. . .Taxation, however harsh and brutal, would still be less severe and brutal, if all shared equally in the common lot. But the situation is made more shameful and disastrous by the fact that all do not bear the burden together. The tributes due from the rich are extorted from the poor, and the weaker bear the burdens of the stronger. The only reason why they do not bear the whole burden is that the exactions are greater than their resources. . . .
As the poor are the first to receive the burden, they are the last to obtain relief. For whenever, as happened lately, the ruling powers have thought best to take measures to help the bankrupt cities to lessen their taxes in some measure, at once we see the rich alone dividing with one another the remedy granted to all alike. Who then remembers the poor?. . . What more can I say? Only that the poor are not reckoned as taxpayers at all, except when the weight of taxation is being imposed on them. They are outside the number when the remedies are being distributed.
Under such circumstances can we think ourselves undeserving of God's severe punishment when we ourselves continually so punish the poor?
An expert rhetorician, Salvian paints the picture in the blackest colours he can find. But there is ample evidence that the situation was scarcely better than he reports. For example Sidonius, too, when he became bishop of Arverna (Clermont-Ferrand), was besieged by crowds of destitute petitioners who opened his eyes to the social distress of his age. And an obscure writer of Christmas sermons, Gaudentius, wrote that the peasants who had died of hunger, or had been forced to take refuge with the charity of the church, were so numerous that he felt too ashamed to disclose their number.
The consequence was that thousands of men despaired of making an honest living at all, and went underground to form travelling gangs of robbers and bandits. These guerilla groups, the equivalents of today's drop-out terrorists - likewise thrown up and thrown out by social systems they find unacceptable -were swollen not only by deserters from the army, but by hordes of destitute civilians as well. This had happened before, but now the problem assumed truly formidable dimensions.
Banditry on a considerable scale was reported from Italy, North Africa, Spain and the Danube. But it was in Gaul that the gravest disorders occurred. In the third century this had already been one of the worst trouble-spots, and now there were major outbreaks once again. These Gallic bands assumed, at some stage or other, the old name of Bacaudae or Bagaudae, meaning 'rebels'. This designation, like their whole quasi-military movement, may have had certain nationalist overtones. For this was an epoch when the decay of central control meant a revival of regional sub-cultures, particularly in countries such as Gaul where the people had still, in some areas, retained their own language.
And so Ammianus reports a serious Gallic upheaval in 369. Later, for a number of yeas between 401 and 406, gangs of marauders were active in the Alps. Next, during the decade that followed, armed men in Brittany turned out to be not so much the local defence-groups for which the Emperor Honorius was hoping, as brigands operating almost on the scale of a nationwide uprising, in which tenants and slaves rebelled in unison against their landlords.
In 435, a further large-scale Gallic disturbance of the same kind arose under a certain Tibatto, who once again appealed to the slaves, and held out against the Romans for two years. The 440s witnessed a serious revival of similar troubles, under the leadership of a physician named Eudoxius, who eventually fled to the Huns. In Spain too, not for the first time, disorders continued to break out, until a Visigothic army sent by Aetius finally crushed the militants in 454.
A curious verse play called The Protester (Querolus), which appears to be attributable to the early fifth century, tells how the Bagaudae formed rudimentary political structures, holding their own People's Courts, 'where capital sentences are posted up on an oak branch or marked on a man's bones'. Such was the disorder reigning over wide areas of the provinces that these desperate characters, runaways from government and landlords alike, had been forced, as best they could, to take matters into their own hands.
In vain the Imperial officials uttered their menaces. In the later years of the fourth century it was enacted that anyone giving aid or comfort to brigands would be flogged, or even burnt alive. The right of using arms against all such men was granted to every member of the public in self-defence: a law of 409 suggests that 'shepherd' and 'bandit' had virtually come to be regarded as synonymous terms.
Seven years later, however, owing to the 'overwhelming calamities of the times', it was decided to declare an amnesty, in the hope that more lenient policies, for a change, might bring these warlike gangs to reason. Yet none of these measures, whether stringent or conciliatory, availed to restore public order.
And can you wonder, asks Salvian? Unlike most of his contemporaries, he was extremely hostile to the measures taken by Aetius against the bandit gangs, whose flights from society and disorders he blames entirely upon the Roman rulers and their upper-class supporters. The brigandage, he admits, is universal, and no one is safe from it. But in his opinion the so-called brigands themselves are not in the least guilty. Once again, their actions are wholly due to the deeds of their wicked and bloodthirsty oppressors.
. . . The poor are being robbed, widows groan, orphans are trodden down, so that many, even persons of good birth who have enjoyed a liberal education, seek refuge with the enemy to escape death under the trials of the general persecution. They seek among the barbarians the Roman mercy, since they cannot endure the barbarous mercilessness they find among the Romans. . . .
We transform their misfortunes into crime, we brand them with a name that recalls their losses, with a name that we ourselves have contrived for their shame. We call those men rebels and utterly abandoned, whom we ourselves have forced into crime. For by what other cause were they made Bagaudae save by our unjust acts, the wicked decisions of the officials, the proscription and extortion of those who have turned the public exactions to the increase of their private fortunes and made the tax indictions their opportunity for plunder?
Like wild beasts, instead of governing those put under their power, the officials have devoured them, feeding not only on their belongings as ordinary brigands would do, but even on their torn flesh and their blood. Thus it has come to pass that men who were strangled and half killed by brutal exactions began to be really barbarians, since they were not permitted to be Romans. They were satisfied to become what they were not, since they were no longer allowed to be what they had been; and they were compelled to defend their lives as best they could, since they saw that they had already completely lost their liberty.
How does our present situation differ from theirs? Those who have not before joined the Bagaudae are now being compelled to join them. The overwhelming injuries poor men suffer compel them to wish to become Bagaudae, but their weakness prevents them. So they are like captives oppressed by the yoke of an enemy, enduring their torture of necessity, not of their own choice; in their hearts they long for freedom, while they suffer the extremes of slavery. Such is the case among almost all the lower classes.
Far distant, whole aeons past it seemed, was that earlier Imperial golden age when, as Ammianus believed, 'high and low alike with united ardour and in agreement had hastened to a noble death for their country, as if to some quiet and peaceful haven'. Those days were indeed gone and had been succeeded by a fundamental, self-destructive lack of any such united ardour. 'Men fight not as they fought in the brave days of old,' Macaulay makes an earlier Roman say in his poem Horatius. But equally serious, in these later days, was their failure to contribute the sums which were necessary if the army was to exist and fight at all.
This conflict between the authorities and the mass of the people was one of the principal causes of the downfall of the Empire. Karl Marx used this situation to illustrate his point that the classes have no common interests at all, their struggle against one another being essentially illimitable. But Marx also claimed that the specific reason why the Roman Empire fell wa
s because its social pattern, founded on slavery, gave way to a feudal system, which broke down the Imperial structure. It would perhaps be more exact to say that one of the main reasons why the collapse occurred was because the 'free' population, which had to provide most of the Imperial revenue, was so severely ravaged by these tax demands that it could not pay up any longer and, in consequence, ceased to be free at all, so that scarcely a trace of any viable commonwealth survived; and the empty husk of a community which alone remained could no longer resist the invaders.
Such was the appalling disunity between the government and the vast bulk of its subjects: and indeed between the rich and the poor in general.
4
The Rich against the State
The last chapter discussed the tragic circumstances which set the Roman government on a course of direct conflict with the impoverished majority of its subjects. An equally unhappy outcome awaits a state, when its governmental authorities are in conflict with its upper class. This situation, too, arose violently in ancient Rome - despite all the privileges which that class possessed - and was another of the disunities which contributed to its collapse.
In the declining Roman Empire the topmost layer of the population mainly consisted of the men entitled to describe themselves as Senators. Under the earlier Emperors the Senate, that advisory council which formerly guided the decisions of the state, had already become a subordinate and somewhat pitiable body. Yet in these days of Imperial decay, there had been a change: and as far as the Senators were concerned it was a change for the better. For even if the Senate itself, as a body, still did not count for very much, its individual members were now more powerful than they had ever been before.
Those of them who habitually sat in the Senate-house at Rome did not see a great deal of the Emperor, who generally resided in Mediolanum (Milan), and later in Ravenna. The repercussions of his absence were partly unfavourable to senatorial authority -and partly favourable. The doctrine 'where Caesar is, there Rome is', and the fact that Rome itself was usually where he was not, might have seemed to reduce the Senate to little more than a city council; and this was sometimes rather how things looked. On the other hand the removal of Emperor and court to other cities gave the conscript Fathers, in some ways, a new degree of independence. Moreover, Constantine, whose conversion to Christianity made it essential to placate the pagan aristocracy, had increased the important posts available for Senators.
True, he still excluded them from the army; they had been excluded for a good many years. But the annual pair of consulships which still stood at the summit of their career was raised to loftier heights than in earlier Imperial times, since the office was now completely reserved for the Emperor's most prominent supporters, the close friends whom he described as his Companions. They did not have a great deal to do during their consular year. As Gibbon remarked, a consul of late Imperial times 'enjoyed the undisturbed contemplation of his own dignity'. But his mere tenure of the post ennobled for ever all the members of his whole line to come, and usually enriched them as well.
So, although Rome itself was no longer the centre of events, the city's leading residents regained a degree of personal influence that they had not possessed for four hundred years. Class consciousness was immense. Symmachus, himself a leading nobleman, remarked, 'good blood tells and never fails to recognize itself. Yet the aristocratic structure was not altogether closed at the base. The poet Ausonius, for example, won his way into its privileged ranks, and, while displaying a depressing servility towards men of superior pedigree, succeeding in gaining jobs for all his relations.
However, his fellow-author Claudian echoes the widespread indignation felt among Senators when a eunuch, Eutropius, became consul in the East; and Jerome writes of their fury whenever men of humble birth, or 'rustics', took away from them the consulships they felt ought to have been theirs. Moreover, most writers take it for granted that the lower classes will regard a consul and a Senator with immeasurable respect.
But the term 'Senator' had broadened its meaning since the early days of the Empire. For by this time such personages were by no means only the comparatively few individuals who actually sat in the Senate. Their meeting place during the later Western Empire, the Curia, is still standing beside the Roman Forum today. It could scarcely have held even the 600 members which the Senate had possessed at the time when the Empire began. And now there were as many as 2000 members, in addition to another 2000 belonging to its counterpart in Constantinople.
These 4000 Senators were divided into three groups according to property qualifications, each with its own grade of privileges. By the year 450, the two lower grades were excused from attending Senate meetings. Earlier, there had been a regulation that Western Senators must live in Rome. But this rule became obsolete and indeed had to be formally relaxed, since large numbers of Senators, including many belonging to the highest of the three grades in the hierarchy, preferred to live outside the capital and even outside Italy altogether, in the midst of their vast estates. Yet, scattered geographically though they were, these major aristocratic families enjoyed intimate connexions with one another, forming a closely interlocking, self-perpetuating pattern throughout the territories of the West, and dominating the landscape all around them.
Although the lower grades of Senators tended to sink downwards and join their inferiors in the general impoverishment of the times, the richest noblemen became a very great deal richer still. We hear of people whose leases earned them an annual income of four thousand pounds of gold, with the addition of all the revenue they derived from grain and wine and produce of other kinds. Such men may have been five times wealthier, on an average, than their counterparts in the early days of the Empire.
In Rome and Constantinople, Senators appointed to consulships were under a legal obligation to celebrate their appointment by paying for lavish public entertainments or games. Augustine preached critically against rich men who were prepared to ruin themselves in order to give displays. A certain Petronius Maximus, who subsequently became Emperor for a few weeks in 455, expended 4000 pounds of gold on such games. Symmachus, when his son attained office, spent 2000 pounds. Although classed by a contemporary as a man of only medium wealth, Symmachus possessed three houses at Rome and at least thirteen more in various parts of Italy, as well as others in Sicily and Africa.
One of the ascetic ladies in whom Jerome took an interest, Saint Melania the younger, owned estates in Italy, Africa, Spain, Sicily and Britain. Her Sicilian property was maintained out of the revenue of sixty farms, and cultivated by 400 slaves. At one juncture, she emancipated 8000 slaves by a single act. Nevertheless, she was a shrewd financier. In the words of her biographer, 'blessed are those who perceived, and sold their property before the coming of the barbarians'. And she and her family also perceived the sound sense of transferring the proceeds to the East in good time.
As the possessions of people like Symmachus and Melania reveal, anyone who wanted to make a fortune would do well to invest his or her money not in industry but in land. Christian moralists such as Ambrose and John Chrysostom attacked the wealthy figures who bought house after house and field after field, ejecting the former owners and absorbing entire hamlets into their own insatiable hands. As the poet Rutilius Namatianus sailed up past the Etruscan coast in 416, he saw these enormous properties along the shore.
We sailed north past Alsium, and Pyrgi
Was soon behind us. Today these are large estates;
At one time they were little villages.
Many of the great houses presiding over these lands were fortified like castles; this was the almost impregnable security to which so many destitute and displaced persons fled for shelter. The estates were whole little kingdoms in themselves, self-contained economic and social units full of farm-workers, slaves, artisans, guards, bailiffs, and hangers-on.
The mosaic of a certain Julius at Carthage shows one of these battlemented country palaces; and the families of Mauretanian chi
eftains such as Firmus and Gildo, who felt powerful enough to rise against the government in 373 and 397, lived on the same sort of scale.
Sidonius gives a description of another great chateau, the Gallic Burgus of Leontius at the confluence of the rivers Duranus (Dordogne) and Garumna (Garonne). Indeed, in Gaul there was a particularly massive concentration of powerful landowners, who lived more and more in the country and rarely came to Rome - a vigorous senatorial aristocracy of about a hundred families, who handed down their hereditary power and kept their own armed retainers.
Many a village near their homes still keeps their names today -Juilly (Julius), Vitry (Victor), Savigny (Sabinus), Lezigny (Licinius). So powerful were these Romano-Gallic lords that the Emperor Honorius, in time of crisis, virtually decentralized the control of the country into their hands. In 455, meeting at Arelate (Aries), they even proclaimed one of their own number, Avitus, as Emperor.
This act was a triumph of the Gallic nobles over the Roman aristocracy itself, though only a momentary one, since Avitus was deposed and died very soon afterwards. His son Ecdicius, however, was still wealthy enough to support 4000 starving poor in time of famine - a charity which by no means all his fellow landowners would have performed.
A glance at the clothing of one of these noblemen would have shown how times had changed. The plain white robes of earlier Roman dignitaries have gone. A fourth-century Senator wore a linen tunic (camisia), with a woollen robe (dalmatica) thrown over it. On top of the dalmatica was a stiff-hooded cloak, or a diaphanous mantle, floating lightly behind him. These clothes were brilliantly coloured with patterns, and further adorned by handkerchiefs and scarves. Women liked silk dresses, emblazoned with gold thread. Jerome offered many a malicious portrait of extravagantly bejewelled matrons, and Ammianus, too, deploys a whole battery of savage attacks upon the outrageous luxury of the rich. So, of course, does the radical Salvian.
The Fall of the Roman Empire Page 8