The Long View: The Fall of the Roman Empire

The Long View: The Fall of the Roman Empire

One of the things I enjoyed the most about John J. Reilly's book reviews is that he was not only a gifted summarizer, able to quickly sum up the key points of a book, he was knowledgeable enough to critique and expand upon those key points in interesting ways.

For example, Peter Heather speculates in this book that if the African provinces and their tax revenues had been successfully returned to Imperial control in the fifth century, then the Western Empire might have trundled on for some time. John disagreed, because of the specific manner in which Imperial government was failing in the West at the time:

If African tax revenue had found its way to Ravenna after 468, it would have been stolen, or used to invade Illyricum, or for some damn stupid thing that would have had nothing to do with restoring the empire. Such a restoration was a project too large for the imaginations of the people who would have been tasked to carry it out.

The Fall of the Roman Empireu
A New History of Rome and the Barbarians

By Peter Heather
Oxford University Press Paperback 2007
(First Published MacMillan 2005)
572 Pages, US$19.95
ISBN 978-0-19-532541-6

During the last quarter of the 20th century, the study of the history of the Greco-Roman world experienced a healthy reappraisal of familiar sources and the venerable commonplaces of large-scale narrative. Historians began to grapple with new archeology, and even some newly discovered texts, that shed fresh light on old subjects. Nonetheless, Classical history did not escape the shenanigans that infected the rest of academia. In those days, the tools of literary deconstruction shredded the ancient historical texts so as to put every statement in the indicative mood into question, while political theorists, usually of a Marxist bent, reworked any historical narrative that survived to accord with their partisan preoccupations. There came a point when the phrase “fall of the Roman Empire” was often put in scare quotes, on the ground that the notion was essentially a literary conceit that masked what was really a late-antique tale of change and continuity. The historiographical world has calmed down a bit in more recent years, but we are still in a situation where we know more about the end of the empire than we did in 1950 but are less sure about what our knowledge means.

Now comes Peter Heather of the University of Oxford (Worchester College) with this delightful attempt at a new synthesis. Yes, we are assured, the Roman Empire did fall. Indeed, in the very specific way in which the author frames the issue, we are even assured that the date in the old textbooks for the fall of the empire in the West, AD 476, is actually a pretty good approximation. One may quarrel with the author’s interpretation of various points, or even with his principal thesis, which is that the fall of the empire must ultimately be ascribed to “exogenous” factors, to forces originating outside the empire, rather than to any flaw in the empire itself. Still, readers are given enough information to judge for themselves, plus a glossary, an appendix of notable persons of the fourth and fifth centuries, and a helpful timeline of all these distressful events. The fall of civilization has never been more user-friendly.

In this telling, the empire was characterized by certain features throughout its whole run of just shy of 500 years. The empire was essentially a one-party state supported by an ideology of “Unity in Perfection.” Imperial society was assumed to be the highest form of society. The empire, and each individual emperor who governed it, had been selected by divine will to bring order to terrestrial affairs. Be that as it may, the borders of the empire were remarkably stable and, to some degree, natural. With some fluctuation, the empire stopped expanding into the Near East when it encountered militarily formidable societies in the Parthian Empire and later the Persian. It stopped on the Rhine because the Germanic polities on the other side were too sparsely peopled and economically primitive to support the cost of garrisoning them.

The author emphasizes that the empire was not regarded by the bulk of its subjects as foreign. When a people was conquered by the empire, its elites usually bought into imperial culture. They founded municipalities with Roman street grids and acquired standardized “Latin right” constitutions for them that guaranteed a fair measure of autonomy and civil liberty.

The elites further invested heavily in education: typically ten years under a grammarian to learn enough proper Latin for public life, with another few years under a rhetor to gain the expertise needed to function as a lawyer or a panegyrist. (The author has a lot of fun with the imperial flacks who could be depended on to formulate the most amazing whoppers when the government’s enterprises conspicuously miscarried.)

These elites were, for the most part, a class of landowner that the author says was reminiscent of “Mansfield Park in togas.” The members of this Jane Austen gentry occupied their time plotting advantageous marriages for their children and writing flowery letters to each other in a Latin that grew more rococo as the fortunes of empire declined. These people might have military experience, but they were essentially civilian landowners, and their survival as a class depended on the existence of a government that could enforce a quite elaborate system of property rights. To put it bluntly: their loyalty to the imperial government was assured, as long as the imperial government could raise enough tax revenues to pay for the maintenance of public order.

Perfect though the empire might seem to its subjects, it did undergo change, so that the late empire of the fourth century differed in important ways from what is sometimes called the “high empire” the first two centuries of the Christian era. According to the author, most of these changes can be blamed on the Persians. The empire in the third century started losing armies, cities, and even the lives of emperors in a series of wars with the Sassanid Dynasty, to such effect that it seemed for a while as if the conquests of Alexander might be reversed. In order to meet the threat, the empire had to increase its tax revenues by about a third. It also developed a permanent need for a plural imperial executive and two to four working capital cities. None of these was Rome. Rome had become a ceremonial backwater that was maintained in the manner to which it had become accustomed, but Rome was otherwise neglected. Emperors were needed to manage the Persian border, from Constantinople and Antioch, but also the Danube and Rhine, from Ravenna or Milan, and Trier. The Germanic lands were no longer so primitive and underpopulated as they had been in the days of Augustus.

These challenges were met: the Persian border was stabilized by about AD 300, but at a cost. Retail politics among the gentry had traditionally been a matter of seeking local prestige by building public works at personal expense and managing public amenities supported by local taxes and fees. In the third century, however, the imperial government expropriated all sources of public revenue, but still required the gentry to serve on public bodies to collect it. Notoriously, the inscriptions commemorating private benefactions that characterized Roman cities earlier in the empire stop being made in the third century. Because of that cessation, many historians had inferred that the gentry class that had once produced them had been immiserated by taxation.

Not so, says the author. The private benefactions and the inscriptions to commemorate them ended, but the gentry who had once made them were still there. The difference is that the direction of their political attention shifted from their neighbors to the imperial government, from which they sought to extract honors, rents, and careers (the number of some types of imperial civil servant seems to have increased by almost a factor of two dozen). This was part of the reason the empire needed several centers: patronage that once had been local now had to be distributed by the emperor, and one emperor just was not adequate to that purpose in a state with the size and limited communications of the Roman Empire. Even so, the plural executive was not enough. The chronic and eventually pathological sequence of rebellion, coup, and assassination among aspirants to the throne (or one of the thrones) was partly the result of the fact that the gentry of some region, somewhere, always believed they were not getting their fair share of imperial funds and attention.

Nonetheless, the author assures us that the fourth-century empire was a sustainable success. The author has many things to say about demographics, some of them more credible than others. He tells us, as if it were a great surprise, that, the population and economy of the eastern half of the empire were expanding in those years. More interesting, he notes that Britain was actually fairly densely settled at this time. He does not altogether glide over the decline of Italian agriculture, but attributes it to the lessened political importance of Italy rather than any general trend toward depopulation. No, no, he says: the late empire boasted a population of about 70 million. As for those extra taxes, they simply spurred the slacking peasant tenants to use their land more efficiently, so that the economy of the late empire was operating at close to maximum production.

To this assessment one may respond that any mechanism that is running at 100% of capacity is likely to break if it is asked for another 10% effort, and the author tells us that this is pretty much what happened. The Huns were to blame. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that presented Attila in quite so sympathetic a light, but in fact the actual Hunnish invasions of imperial territory in the middle of the fifth century did not do an extraordinary amount of damage and were contained in due course. What the Huns did do, when they began to move west from Asia into Europe in the fourth century, was to set in motion the now not-so-primitive or disorganized peoples of “Germania” toward sanctuary on Roman territory.

It was not unusual for Germanic groups to ask to settle on Roman land; the imperial government frequently allowed it, though the terms of accession parceled out the immigrants to ensure they would not retain their cultural or linguistic identity. As we all know, however, the eastern empire fumbled a movement of this sort late in the century, leading to the Battle of Hadrianople (Adrianople grew an “H” in this book) in 376. The emperor Valens was killed, and the Danube border briefly collapsed. AD 376, in fact, is sometimes given as the “real date” for the fall of the empire, but the author will have none of it. The Goths in question soon made a treaty that legitimated their presence in the empire; a treaty that resulted in the sack of Rome in 410, when their king Alaric found the Roman governments insufficiently forthcoming with more concessions. However, as the author points out, the famous sacking was a shock to the whole world, but actually an expression of Gothic weakness: it was a case of a kidnapper discovering that the hostage’s loved ones did not love her enough to pay the ransom money.

The important invasion was the one over the Rhine in 406, involving Vandals and Suevi and Alans and the Lord knows who else. The invaders did considerable damage in the imperial heartlands in Gaul and Iberia, but the end was still not yet. The author reminds us that the empire had good days, even good decades, in the fifth century. The immigrants (a term the author favors after a certain point) proved receptive to the advantages of a regularized status with the government of the western empire as client-allies. Revenues streams to the imperial treasury were reestablished. The armies of the newcomers allied with the remnants of the Roman forces to make the more obstreperous newcomers docile (and to defeat the Huns, as we have seen). Nonetheless, the invasion of 406 led to the invasion of Roman North Africa by the Vandals in 435, and that would ultimately end any hope for a reorganized empire.

The logic is mechanical. As long as it appeared that the western Roman government would probably be able to regain the tax revenues from Africa, that government was worth doing business with. When those revenues were regained, as most people thought would happen, the government would again be able to maintain a military large enough to function outside Italy, and to restore some level of civil administration everywhere. Meanwhile, the barbarian kings took the trouble to superficially Romanize themselves in their capacity as imperial subjects. The gentry were willing to work with the kings as mediating powers in what was still universally acknowledged to be a Roman world. However, 30 years of attempts to retake Africa, often involving joint operations by the western government at Ravenna and the eastern one at Constantinople, were repeatedly frustrated by distractions like coups and fresh invasions. Finally, in 468, a serious joint invasion was organized, an effort large enough to clean out the treasury at Constantinople. It was defeated at sea, not far from Carthage. There was no other force to send, and no political will to send it.

After that, the record shows that political elites lost interest in the western empire very quickly. One fellow who had a plausible claim to the thrones of the West and of the Burgundians opted for the Burgundians. Actually, for almost a century, sensible people in the West rarely aspired to be emperor anymore: minister-generals, usually of barbarian origin, ruled in the name of puppet emperors. Those emperors were politically powerless, but sometimes homicidal at close quarters.

On a micro level, the gentry gave up trying to cage support from Ravenna and refocused their expressions of loyalty on the nearest barbarian overlord. In 476, of course, the latest semi-barbarian premier, Odovacar, found no advantage to either being emperor of the western empire or pretending to serve one. He pensioned off the child-emperor, Romulus Augustulus. Then he sent the still very real emperor at Constantinople a polite note about it, promising to rule Italy in Constantinople’s name.

As the author points out, no serious historian these days attributes the fall of the empire wholly to either external or internal causes. This book chooses to concentrate on the external causes, which is fine. The book’s largest excursus into cultural questions concern religion, where the author finds no merit in Edward Gibbons old charge that Christianity undermined the morale of the empire. The author notes instead that the imperial ideology simply incorporated Christianity: the providence that gave the empire its legitimacy was said to be that of the Christian God rather than, as formerly, Fate or the Greco-Roman pantheon. Most Christians were willing to go along with this. The author further notes that the big break from imperial ideology came, of course, from St. Augustine, who lived in North Africa just as the imperial roof was falling in. It was he who warned, perhaps a bit belatedly, against identifying any political regime with the City of God. (The author does perpetrate a bit of mischief when he remarks that St. Ulfilas’s Christological views were “traditional”: certainly the homoiousian position was a piece of fourth-century obfuscation that had not been around long enough to be anyone’s tradition, no matter the issue of Arianism avant le parole. And don’t get me started on Pelagius.)

The author attempts a little counterfactual speculation that I think suggests ways in which his account of the fall could be broadened. It is easy to imagine, he says, that the Romano-Byzantine invasion of 468 might have succeeded. Indeed, Constantinople actually succeeded in recovering most of Roman North Africa in the next century. If that had happened in the fifth century, when there was still an imperial government in the west, then “Rome” might have reasserted itself at least as a hegemonic power within the borders of the former empire. To that I would say that this scenario presumes that the tax revenues that would have been recovered from Africa would have been used wisely, or at least sanely. The fact is, though, that the western government had been a slasher-movie for several generations before the invasion failed. No one seemed to consider that murdering the emperor or suborning an army to overthrow him might have a deleterious effect on the strategic situation. The madness was not confined to Rome or Ravenna: a Roman general based in Britain took the opportunity caused by the Rhine invasion of 406 to lead the garrison from the island in a bid to become emperor. This act ensured that Roman Britain, almost uniquely among the major provinces, would be wholly destroyed by invasion.

One way to put it might be that the idea of public property had evaporated. Certainly the idea of public responsibility had. No doubt the resources might have been found to restructure the empire on a more modest plan; perhaps a confederal structure, like the Holy Roman Empire of the second millennium. The fact is, though, that the political culture to support such a structure no longer existed in the fifth century in the west. If African tax revenue had found its way to Ravenna after 468, it would have been stolen, or used to invade Illyricum, or for some damn stupid thing that would have had nothing to do with restoring the empire. Such a restoration was a project too large for the imaginations of the people who would have been tasked to carry it out.

This cultural shift was not a new development, if we can believe Peter Brown. According to him, the political tranquility of the empire in the second century did not collapse in the third, but exploded upwardly. That is not so different from what the author here has to say about the third-century elites refocusing their attention on the center. I suggest, however, that the author neglects the importance of the fact that the gentry had stopped trying to maintain public institutions and started to mine them. Perhaps this predisposition continued into the next century. If so, that might not have rendered the empire doomed to destruction, but it would have made it extraordinarily brittle. The Roman Empire in the fourth century may have been a success story, in the sense that it kept the Persians at bay. That does not change the fact that, at least to many readers of its literature, its culture was crepuscular, valetudinarian, and, well, icky.

Gibbon’s reading of Roman history is open to criticism on many points, but he was not wrong to begin it before the Persian wars. Something was misfiring in imperial society before the major exogenous stresses appeared. Neither was he wrong to use a longer title. The author has written a wonderful account of the Fall. The full story, though, requires an account of the Decline.


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