"If," writes Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire, " a man were called upon to fix the period
in the history of the world when the condition of the human race
was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name
that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession
of Commodus"-- that is, the period from 98 to 180 AD.
Yet in the next century the Roman empire crumbled. There were
civil wars between 180 and 285 AD. Of twenty-seven emperors or
would-be emperors all but two met violent deaths. Meanwhile, the
Persians raided to Antioch in the East and in Europe the barbarians
broke through the frontiers. Huge tracts of country were devastated.
The middle-class was squeezed out of existence. Farmers and laborers
were transformed into serfs. When in 285 AD Diocletion pulled
the empire together again, there was but little left of the prosperity
of the Pax Romana.
It seems clear, then, that the causes of the collapse must, like
hidden cancers, have been developing during Gibbon's period of
happiness and prosperity. Some of the symptoms, at least, can
be recognized. To take one example, in the first century of the
empire there had still been a vigorous literature. But in the
second century AD from Hadrian onward, apart from Suetonius' Biographies
of the Emperors, the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, and the Attic
Nights of Aulus Gellius, Latin literature is overcome by a sort
of indolent apathy. The same apathy began to exhibit itself in
municipal life. Financial burdens which were imposed on the local
magistrates and senators. By the second century many cities had
spent themselves into debt.
There was the cost of repairing and maintaining the temples, public
baths, and the like. There were also heavy expenditures for civic
sacrifices, religious processions, feasts and for the games necessary
to amuse the proletariat. The wealthy citizens of the municipalities
who were, in effect, the middle-class, began to grow weary of
the load: especially since the constantly rising taxation rates
were shearing them closer and closer. Furthermore, they were expected
to help their communities out of debt by voluntary loans. By the
middle of the second century, there were cases where compulsion
had to be used to fill the local magistracies. There were other
cases, beginning with Hadrian, where, when municipalities got
into financial difficulties, imperial curators were pat in change
and the cities lost their independence. The people did not seem
to mind. As often happens today, they were quite willing to resign
their control of affairs and to let the government take care of
them.
This extension of paternalism was accompanied by a tremendous
increase in the personnel of the imperial civil service. Each
bureau expanded its field and new bureaux were constantly being
created. By the time of Antoninus Pius, who ruled from 138 to
161 AD, the Roman bureaucracy was as all-embracing as that of
modern times. Naturally, too, as benevolent paternalism and bureaucracy
took over, personal freedom tended to disappear. By the third
century, to quote the historian Trever, "the relentless system
of taxation, requisition, and compulsory labor was administered
by an army of military bureaucrats. . . .Everywhere . . .were
the ubiquitous personal agents of the emperors to spy out any
remotest case of attempted strikes or evasion of taxes."
To the cost of the bureaucracy was added the expense of the dole.
Originally, this was passed out once a month. By the time of Marcus
Aurelius, there was a daily distribution of pork, oil, and bread
to the proletariat. Meanwhile, the expenditure on the public spectacles
kept mounting. A hundred million dollars a year is a moderate
estimate of what was poured out on the games. There was likewise
an attempt to combine subsidy to Italian farmers with charity
to needy children. This was called the alimenta and was instituted
by Nerva, who reigned from 96 to 98 AD. His system was to lend
money at five per cent instead of twelve per cent to farmers with
the proviso that the interest should be used to support needy
children. Boys received seventy cents a day, girls sixty. And
then there was the army. The army was essential to the security
of the empire. The cost of it, though, more than doubled between
96 and 180 AD.
All these expenditures had to be recovered from the taxpayer.
To compound the difficulties, there was an adverse balance of
trade. Roman currency, for example, poured into India and the
East to pay for luxuries. Even in the time of Nero, Seneca estimated
that it cost Rome five million dollars a year to import its luxuries
from the East. In a word, though seemingly prosperous, in the
second century AD the Roman empire was overspending to such an
extent that it was moving to an economic crisis. When in 167 AD
Marcus Aurelius was faced by the attack of the Germanic Marcomanni
and Quadi, he was forced to sell, is it were, the crown jewels
as well as the household furnishing of his palace to finance the
war.
To add to his troubles a plague, brought back from the East, was
ravaging the empire. By 180 AD at least one-fourth of the population
of the whole empire, both civilian and military, had perished.
In any estimate of the reasons for the decline of Rome, the moral
and physical effects of this plague and the later one (252-267
AD , ought not to be omitted. Thus, the seemingly happy world
of Gibbon's day was sleepwalking its way to catastrophe. The plague
contributed to the decline. But, even before the plague, the Roman
world was rotting from within.
Government paternalism, bureaucracy, inflation, an ever-increasing
taste for the brutal and brutalizing spectacles of the amphitheater
and the circus were symptoms of spiritual malaise which had begun
when political freedom was tossed away in the interests of peace,
security, and materialism. There was the cancer of slavery and
the equally dangerous practice of keeping a segment of the population
permanently on the dole. There was free labor subsisting on starvation
wages because of the competition of slavery. At the other end
of the scale lolled a group of multi-millionaires for whom no
luxury was too extravagant. Nor did anyone perceive that inflation
and rising taxation must ultimately squeeze the middle class out
of being. Meanwhile, a tide of Oriental religions tried to fill
the spiritual vacuum.
A sense of futility seemed to permeate society. There were many
outstanding administrators and good governors but, on the whole,
the Roman spirit which had conquered the world seemed to have
dissolved into an indolence which preferred ease and comfort to
a facing up to the dangers which threatened civilization. Some
authors suggest that the change in racial stock was responsible
for this attitude. Others mention the plague and malaria as possible
causes. One might better, perhaps, simply call it the disease
of materialism or, if you like, of the "affluent society"
.
In any case, few Romans or Italians now served in the legions.
Beginning with Hadrian, the army was decentralized, immobilized,
and, if one may invent a word, foreignized. It was Hadrian who
built the great wall in Britain from the Tyne to the Solway. He
also constructed a three-hundred-and-forty-mile-long palisade
of spit oak logs, nine feet high, along the frontier in Germany
and Rhaetia. Behind this palisade were forts of earthworks which
his successor replaced with stone. Behind this Maginot Line, if
one may be permitted an anachronism, and elsewhere in the empire,
each legion was settled in a permanent camp. This camp often became
a town such as Lambaesis in Africa or Carnutum in Austria. Moreover,
Hadrian also began the policy of filling up the army with privincials
from the area to be defended and of allowing the Germans to settle
in the Danubian provinces, provided they served in the auxiliary
troops when called upon.
Thus by the time of Marcus Aurelius the army was composed either
of ignorant countrymen from the most backward parts of the empire
or of foreigners. In spirit and in culture they were peasant wolves
with little, if any, respect for the fat sheep they were supposed
to protect. This divorce between barbarized army and civilized
but soft civilians was the immediate cause of the collapse. The
apathetic Romans soon reaped the whirlwind they had sown. When
in 191 AD Comodus, the brutal son of the Stoic emperor, Marcus
Aurelius, was assassinated, a man named Pertinax put on the purple.
He promised large gifts to the legions and to the praetorians,
those soldiers who from their camp just outside Rome dominated
the city. When he tried to enforce discipline, he in turn was
murdered. The praetorians then sold the throne to Julius Julianus
for a bribe of $1,200 per soldier. But the legions promptly put
forward three other candidates. After three years of civil war
Septimius Severus emerged as the victor. He ruled harshly but
capably until 211 AD and had the good luck to die in bed in Britain.
You can see his triumphal arch today in the Roman Forum. But the
army now knew its power. During the next twenty four years, four
Caesars ruled and four Caesars were assassinated.
Then in 235 Ad, the legions raised the first barbarian to the
purple. This man, Maximinus, was a Thracian peasant of mixed Gothic
and Alan descent who had begun his career as a common soldier.
According to the legends about him, he was eight-and a-half feet
tall, could crumble stones in his hands and break a horse's leg
with a kick of his heel, and each day ate forty Pounds of meat
and drank nearly eight gallons of wine.
Maximinus never even visited Rome. His three years of rule were
a reign of terror. After him followed fifty years of military
anarchy. During that half-century twenty-six Caesars in all donned
the purple and only one died peacefully in bed. Almost all of
them were first the nominees and then the victims of the soldiers.
In one year, 259 AD, there were eighteen pretenders to the throne.
Sections of the empire seceded, as, for example, Gaul, in which
Postumus, and after him Albinus, held power for fifteen years
with Britain and Spain as tributary provinces.
As if the civil wars were not enough to fill full the cup of woe,
in the East the second Persian empire raided as far as Antioch
and took the Emperor Valerian prisoner. The situation in Europe
was even worse. Here, the Germans burst through the barrier of
the Rhine and the Danube. In 257 AD the Goths overran Dacia, crossed
the Danube, and penetrated into Greece. In 269 the Heruli and
the Goths, in their biggest invasion, crossed the Danube with
their families, 320,000 strong, and sailed with 2,000 ships into
the Mediterranean. Fortunately for Rome the Emperor Claudius cut
to pieces both their fleet and their army. Further west another
German tribe, the Marcomanni, had already in 254 penetrated Italy
as far as Ravenna. A few years later the Alamanni got as far as
Milan. Meanwhile, in 256 and 258, the franks and allied tribes
wept across the Rhine and ravaged the whole country as far as
Tarragona in Spain. Still farther west the Saxons were sailing
against Britain.
To pile disaster on destruction, from about 252 AD the second
plague, which has already been mentioned, devastated the Roman
world for fifteen years. Alexandria lost two-thirds of its population
and in Rome, at the peak of it, five thousand died each day. The
Emperor Aurelian did something to check the complete disintegration
of the empire. In addition to capturing some enemies in the East
he brought back Gaul, Britain and Spain into the empire. But it
was he who abandoned Dacia and built around Rome the great wall,
twelve feet thick and twenty high, of which you can still see
large sections in the imperial city. But Aurelian was assassinated,
and so there was another period of chaos until in 285 AD the Illyrian,
Diocletion, gained control.
Such is a brief sketch of the ordeal through which the Roman world
passed in the one hundred and five years from the death of Marcus
Aurelius to the accession of Diocletion. Mere words can scarcely
convey the agony through which the inhabitants of that world passed.
There was murder, rape, and pillage. What the soldiers or the
barbarians spared, the agents of the emperors took for taxes.
The old bureaucracy of senators and knights was pretty well exterminated.
In its place came a military hegemony of soldiers who had risen
from the ranks. Both the army which maw included many barbarians,
and the senate were equalized and, in consequence, barbarized.
It was the members of the military who formed the new landed aristocracy.
The middle-class and labor bad both become serfs of the state.
Increasing taxation and paternalism meant, inevitably, regimentation.
Such was the situation when in 285 AD Diocletion took charge,
He drove back the barbarians and reconstituted the empire. but
it was anew type of Roman empire, one which was ruled by an Oriental
despotism. No one could approach Diocletion without prostrating
himself on the ground and kissing the hem of his garment. Furthermore,
he appointed three other caesars and divided the empire prefectures.
His own capital was not at Rome but at Nicomedia in Asia Minor.
The army was reformed and enlarged; and was composed chiefly of
Germans and Sarmations or else of the sons of veterans. A mobile
force of infantry was supplemented by a powerful cavalry. For
the foot-soldiers of the legions could no longer be trained in
the old Roman way.
But there was no escape from the relentless regimentation which
pervaded all aspects of life. For regimentation was the end-result
of the abdication of political freedom and of the pursuit of materialism.
The welfare state had become a despotism. This new and dreary
type of empire still possessed sufficient power to hold the frontiers
against the barbarians for another century.
In 324 AD Constantine the Great won the purple under the sign
of the Cross. Hence came an edict of toleration for Christianity.
But the despotism was tightened rather than eased; and it is an
interesting note on the morals of the age that within three years
of his championship of orthodox Christianity at the Council of
Nicaea, Constantine put a nephew to death, drowned his wife in
a bath, and murdered a son. Constantine put his capital in Byzantium,
which he renamed Constantinople. Thus Rome was now no longer the
center of the empire.
Finally, in 395 Ad, the former Roman world was formally divided
into an Empire of the East and an Empire of the West. The eastern
empire survived until the capture of Constantinople by the Turks
in 1453 AD. In the west, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, Franks,
and Huns burst over the frontiers and the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons
planted themselves in Britain. In 410 AD Alaric and his Goths
sacked Rome. Then, in 476 AD, the last of the Caesars, Romulus
Augustulus, was dethroned. The Germanic kingdoms took the place
of the Imperium Romanum.