitants. Its magnificent marble buildings were - despite spotty fire damage courtesy of Alaric - still more or less intact. And it was, for the first time since the early fourth century, home to an emperor again. That emperor, admittedly, was the unprepossessing Valentinian III - but he was an emperor regardless, and lived as his great predecessors had in the vast imperial complex on the Palatine.

In AD 500, Rome was still an impressive city. But its population had fallen dramatically - perhaps to 100,000 or fewer - and whole neighborhoods were empty and crumbling. The emperors were gone, replaced by a barbarian (albeit a Christian and Latin-speaking one) by the name of Theodoric. Theodoric liked Rome, and continued to patronize both the old imperial monuments and the old imperial grain dole (now sourced from Italy). He ruled, however, from Ravenna; and none of his patronage could disguise the fact that Rome was a shadow of its former self.

An average Roman who lived through the last three quarters of the fifth century would have passed his life against a backdrop of dirty streets and decaying apartment blocks. The greatest change would have been the steady decline of the population. The greatest trauma of his life would doubtless have been the terrible sack of 455, when the Vandals systematically stripped Rome of its valuables (pausing to pluck half the gilded shingles from the Temple of Jupiter's roof), and carried off thousands of captives.

In the depopulated city of the late fifth century, the spoliation of building materials became an increasingly visible problem. A series of emperors passed ineffectual laws against the scavengers who tore marble, bronze, and other valuable bits from the city's growing stock of empty buildings. Total decay of the city center, however, was prevented by the feeble patronage of the emperors (as long as they resided in their dusty residence on the Palatine) and the extremely wealthy senatorial class, whose glittering palaces, staffed with hundreds of slaves, were the real power centers of late imperial Rome. Even in the last decade before the fall of the Western Empire, the letters of Sidonius Apollinaris (a Gallic senator who served briefly as urban prefect) shed light on a self-contained aristocratic world that glittered as the Empire collapsed around it.

Although an ordinary Roman would be excluded from the banquets and intrigues of the elite, he could still enjoy the great baths of the imperial city - which functioned throughout the fifth century - and still watch spectacles in the Colosseum. The gladiatorial combats had ended in the early fifth century, victims of mounting expenses and Christian disapproval. Beast hunts, however, were still held; and the Colosseum, though badly damaged by earthquake and fire, could still seat nearly 50,000 spectators. Odoacer, the barbarian king who replaced the last western emperor, even undertook a partial restoration of the building, and encouraged senators to inscribe their names on their favorite seats. The wildly popular chariot races of the Circus Maximus also continued through the end of the Empire, with barbarian kings replacing the emperors as their sponsors.

Rome was mostly Christian in 430, and probably more or less completely so by 500. The Vandals (who were Arian Christians) spared the city's major basilicas, and the Roman Church seems to have suffered no ill-effects from the disintegration of the imperial system. The same decades that witnessed the collapse of the Western Empire were marked by a substantial program of church building, and one of the late fifth-century popes, Gelasius, felt strong enough to end the Lupercalia, the city's last "pagan" festival.

There was, in short, more continuity than change in fifth-century Rome. Despite dramatic depopulation, the city center was kept in good repair, the senatorial aristocracy remained largely intact, and the old amenities of the classical city - subsidized grain, baths, and games - were still lavished, if on a reduced scale, on the populace. The real break with the past came in 472, when a civil war destroyed part of the city center, and Olybrius, the last emperor to reside in Rome, died. For the people of Rome, 476 was just another year.

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I talk more about (early) fifth-century Rome in my page on the church of Santa Sabina, which has, if nothing else, decent photos of that wonderful building.