On March 8th Cam Grey presented at Temple University. His talk was titled, "Disaster, Decline and Fall- or Not? A Late Antique Earthquake and its Cultural Reverberations."
Analysis of the impact of seismic events upon communities in late antiquity has tended to revolve around intellectual paradigms that focus upon the ways in which they were employed in the putative “culture wars” between pagans and Christians in the period, or implicate natural disasters in the so-called decline and fall of the late Roman Empire. The purpose of this paper is to begin upon the task of rescuing natural disturbances such as earthquakes, together with the human disasters that they sometimes catalyze, from these rather unreflective and tautological analytical frameworks.
Earthquakes can be scary things. They occur largely without warning, and may be followed by a series of equally unheralded and unexpected aftershocks that can last days, weeks, months, or even years. The sudden shifting, trembling, or shaking of the ground, the collapse or warping of familiar structures, and the ensuing physical, mental, and emotional instability that these can cause combine to render the earthquake a mysterious, terrifying phenomenon, with a temporal horizon that far exceeds the seconds or minutes of the actual event. Analysis of the impact of seismic events upon communities in late antiquity has tended to revolve around intellectual paradigms that focus upon the ways in which they were employed in the putative “culture wars” between pagans and Christians in the period, or implicate natural disasters in the so-called decline and fall of the late Roman empire. The purpose of this paper is to begin upon the task of rescuing natural disturbances such as earthquakes, together with the human disasters that they sometimes catalyze, from these rather unreflective and tautological analytical frameworks.