Dressed in Our Clothes: The Ancient Comfort of Pretending Your Replacement Was Really You All Along

Somewhere in the imperial archives of the late Western Roman Empire, there is a record — metaphorical if not literal — of the moment a Roman official sat down and wrote out the military commission of a man whose grandfather had been classified as a barbarian threat. The commission would have used proper Latin. It would have invoked the correct imperial authority. It would have assigned a Roman rank to a man who, two generations earlier, would have been met at the frontier with legions rather than paperwork.

This was not an isolated administrative quirk. It was policy. And it was, depending on how you read the subsequent history, either a sophisticated survival strategy or an elaborate exercise in institutional self-deception. Probably both.

The question worth asking — the question the historical record forces on anyone paying attention — is not whether the strategy worked. It mostly did not, in any durable sense. The question is why civilizations at the height of their anxiety about decline reached for this particular response, again and again, across contexts separated by centuries and continents. The answer reveals something consistent about human psychology that no amount of historical distance makes comfortable.

The Foederati and the Polite Fiction

The Roman practice of incorporating Germanic tribes as foederati — allied forces fighting under Roman command in exchange for land, pay, and some degree of legal standing — was not invented in desperation. It had reasonable precedents and, in its early forms, produced real military utility. The desperation came later, when the terms of the arrangement shifted so far that the fiction of Roman command became difficult to maintain even ceremonially.

Stilicho, the general who defended the Western Empire in its final decades, was himself the son of a Vandal officer. He held the highest military command Rome possessed and was, by any functional measure, the most powerful man in the Western Empire for most of his tenure. He was also, in the eyes of his political enemies, irremediably foreign — a fact that ultimately contributed to his execution in 408 A.D. on charges of treasonous dealings with the very peoples he had spent his career fighting.

Photo: Stilicho, via i.pinimg.com

The episode captures the central contradiction of the assimilation strategy. Rome needed men like Stilicho because it could no longer produce sufficient military capacity from its own population. It gave them Roman titles, Roman authority, and Roman careers. It then destroyed them for being insufficiently Roman. The psychological need to maintain the fiction of Roman supremacy was, in the end, more powerful than the pragmatic need to keep the generals who were holding the frontier.

Tang China and the Warlord's Robe

The Tang dynasty's engagement with its northern and western frontiers produced one of history's more elaborate exercises in assimilation theater. Steppe commanders who presented themselves at the Tang court were received with ceremonial generosity — titles conferring nominal Chinese ranks, gifts calibrated to imply tributary relationship, and in some cases the grant of Chinese surnames that placed them, at least symbolically, within the imperial family's extended orbit.

An Lushan, the general whose rebellion in 755 A.D. nearly destroyed the Tang dynasty entirely, had received three governorships, extraordinary military authority over the northeastern frontier, and personal favor from the Emperor Xuanzong himself. He had been, in the court's self-understanding, successfully incorporated — a useful barbarian made loyal through elevation and honor.

Photo: An Lushan, via gohighbrow.com

The An Lushan Rebellion, which killed somewhere between thirteen and thirty-six million people and permanently weakened Tang imperial authority, is the historical verdict on this assessment. What the court had understood as successful assimilation, An Lushan had understood as an opportunity. The robe did not change the calculation. It may have clarified it.

Byzantium's Baptismal Diplomacy

Byzantium developed the most sophisticated version of this strategy, which is perhaps unsurprising given that it had the most time to practice. The Byzantine approach to threatening neighbors combined religious conversion, dynastic marriage, and the conferral of honorary imperial titles into a system of managed incorporation that was, at its best, genuinely effective and, at its worst, a mechanism for producing enemies who understood Byzantine court culture well enough to exploit it.

The conversion of Vladimir of Kiev in 988 A.D. and his subsequent marriage to the Emperor Basil II's sister Anna was understood in Constantinople as a diplomatic triumph — a potentially dangerous northern power brought within the Byzantine cultural and religious orbit. The Rus would build their ecclesiastical culture on Byzantine foundations, translate Byzantine theological texts, and model their court ceremonies on Constantinople's example.

Photo: Vladimir of Kiev, via c8.alamy.com

They would also, over the following centuries, develop a distinct civilization with its own imperial pretensions. Moscow would eventually style itself the Third Rome. The assimilation had worked, in the sense that it transmitted Byzantine culture. It had not worked in the sense of keeping Byzantine power central. The student had learned the lesson and then written a different ending.

What the Strategy Was Actually For

The persistence of this pattern across Roman, Chinese, and Byzantine contexts — and it appears in others, from the Abbasid Caliphate's Turkish soldiers to the Mughal court's Rajput nobles — suggests that the strategy was serving a purpose beyond its stated one.

The stated purpose was management of external threat: bring the dangerous outsider inside the system, give him a stake in the system's survival, and convert an enemy into an asset. This logic was not irrational. It sometimes produced exactly the result intended.

But the historical frequency with which it failed to produce that result, combined with the frequency with which it was attempted anyway, points toward a secondary function. The assimilation strategy allowed the civilization employing it to narrate its own situation in terms that were psychologically bearable. If the Visigoths were Roman foederati, then Rome was still directing events. If An Lushan wore a Chinese title, then Tang authority still extended to the frontier. If the Rus were baptized Christians with Byzantine court manners, then Byzantium remained the center of the civilized world.

The strategy was, in this reading, less a tool of foreign policy than a tool of domestic psychology — a way of managing the discomfort of realizing that the center was losing its gravitational pull. The titles, the robes, the baptisms, and the imperial daughters were all ways of saying: this is still our story, and these people are characters in it, not authors of their own.

Human psychology has not changed in five thousand years. The need to narrate decline as continuity, to see the people inheriting your world as extensions of your project rather than replacements for it, is not a failure of intelligence. It is a feature of how minds manage information that threatens the coherence of identity. The Roman official writing out that military commission was not foolish. He was human. He was doing what humans do when the alternative is too uncomfortable to contemplate directly.

The historical record is not kind about where this leads. But it is, at least, honest about why we keep going there.