The Fall of the Roman Empire

by Michael Grant

  No doubt opulent Romans and Gallo-Romans lived very grandly indeed. But Ammianus' picture is to some extent a deliberate literary echo of a traditional satirical theme; and in any case he was an Easterner who felt embittered because he had not quite made the social grade at Rome. In fact, there is no reason to suppose that Roman Senators were much more extravagant than they had been in earlier times. It is true that the Greek historian Olympiodorus declared that 'each of the great houses of Rome had in itself everything that a moderate-sized town would be likely to possess - a hippodrome, forums, temples, fountains and numerous baths'. But another writer of the day who was in a position to know, Macrobius, congratulates the men of his generation on being less luxurious in their personal style of living than their ancestors. In the eighteenth century, Montesquieu partially attributed Rome's collapse to the excessive luxury of the rich; and he has been followed by countless painters and filmmakers who depict orgiastic scenes with the puritanical implications that this was the sort of self-indulgence that brought the Empire down. But the same or greater luxury had existed for centuries, without any such lethal results.

  Much more serious is another accusation that can be brought against these senatorial noblemen of later Rome. There is in the city', reported a visitor from the East, 'a Senate of wealthy men. . . . Every one of them is fit to hold high office. But they prefer not to. They stand aloof, preferring to enjoy their property at leisure.'

  Like many people today, they felt that politics was a dirty business, which they preferred to avoid. And this, in the later 300s and earlier 400s, was how the rich betrayed the Empire and contributed to its fall. In Rome and the provinces alike, they failed to pull their weight in public life. Exempted from service as city councillors, they tended only to consider the interests of their estates, or the advancement of their own friends. Towards the very end of the Western Empire there was a change, because by then the landowners had become more powerful than the Emperor himself, and successfully invaded his councils. But many still remained apart even then, and oblivious of any wider claims upon their time.

  Up to a point, this attitude was scarcely a novelty. For some degree of leisure and alienation from public events had long been regarded as essential for the well-rounded life a Roman gentleman should lead. Nevertheless the later Imperial aristocracy fiddled with noteworthy insouciance while Rome burned.

  Salvian felt this deeply, and declared that the higher a man's status might be, the greater was his obligation, and the greater his guilt if he fell short. Sidonius, too, called his fellow Gallo-Romans to task for this failure, and wrote to one of them, a certain Syagrius, urging a more public-spirited attitude.

  . . . Why guide the plough-handle, and yet forgo all ambition for the consul's robe? Do not bring a slur on the nobility by staying so constantly in the country.... I would not indeed say that a wise man should fail to concern himself with his private affairs, but he should act on the even principle of considering not only what he should have but what he should be.

  Moreover, for a brief and gallant period, Sidonius practised what he preached. That was mainly during the years 471-5 when, as bishop of Arverna (Clermont-Ferrand), he helped Ecdicius in the local defence against the Visigoths - until the Imperial government let him down by making the territory over to them. During the remainder of his life, too, Sidonius made a few brief interventions in public affairs.

  Nevertheless, the nine books of his literary letters, addressed to many friends and relations, remain a vivid advertisement for the very same ivory-towered seclusion he deplored to Syagrius. Ardent patriot though Sidonius felt himself to be, his letters perfectly depict an aristocracy which, although living under the very shadow of the Germans, was content to bask in the last feeble rays of the Imperial sun, largely indifferent to the encroaching darkness. At Rome, too, the ten books of epistles composed by Symmachus, two generations earlier, had revealed that the elegant metropolitan nobility of his time could scarcely spare a thought for public affairs, or worry about the menacing storm.

  When the writer On Matters of Warfare suggested that provincial landowners living near areas threatened by German invasion should help to build up the Imperial defences, he may have been attempting a sardonic joke. As he must have known, there was no chance that this would happen. They were quite content with keeping the fortifications of their own palaces in good trim. In spite of frequent lip-service to the romantic concept of Eternal Rome, many noblemen were not prepared to lift a finger to save it. Indeed Orosius and Salvian accused a number of aristocrats of decamping to the barbarians, whom they even bribed, added Orosius, to escort them and carry their baggage.

  It is true that, though they did not know it, these landowners, with their scribes and libraries and literary tastes, were playing a historic role in transmitting the culture of the past through and beyond the downfall of the Western Empire to future generations. But their escape from the practical tasks of patriotic service and defence was one of the reasons why the Empire fell at all.

  One such landowner, the poet Ausonius, objecting strongly because his fellow-magnate Paulinus wanted to withdraw from his lands and become a churchman, could point to the chaos that would ensue if Paulinus' estates were broken up. It could equally have been argued, however, that the proprietors were centrifugal forces of destruction. Nor was that merely because of their passive failure to associate themselves with the Empire's needs. They also undermined the state in a very active fashion. For of all the obstacles to efficient and honest administration, they were the worst. They forcibly ejected collectors of taxes, harboured deserters and brigands, and repeatedly took the law into their own hands.

  Symmachus declared it to be perfectly right that any provincial governor, when performing his duties as a judge, should favour nobles and gentry against the proletariat. They possessed their own private prisons: Theodosius i, receiving complaints about their arrogant behaviour, forbade them to maintain such establishments, but he spoke in vain. Ammianus told of local potentates whose 'private properties were enlarged by public disasters'. When the Germans broke into the Empire in 410, the selfish egotism of some of the landowners - especially a great lady named Proba - was reported to be making the appalling task of the government a good deal harder than it had been already.

  Emperors and their advisers were well aware that an oligarchy of Senators in every province created a barrier between the average man and the government, and that the patronage which landlords exerted over their tenants and the surrounding population was destructive of the powers and rights of the Imperial authorities.

  Indeed, rulers repeatedly passed laws seeking to restrict and limit such patronage; and in the end they 'abolished the name of patron altogether'. But this was meaningless verbiage, since nothing whatever happened. In fact, successive Emperors virtually had to give in. The Senators attained such power that those of them who wished to were finally able to infiltrate into the government itself, and into the top strata of the Imperial civil service; and in spite of forlorn attempts by Valentinian III to re-establish regular stages of promotion, the high offices became automatically theirs.

  Moreover, 'patrons' though the rich were, some of them were also the most brutal oppressors of the poor. Symmachus' father Avianius declared, in a time of wine shortage, that 'he would rather mix lime with his wines than sell them to the mob'. That was, perhaps, unimportant; but it was symbolic of a basically cruel social attitude.

  It was bad enough when the landowners gained a say in the appointments of the Defenders of the People, whose specific duty had been to protect the poor. But, besides, these prosperous property-owners themselves were exempt, not only from all municipal responsibilities, but also from a wide range of taxes; and as for the taxes they were expected to pay, it was they who had perfected the facilities for evasion or postponement. This meant that the burden imposed on the poor became correspondingly greater. And, once again, when tax rebates were declared, it was the rich, not the poor, who secured them.<
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  A series of Imperial decrees, however ineffectual, show that the government was uncomfortably aware of all this. Salvian is scarcely overstating it when he declared that the rich were guilty of slaying the poor.

  . . . Who can find words to describe the enormity of our present situation? Now when the Roman commonwealth, already extinct or at least drawing its last breath in that one corner where it still seems to retain some life, is dying, strangled by the cords of taxation as if by the hands of brigands, still a great number of wealthy men are found, the burden of whose taxes is borne by the poor; that is, very many rich men are found whose taxes are murdering the poor. Very many, I said: I am afraid I might more truly say all. . . .

  The rich have thus become wealthier by the decrease of the burdens that they bore easily: while the poor are dying of the increase in taxes that they already found too great for endurance. So the vaunted remedy most unjustly exalted the one group and most unjustly killed the other. To one class it was a most accursed reward and to the other a most accursed poison.

  Indeed, the leading men had the whip-hand in every way. It was even they who themselves levied the taxes payable by their tenants. This was part of their deal with the government, the deal which eventually placed most of the official posts at their disposal. And yet Valentinian in, in 450, still found it diplomatically advisable to express sympathy with the alleged hardships of the wealthy class as taxpayers.

  Even so, however, they did not move into patriotic obedience. On the contrary, they often remained hostile to the Emperor, and estranged from his advisers. For a long time many were pagans while their ruler was Christian. And their relations with the armed forces, in which they themselves were not allowed to play a part, were particularly bad. Their resistance to every attempt to recruit their labourers remained just as determined and became even more successful than before.

  A postscript may be added about a brief interlude in this political and financial advance of the rich landowners and Senators. For their progress had been momentarily halted by Valentinian I, a Danubian soldier from quite outside the magic circle, who very much disliked them and their influence. Indeed, they suffered severely at his hands, and for a short time something like a total rift developed between the government and the aristocracy. Yet his appointment to the praetorian prefecture of the highly aristocratic and oppressive Petronius Probus was an attempt to conciliate the most significant noble families, and helped them to bow before the storm until this period was over - as it soon was.

  And meanwhile there were writers imbued with their tradition who could hit back and damn Valentinian I, if not to his face, at least after his death. One such man was Ammianus who, although snubbed by the nobility, was steeped in its cultural values. Ammianus admits that Valentinian I could not be described as a 'semi-rustic' like his brother. But he could feel no real sympathy or identification with a family brought up to drink the wretched barley-wine of its native Danubian frontier province.

  This snobbery about the people who did not socially belong was one of the most tedious phenomena of the ancient world, and proved perilous at a time when the welfare of the Empire, and even its survival, depended upon such men - men like Valentinian 1 and his Danubian fellow-countrymen, who had been saving Rome now for more than a hundred years, supplying almost all its best Emperors and soldiers.

  Yet prejudice dies hard. The historian Dio Cassius, early in the third century, had already depicted such Danubians as rough, wild, primitive brawlers, and Galerius, an Emperor from a village near Florentiana (Dacia Ripensis, formerly Upper Moesia) who ruled from 305 to 311, was declared to have passed laws that were 'rude and boorish, corresponding to his origin as a cowherd'. One of his successors, Julian, was obliged to listen to orators mocking the uncouth, countrified entourages of these Danubian Emperors. Many a writer, too, expressed horror of barbarian careerists in general. The fastidious Symmachus, predictably, nagged at the 'outlandish ways' of Valentinian I'S friends and compatriots. It was all very negative: and when the same spirit of rejection was extended to the entire German element in the government and the army, it became mortally dangerous. By adopting this attitude, the Senators made yet another of their contributions to the downfall of the Empire.

  When on the other hand the West had fallen, the nobles at once, somewhat ironically, established excellent relations with the German Odoacer who had brought it to an end, and became his collaborators throughout Italy. In Gaul, too, the landed aristocracy survived exposure to German rule without important material or cultural damage - handing on their incipient feudalism to the kingdoms of the Germans, whose flexible class structure made it possible for them to receive and absorb it.

  Yet, gravely blameworthy though the Roman senatorial class was, the fault cannot be placed entirely at its door. For one of the reasons why it increasingly took matters into its own hands was because of the growing incapacity of the authorities to defend the persons or possessions of that class, or indeed of any other class either. A government must be master of its own house; and this the late Roman government was not. For all its passionate desire to regiment everybody in order to raise money, it failed in the last resort to do so, and because of its failure it collapsed.

  5

  The Middle Class against the State

  The controllers of the later Roman Empire in the West had succeeded in totally alienating the rich and ruining the poor. And they also first alienated, and then ruined, the solid nucleus of those who lived between those two extremes - the middle class.

  The middle class had always been the backbone of the Roman Empire, as it had been in the Greek city states that had come before. The reason why it fulfilled such a central role in the Roman world was because the Empire was made up of cities, more or less autonomous city-states, dating back in many cases to the period before the Romans took over. Under the general suzerainty of the Roman provincial governors, each of the cities retained a piece of land of its own, quite a large tract in some cases. The provinces, and especially those covering the more highly developed areas, were little more than the aggregates of these cities and their territories. It was, and had been for centuries, an urban civilization, in which the middle class who ran the cities comprised the central and vital element. The interests of the rural populations were not taken very much into account.

  But in the third century AD these cities received a terrible blow. External invasions and internal rebellions gravely damaged them and their local leaders, and monetary inflation caused their endowments and lands to vanish into thin air. Nor were the military Emperors of the time particularly sorry; many of them

  were out of sympathy with the urban Greco-Roman culture, and felt closer to the rustic populations which the representatives of that culture had always ignored.

  So when, shortly before 300, by grim and authoritarian measures of reorganization, Emperors of this military stamp managed to consolidate the Imperial regime once again, the cities received little encouragement to recover. Constantine the Great and his sons confiscated their tax-revenues and annexed much of their remaining territory, and then, after a momentary relaxation under Julian, similar measures were repeated by Valentinian 1. Later, the towns were allowed just enough money to repair their public buildings, but new construction work of any kind still remained severely restricted.

  These cities began to look thoroughly dilapidated, and the whole of the old middle-class civilization fell rapidly apart and into economic decline. The historian Zosimus attributed its collapse primarily to Theodosius 1. This was partly because the author, a pagan, deplored the Emperor's strict Christianity. But there is truth, all the same, in his general estimate that the age of Theodosius was a period of continued and intensified urban decay.

  And the depressing process still continued after that. Such glimpses as we are given of later city life are far from encouraging. When the Imperial envoy Priscus of Panium (Barbaros) in Thrace visited Attila, a businessman from the Empire whom he found at the Hun cour
t complained that the Roman citizens he had left at home no longer felt the smallest hope. Moreover, in addition to the attitude of the Imperial authorities, the cities had destruction by German invaders to contend with. Although some ancient authors overstated the devastating effects of invasion, these effects were quite grave enough to strike further crippling blows at city life.

  In such circumstances, the townsmen became inert. Their one object was to prevent their buildings and property from being sacked by invaders, and once this was guaranteed they were usually prepared to surrender. But they often suffered serious damage from the Germans all the same. Thus Sidonius pays a poetic tribute to the city of Narbo (Narbonne) in southern Gaul, which was half destroyed: 'such glorious ruins make you precious in our sight.'

  The moralist Salvian, on the other hand, deplored the continued enthusiasm of the people of Treveri (Trier) for their games, which they still continued to hold even though the place had been sacked and plundered on no less than three occasions. 'The Roman people', he declared, 'are dying and laughing.' Dying they certainly were; or at least the cities, their traditional social units, were dying, and had already become the merest shadows of their former vigorous selves.

  The essential element in the urban middle class consisted of the curiales, the members of the city councils or curiae; and the title was extended to their sons and descendants. These councillors had tended to become a hereditary group, because only the solid citizens, those who had some property to hand down from father to son, could endure the financial burden involved. But wealthy men had long since become increasingly unwilling to enrol as councillors. In due course, Imperial compulsion was exerted upon them to serve.