Zosimus Quotes

He was forty years old, and for six years he had been struggling to claim the crown of the imperator. Less than twenty-four hours before, he had finally beaten the sitting emperor of Rome, twenty-nine-year-old Maxentius, at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. Constantine’s men had fought their way forward across the bridge, toward the city of Rome, until the defenders broke and ran. Maxentius drowned, pulled down into the mud of the riverbed by the weight of his armor. The Christian historian Lactantius tells us that Constantine’s men marched into Rome with the sign of Christ marked on each shield; the Roman* writer Zosimus adds that they also carried Maxentius’s waterlogged head on the tip of a spear. Constantine had dredged the body up and decapitated it.1

Contemporaries struggled to make sense of what, to them, was the complete collapse of the world order. “Why does [God] allow us to be weaker and more miserable” than all these tribal peoples, wailed the fifth-century Christian writer Salvian; “why has he allowed us to be conquered by the barbarians? Why does he permit us to be subject to the rule of our enemies?” The answer, he concluded, was simple: men had sinned and God was punishing them.23 Others reached the opposite conclusion. Rome had been master of the world when it was faithful to its pagan roots, argued Zosimus, the Byzantine historian (who was himself pagan); when it abandoned these and turned to a new faith, it engineered its own demise. This, he said, was not an opinion; it was a fact.24 Rome

They renounce legal marriages and fill their populous institutions in cities and villages with celibate people, useless either for war or for any service to the State; but gradually growing from the time of Arcadius to the present day they have appropriated the greater part of the earth, and on the pretext of sharing all with the poor they have, so to speak, reduced all to poverty. — Zosimus, the last pagan historian of antiquity, AD 498.