As in any vast state, the standard of efficiency and integrity maintained by these various grades of officials was neither uniformly good nor bad. For example the legislation of successive Emperors reflects the strenuous efforts of at least a number of Administrative Structure of the later Roman Empire
Western Eastern
Roman Empire Roman Empire
Milan and later Constantinople
Ravenna
* later four 'Vicars' of Dioceses
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Governors of Provinces
praetorian prefects to check the rapidly accelerating slide into chaos. Yet it was unfortunate that Valentinian I'S prefect of Italy, Africa and Illyricum - who occupied the post no less than four times, under three successive rulers - was Petronius Probus. For it is impossible to ignore Ammianus' account of Petronius as a person who, although careful never to order an illegal act, nevertheless was a suspicious, merciless and sinister hypocrite, eaten up by anxiety and jealousy.
Moreover, there is evidence that provincial governors, too, had fallen below the high levels of early Imperial times. It was hardly to be expected, in such a difficult and exacting age, that every one of the hundred governors at any one time should be entirely respectable characters; and the weakness of city councils was a positive encouragement to these officials to interfere right and left. The writer On Matters of Warfare paints a deeply depressing picture. 'The appalling greed of the provincial governors', he asserts, 'is ruinous to the taxpayers' interests. . . . The buying of recruits, the purchase of horses and grain, the monies intended for city walls - all these are regular sources of profit for them, and are the pillage for which they long.' It was the brutal cynicism of governors and their henchmen that caused the Visigoths the hardships which impelled them, in desperation, to attack the Romans in 378. Orators declared in the presence of Emperors that the conduct of such administrators made the provincials actually long for barbarians to occupy their territories.
Salvian found governors venal and cruel - men who subjected the poorer communities to virtual devastation. A severe judgment from so censorious a writer was only to be expected, but the much more conservative Sidonius, too, felt that the abuses committed by Roman functionaries in Gaul had gone to intolerable lengths. One fifth-century official, Seronatus, behaved with such brutality that he drove many of the population into the woods.
After all this, it would be funny, if it was not sad, to read an Imperial edict which declares it better for a governor not to frequent fascinating houses of ill-repute (non deverticula deliciosa sectetur).
A special word of condemnation must be reserved for the lawyers of the later Empire. One of our outstanding documents for the period is the Theodosian Code which was drawn up in 438 on the orders of the Eastern monarch Theodosius II, and was accepted by the West. The Code consists of sixteen books, containing a collection of Imperial enactments extending back for a hundred years and more.
It was intended to eliminate the many notorious ambiguities, inconsistencies and contradictions of which the existing laws were full. Although exercising an influence upon subsequent German legislation, it was largely superseded in the sixth century by the Code of Justinian I.
As a source of historical information, however, it remains highly significant. The measures it records tell us a tremendous amount about conditions in the two Empires, Eastern and Western alike. And equally informative are certain further edicts by Western Emperors of the same period and later, notably Valentinian in and Majorian.
But these regulations are particularly instructive for reasons which it would not have pleased their compilers to hear. For many of the documents in question, especially as the Western Empire drew towards its end, display an almost hysterical violence, revealing emotional confusions between sin and crime that would have been quite alien to the classical Roman law of earlier times. Sir Samuel Dill, who wrote feelingly on the hardships suffered by these later Romans, was convinced, with some justice, that this prolonged repressive legislation was not only a symptom of the Roman collapse, but helped decisively to bring it about.
Above all else, the Imperial pronouncements are intensely, monotonously repetitive. Such constant repetitions suggest that these successive measures, emerging in a continuous torrent, were circumvented, disobeyed and ignored with equally continuous impunity. Their endless reiteration shows that the government, while alive to what it ought to be doing, was overwhelmed by the situation, and quite impotent to improve it. Never has there been such a futile spate of over-legislation. And its futility seems to be underlined by a curiously baroque and wordy style of drafting, with many flowery references to the potency of evil and the need to remould those citizens who were ignorant and liable to be deceived by depraved persuasion.
Some legislation, it is true, was both humane and enlightened.
There were laws, for instance, alleviating the lot of slaves, and granting assistance to needy debtors and forbidding infanticide. However, there was also a terrifying amount of bloodthirsty judicial inhumanity. Besides, there was not even a pretence of equality before the law. Not only were noblemen entitled to have their lawsuits heard in a specially constituted court, but, with the explicit approval of Symmachus, the privileges and punishments of rich and poor were entirely different. 'If a man be poor,' declared the theologian Theodoret, 'his terror of the judge and law-courts is doubled.'
Certainly, there were brief moments when this trend was reversed, for example under Valentinian I, who dealt sternly with the upper class. All the same, Valentinian himself was a poor advertisement for judicial balance. For even if we do not believe Ammianus' assurance that he fed victims to pet bears, he was evidently liable to terrible fits of anger, one of which caused his death. And the ferocity with which he ordered summary executions was notorious. 'Shift his block!' he would cry. And Theodosius i, too, for all his religious principles, often behaved with the grimmest cynicism and brutality.
Such were the character defects of hard-pressed Emperors. But worse still was the savagery with which, throughout the Empire, the law was administered and enforced by the courts. True, they were only reflecting the Codes which continually menaced floggings and burnings alive - or perhaps the Codes were reflecting the practice of the courts. When landowners, too, took matters into their own hands and dispensed justice themselves (as a Carthage mosaic shows one of them doing) the results were no less harsh. The veto of Theodosius i on their private prisons proved ineffective. And even the cultured Sidonius, after coffin-bearers had inadvertently left their tools on the ground covering his grandfather's grave, tells us how he acted on his own responsibility to have them flogged or tortured on the site of their offence.
But by far the most serious problem affecting the operation of the laws was the defect already noted in the civil service as well. For the administration of justice, like the operations of the bureaucracy, was riddled through and through with corruption. Many lawyers behaved quite abominably. The writer On Matters of Warfare selects this particular theme as the culmination and climax of his essay.
. . . Most Sacred Emperor, when the defences of the state have been properly provided both at home and abroad through the operation of divine Providence, one remedy designed to cure our civilian woes awaits Your Serene Majesty. Throw light upon the confused and contradictory rulings of the laws by a pronouncement of Your August Dignity. And put a stop to dishonest litigation!
The Code of Theodosius n was intended to tidy up the contradictory rulings. But for the dishonest litigation it did not begin to find a remedy. An anxious awareness that there was corruption in the very centre of the legal scene was openly voiced at a curious ceremony in the Emperor's presence, when the Senators chanted a series of ritual incantations, one of which, repeated no less than twenty-five times in succession, took the form of an appeal 'that, to prevent the edicts being interpolated, all the Codes should be written in longhand'. Dishonest interpolations, that is to say, were not only fea
red, but fully expected.
The envoy Priscus of Panium (Barbaros) in Thrace, visiting Attila's court, tried to persuade the disaffected Greek merchant he met there, in an oration which even in his own account sounds wooden and unconvincing, that Roman justice was still a fine thing. The Greek replied that the system might be all right, but that the men in charge of it were appalling.
But much the most damning indictment of the lawyers comes from Ammianus. Not content, he says, with promoting utterly useless legislation, they employed their audacious, windy eloquence for criminal frauds, procrastinated by creating hopeless legal tangles, deliberately raised deadly hatreds between one member of a family and another, and 'laid siege to the doors of the widows and childless'. The coarse-mouthed offensiveness of their speeches, he added, was only equalled by their lamentable ignorance of the law.
Perhaps Ammianus was indulging in some rhetorical overstatement, in the spirit of the satirists of old. But he is a responsible historian, and much of what he says must have been true. Indeed, the Imperial edicts themselves stress the existence of precisely such abuses. The lawyers, almost as much as the civil servants, caused Rome's administration to grind gradually to its paralysed halt. Between them, the jurists and bureaucrats bequeathed to the barbarians an Empire which, in the words of the German philosopher Johann von Herder, was 'already dead, an exhausted body, a corpse stretched out in its own blood'.
7
The People against the Emperor
The rulers who poured forth these constant torrents of ineffectual edicts often lived very cloistered lives. Isolated among their advisors and courtiers, they lost contact with the rest of their subjects. And this was another of the fatal disunities that brought the Empire down.
The Emperor's position was exceedingly elevated and withdrawn. A fourth-century philosopher and rhetorician, Themistius, put the matter succinctly: 'you are the living law, and superior to the written law.' It is true that rulers reserved the right to depart from any individual measure which in a special case seemed to be operating unjustly. Yet great ecclesiastics such as Ambrose would have wished to qualify Themistius' statement, owing to their insistence on the independent rights of the church. And others, too, disliked the situation. So Valentinian in considered it advisable to declare publicly that he considered himself bound by the laws.
Nevertheless, the formal powers of an Emperor were virtually unlimited. And they were ostentatiously symbolized by a portentous solemnity, befitting his role as God's regent upon earth. Since this was his unutterably august status, everything relating to him was pronounced sacred. A series of successive edicts even restricted the numbers of those who were entitled to touch his purple robes, and who were permitted to perform their obeisances before His Serenity in person. Those unqualified to obtain such access prostrated themselves before his holy images and portraits instead. His edicts, written in gold on purple parchment and received by his ministers with reverently covered hands, were formally 'adored'. Since they were heavenly and consecrated, breaches of their provisions were sacrilegious, and could be punished accordingly.
Ceremonial reached fantastic levels of elaboration. Particularly grandiose were Imperial Arrivals and Entries into cities. As the carriage of Constantius n drew him into Rome in 357, Ammianus describes his hieratic, icon-like posture.
. . . For he both stooped when passing through lofty gates (although he was very short), and as if his neck were in a clamp he kept the gaze of his eyes straight ahead, and turned his face neither to right nor to left, but (as if he were a lay figure) neither did he nod when the wheel jolted nor was he ever seen to spit, or to wipe or rub his face or nose, or move his hands about.
The immobile grandeur is a far cry from the relative accessibility with which rulers in earlier days had felt obliged to humour their subjects.
Moreover, an Emperor of these later times was surrounded and cut off from the outside world by a far more extensive court than hitherto. Julian tried to cut down the numbers of his courtiers to reasonable limits, but soon afterwards they became even more numerous than before, especially under Theodosius I. Obviously, their proximity to the Emperor's person gave them enormous influence. They showed their strength at its greatest when they prompted Valentinian III to bring down the virtual master of the Western world, Aetius. But they often immobilized both themselves and the Emperor by quarrels within their own ranks.
This Imperial court, with the cabinet or council (Consistory) at its centre, was inevitably the focus of violent criticism from outside. The historian Olympiodorus attacked it for bribery and embezzlement. Anti-Germans deplored the large number of courtiers who were Germans. And the aristocracy felt implacable hostility against the influence of the ruler's personal chamberlains.
Many of these chamberlains were eunuchs, a class which had often been favoured by ancient monarchs because of its freedom from any sexual loyalties and hereditary ambitions that might weaken its fidelity to the throne. Under Theodosius I, the eunuchs were the people from whom promotion had to be purchased. But attacks against eunuch power were traditional; and under Valentinian in they reached their crescendo. The lofty eminence of these personages, and their influence over Emperors, deepened the rift between the court and the world. It was considered particularly scandalous when one such eunuch, Eutropius, became the chief adviser and general of Arcadius in the East. The poet Claudian lavished ferocious abuse on this development, declaring that not even a nation of barbarians would have tolerated a eunuch as consul and commander-in-chief.
The court was wherever the Emperors were. Until the death of Theodosius i, they still took the field in major wars and spent their lives travelling from one end of the Empire to the other. They often dwelt at Treveri (Trier) close to the German border, or at Sirmium not far from the Danubian front. When they were in Italy they did not usually live at Rome, which was insufficiently central to deal with urgent frontier needs, but established their headquarters at Mediolanum (Milan).
In 402, however, Honorius, while residing at that city, received a severe shock. For during Alaric's invasion of Italy in that year, the young Emperor was besieged for a while within its walls and came within measurable distance of capture by the barbarian enemy. He therefore decided, soon afterwards, to move the government of the Western Empire to Ravenna on the east coast of Italy. He selected Ravenna because it was practically inaccessible to invaders by land, being almost completely surrounded by stretches of water and marsh. On the other hand, it was beside the Adriatic (which has now receded a number of miles), so that communications could be kept open.
The advantages of Ravenna were purely strategic. There were no natural amenities, and not even any water that was drinkable. Although the Emperor Julius Nepos personified the place as a goddess on his coins, Sidonius declared that 'the movement of ships stirs up the filthy sediment in the canals, and the sluggish flow is fouled by the bargemen's poles, piercing the bottom slime'. Nevertheless, under the direction of Honorius' half-sister Placidia, a glittering capital was built, notable especially for the mosaic-filled interiors of its churches and mausoleums.
Many of the buildings we see today date from the period after the downfall of the Western Empire, when Germans and Byzantines ruled the city in turn. But there are also surviving constructions of great beauty which belong to the epoch of the last Western Emperors. One is a cruciform mausoleum, with its interior filled with blue mosaics, which was the burial place of either Placidia or her husband Constantius III. There is an octagonal edifice too, known as the Baptistry of the Orthodox, or sometimes described as the Baptistry of Neon owing to a tradition that it was decorated by an archbishop of that name in the middle of the fifth century; but it may be some decades earlier.
Wherever they were, Emperors tended to be cut off from the world by their scheming courts and elaborate pomp. At Constantinople, for example, in 400, Synesius upbraided its ruler for his pomp-encrusted remoteness. 'You hide in your apartments,' he declared, 'in case men should disc
over that you too are human!' And he went on to urge a clean break with the palace clique and all its stultifying ceremonials. His criticism applied even more strongly to Ravenna, where geography further encouraged the tendency to seclusion. The pagan historian Zosimus painted a vivid contrast between the rest of Italy, a defenceless prey to the Visigoths, and the court of Ravenna, which continued the pursuit of its rituals and intrigues as if it were playing some insubstantial, ghostly game.
Moreover, once Ravenna had become the capital, Western Emperors, with a few short-lived exceptions, never again went out and commanded the Roman army in wars. Honorius stayed behind in safe seclusion, and so did Valentinian in. The latter sometimes visited Rome, because he enjoyed its luxuries, and a few of his transient successors resided there for a time. But for the most part the rulers preferred to remain in the shadows of Ravenna, leading a sedentary life entirely separated from the hard realities of the waning Empire.
Their chief or only contact with the world came from their courtiers. The numerous speeches these men delivered in praise of their masters have left us many sickening examples of servility. Valentinian I, Valens and Gratian even found themselves compared with the Trinity. One of the worst offenders was the poet Ausonius, whose effusion in honour of Gratian's consulship presents the young Emperor's uninteresting personality in a ludicrously unrecognizable form.
. . . There is no place, I say, Most Gracious Emperor, but stamps my consciousness with the wondrous image of your most worshipful Majesty. Not the court, which was so formidable when you came to the throne, and which you have made so agreeable. Not the Forum and basilicas, which once re-echoed with legal business, but now with the taking of vows for your well-being - for under your rule who is there whose property is not secure? Not the Senate-house, now as happy in the business of passing resolutions in your honour as it was formerly gloomy and troubled with complaints. Not the public highways, where the sight of so many joyous faces suffers no one to be alone in showing delight.
The Fall of the Roman Empire Page 11