A Fall of Rome Atlas
There are the Kings: Godigisel and Respendial and Uldin the Hun. The ministers, the heresiarchs, the great ladies were all parts of the big picture. Sometimes the picture of the passion and death of the Empire will be the face of the crucified Christ: but often there will emerge the most fulfilled, the most shatteringly profound image ever, the laughing Christ of Creophylus. — The Fall of Rome
The meaning of the references came clear with the examination of reproductions of coins and medallions of the pseudo-Emperor. Eugenius, who affected an old oriental style in hair and beard, had the face of Jesus Christ. — The Fall of Rome
The one clearly counter-factual statement I can take Lafferty to task for is the odd one at the end of Chapter 5 that the pro-pagan western pretender Eugenius (A.D. 392-94) placed on his coins and medallions the face of Jesus Christ. No, the coins of Eugenius show a conventional late-Roman emperor’s profile. It is not an individual’s portrait at all, save that this one is bearded, whereas the contemporaneous, legitimate emperors are depicted as clean-shaven. But Julian the Apostate had made a political point of his beard too, back in the 360s, when he converted from Christianity to paganism and tried to return to the days of Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius (both of whom were memorably bearded). Most likely the partisans of Eugenius wanted to present their man as another Julian. Yet this too is interpretation. It is easy to imagine a contemporary Christian viewing the image of Eugenius as a mocking caricature of the Savior, even though late fourth-century Christs are usually shown face-on and not necessarily bearded. —Darrell Schweitzer, “Introduction to R. A. Lafferty’s The Fall of Rome” [emphasis added]
Darrell Schweitzer’s essay is one of the few pieces on The Fall of Rome that I find worthwhile. Recently, it sent me back to the novel, so I built this atlas to accompany my rereading. I was again struck by his objection to the passage about Eugenius. He faults Lafferty for claiming that Eugenius placed Christ’s face on his coins and medallions, noting that they show a conventional imperial portrait. But I am not sure his correction responds to what Lafferty actually wrote. Lafferty does not say that Eugenius put an image of Christ on the coins. He says something more radical. He says that Eugenius himself “had the face of Jesus Christ.” In the piece, Schweitzer writes that a contemporary Christian might have seen the portrait as a mocking caricature of the Savior, a possibility closer to Lafferty’s wording than his initial objection suggests. Whether those images warrant the comparison is debatable, but calling them conventional imperial portraits does not, by itself, rule out the resemblance.
What interests me most isn’t really historical. It is how the Eugenius passage develops the imagery of the “Prologue of the Picture,” in which Lafferty describes the people and events of Roman history as pieces of a mosaic that, seen together, reveal Christ’s face, the structured world of the empire before the world ended. With Eugenius, that face appears on a man Lafferty treats as Christianity’s enemy. This is another instance of Lafferty’s love of doubling and doppelgängers. The reader is told that Eugenius and Christ’s resemblance provokes horror. Before the battle of the Frigidus, Eugenius and Arbogast are even described as “the two faces of Antichrist” in the eyes of Stilicho and Theodosius. Lafferty then describes the battlefield in language that recapitulates the prologue as horror:
These barren crags of the Doberdo and the Carso, the farthest south thrust of the Julian Alps, form their own mosaic of rocks, and combine to produce the effect of their own great face. It is the face of the Devil.
How do these images fit the prologue’s mosaic of Christ’s face as the Roman world comes to an end? The detail that troubles Schweitzer seems to me essential to the novel’s design. Its effect depends on Lafferty’s careful language about the face Eugenius shares with Christ. Schweitzer writes:
The one clearly counter-factual statement I can take Lafferty to task for is the odd one at the end of Chapter 5 that the pro-pagan western pretender Eugenius (A.D. 392-94) placed on his coins and medallions the face of Jesus Christ. No, the coins of Eugenius show a conventional late-Roman emperor’s profile. It is not an individual’s portrait at all, save that this one is bearded, whereas the contemporaneous, legitimate emperors are depicted as clean-shaven.
Lafferty does something stranger than Schweitzer’s account suggests: he writes that Eugenius “had the face of Jesus Christ.” Whatever its historical basis, this resemblance connects his portrait to the faces of Christ, Antichrist, and the Devil elsewhere in the novel. Schweitzer makes that artistic relation secondary to a question about Roman coinage. His correction takes precedence over the questions of why Lafferty chose this image and how it belongs to the whole.
That seems to me a misstep at a crucial moment in reading the novel. Schweitzer turns to correction where interpretation is needed. This is one reason to think reading the book as a pastiche of ancient historiography is as mistaken as reading it as popular history. Lafferty is writing a novel.
But to the atlas. I built it for my next reading of The Fall of Rome. It may help others reading or rereading the book, so I’m making it available here as a ZIP file rather than hosting it.
The idea is to follow the action from the two prologues through all nineteen chapters and see how geography shapes the narrative. A few animated maps trace journeys, military movements, blocked approaches, and supply routes, showing earlier trails for comparison.
A few passages from Lafferty are tacked to the maps for relevance and flavor. Place and river names are included when Lafferty mentions them. I like popups on maps, so clicking a location brings up its ancient and modern names, geographical explanations, relevant quotations, and links to other chapters. The notes draw on the resource I made a few years ago.
For those half a dozen of us who care about this book, here’s the file.
