How the Irish Saved Civilization

by Thomas Cahill

  Ausonius made his career as a grammaticus, a professor of Latin, at Bordeaux, which then boasted one of the empire’s great universities. His fame as a teacher reached even to the imperial court, and after thirty years in academe he was summoned to the Golden Palace in Milan (for the royal family no long resided at Rome) to become tutor to Gratian, son of Valentinian, emperor of the west. When in 368 Gratian was ordered to accompany his father on an anti-German campaign, Ausonius went along as a sort of poet laureate to the expedition, rising suitably to the occasion with his usual bland results—though this is also the period of the barracks humor of the “Cento Nuptualis,” written, so Ausonius informs us, at the suggestion of the emperor himself. As one of his spoils of war, Ausonius won the services of a German slave girl, whose charms he sang in his Bissula sequence:

  Delicium, blanditiae, Iudus, amor, voluptas,

  barbara, sed quae Latias vincis alumna pupas.

  Morsel—Blandishment—Sport—Desire—Climax—

  Barbarian! but you, kid, are ahead of all the Latin girls.

  It begins to sound like real poetry—with each noun alluding to the mounting tension of the poet’s arousal till at the moment of orgasm barbara is moaned. But then you realize he’s just aping Catullus.

  In 375, the boy Gratian reached the throne, sharing it with his brother Valentinian II on the death of their father; and it is at this point that Ausonius’s star enters its empyrean: he becomes quaestor sacri palatii, a sort of chief of staff to the emperors. In the same year, his aged father, pushing ninety, is named to the honorary post of prefect of Illyricum; in the next, his son is made proconsul of Africa. More honors tumble forth—for father, for son, for son-in-law, for nephew—and then in 379 Ausonius is named consul, the highest position any Roman (apart from the royal family) can attain.

  In the old days of republican Rome, the consuls—there were two of them, so each could keep the other honest, elected for a term of one year to thus prevent dictatorship—had been the executive pinnacle of Roman government. But in the decisive sea battle of Actium in 31 B.C., Octavian had defeated his fellow consul Mark Antony, who had soiled republican virtue by lolling with Cleopatra in Egypt. Nobly seizing the imperial power, Octavian became Augustus Caesar, the first emperor— and the consulships were henceforth transformed into honorary positions, vestigial reminders of republican virtue, and utterly ornamental.

  The consulships were not the only ornamental offices in Roman society: the Eternal City was filled with the comings and goings of impotent men—senators, magistrates, bustling administrators of all kinds—performing meaningless duties. Augustus, while seizing all power, had wisely left in place all the republican trappings. The empty show that resulted only emphasized the more the importance of how things were done—since no one wished to advert to the vanity of what was being done. During the four centuries that elapsed from the time of Augustus to the time of Ausonius, the life of the capital turned ever more insubstantial and brittle, so that some ceremony or other, meticulously executed, could become the apogee of a man’s life. In Ausonius’s case the ceremony took the form of a convoluted oration, his Gratiarum Actio, or Act of Thanksgiving, given at the end of his consular year, in which he proffered incredibly elaborate and interminable thanks to the divine emperor’s august presence.

  The divine emperor’s power rested, above all, in his office of imperator, commander in chief, the office whose importance had been so greatly expanded during the political upheavals of Augustus’s day. But almost as important as his military power was his power to tax. “And it came to pass in those days,” wrote Luke in the most famous passage on Roman taxation in all of literature, “that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.” Thus is Jesus’s birth set in the reign of the first emperor—“toto orbe in pace composito” (“all the world being at peace”), as a chronicler of the fifth century would soon describe it. But the peace of all the world—all the world worth thinking about, that is—came at a stiff price: the constant, and increasingly unequal, exactions of the emperor’s tax men.

  We know, again from the Gospels, the hatred of the Jews of the first century for the Roman tax collectors. By the time of Ausonius that hatred was universal. But now I must ask a great concession of my readers: to pity the poor tax man, whose life was far more miserable than the lives of those who suffered his exactions. The tax man, or curialis, was born that way: Can you imagine the dawning horror on realizing that you were born into a class of worms who were expected to spend their entire adult life spans collecting taxes from their immediate neighbors—and that there was no way out?

  But this was only the beginning of the horror. Whatever the curiales were unable to collect they had to make good out of their own resources! Who were these wretches, and how were they assigned their doom? Since tax collection was patently beneath the dignity of the Ausonian class of great landowners, the task of collection fell to the next level down, to the small landowners, the squireens who had amassed just enough land to hold their heads up in polite society. Originally viewed as the first rung on the ladder of social betterment, the office of curialis had become by the age of Ausonius a cruel trap from which there was little chance of escape.

  Of course, they tried to escape, especially during this period, as the tax base shrank and gold—the coin many taxes had to be paid in—rose in value against silver by about one percent a year. For a time, the wealthiest curiales succeeded in bribing their way onto the lists of senators, for the Senate was the cream of Roman society and the ancient, if ineffectual, symbol of its past republican glory—and senators paid no taxes. Others bribed their way out of their curial rank and into other ranks of the bureaucratic honeycomb, such as the enormous Palatine service. Some won commissions in the army; others sought refuge in priestly consecration. At the lowest end, curiales exchanged their birthrights to become members of a college of laborers, such as the grain importers and those engaged in river traffic. The most desperate—and as the century drew to its close these were becoming an ever larger plurality—borrowed from the only available lender, the lord of the local manor, whose class connections, as we can imply from the case of Ausonius, effectively exempted him from taxation. The lord was always happy to oblige: not only did he gain new relief from any shadow of taxation (for his debtor was both his tax assessor and his tax collector); in the end, after the curialis inevitably defaulted, his pleasant little farm would be added to the lord’s expanding network of estates. Thus did the tax man often find himself a skilled but land-poor laborer, usually working for the local lord. Sometimes, the pitiable man and his family would sink so low as to become serfs on the land that once was theirs.

  But the emperor had no intention of standing idly by while his tax collectors disappeared. He soon closed off all means of escape by legislating that curiales could not travel or sell their property without permission. Those in the Palatine service and the army were ordered back to their native stations. They could still become senators—providing they passed through all the grades of curialis and, on reaching the highest, principalis, remained in it for fifteen years. If anyone skipped a grade, he was—like a piece on a board game—to be returned to his starting point.

  By the fifth century, in the years before the complete collapse of Roman government, the imperial approach to taxation had produced a caste as hopeless as any in history. Their rapacious exactions, taken wherever and whenever they could, were the direct result of their desperation about their own increasingly unpayable tax bills. As these nerved-up outcasts commenced to prey on whoever was weaker than they, the rich became even richer. The great landowners ate up the little ones, the tax base shrank still further, and the middle classes, never encouraged by the Roman state, began to disappear from the face of the earth. Nor would they return till the appearance of the Italian mercantile families of the high Middle Ages.

  In the flight of the curiales, indeed, we hear the first faint notes of the medieval polity.
As they, increasingly, swelled the ranks of the great lord’s tenants, they were creating the fiefdoms of medieval Europe, complete with titled family, skilled artisans (or freemen), and serfs bound to the land. As the Germanic tribes poured over Gaul and Spain, and at last across the Italian peninsula, they settled down and took up farming like their Romanized neighbors. Their chiefs, too, became great lords of a kind, extending protection in return for labor and produce. To a fugitive tax collector, as to many another Roman on the run, the estate of a German chief could look considerably more attractive than that of his Roman counterpart. The German would welcome the fugitive’s language, his connections, and his many civilized skills with rough enthusiasm—and the German would never have heard the word curialis. Thus did the great estates, gradually becoming laws unto themselves in a time of spreading civil chaos, grow slowly into the little kingdoms of the age of Charlemagne.

  We should not think of the emperors as active persecutors of the poor curiales. (They actually thought of themselves as protecting them—and all Roman citizens—from the cruel vagaries of life beyond the Roman orbis. And, after all, what blessedness could be greater than the honor of Roman citizenship? An imperial edict of this period even tries to shame the recusant curiales by reminding them of their noble rank, of “the splendor of their birth.”) Rather, the bureaucratic and social establishments of Rome had become so top-heavy and entrenched that effective reform was no longer possible. Class was insulated from class. We cannot imagine Ausonius, for instance, giving a thought to the sufferings of any but his own. The passio curialis, had it ever crossed his mind, would only have prompted another clever little poem for his friends to chuckle at. In Ausonius we encounter the complete extinction of Res Publica, the Public Thing—social concern. In all his extant corpus, there is but one appearance by a person not of Ausonius’s class—Bissula, the German slave girl with the funny name, who is there only to prop up Ausonius’s manhood.

  The emperor’s worst headache was the army itself. Starved for taxes, he was unable to maintain a force that could withstand the ever-strengthening barbarian onslaughts. But since the time of Constantine, new emperors had come from the army—or at least been approved by the army—so that the existence of the army was a veiled threat to every reigning emperor. The army had made emperors and pulled them from their throne—and one was hard put to recall an emperor who had lasted more than a few years or had died in his bed. In 383 the army in Britain mutinied and, under the leadership of Maximus, crossed to the continent and began to occupy Gaulish cities. Young Gratian was assassinated at Lyons and his brother driven from Italy. Ausonius’s career was over. By the time order was restored under a new emperor—Theodosius in 388—Ausonius was too old for public life.

  Though it is difficult to imagine the Pax Romana lasting as long as it did without the increasing militarization of the Imperium Romanum, the Romans themselves were never happy about their army. It suggested dictatorship, rather than those good old republican values, and they preferred to avert their eyes, keeping themselves carefully ignorant of the army’s essential contribution to their well-being. With the moral decay of republican resolve, the army became more and more a reserve of non-Romans, half-Romanized barbarian mercenaries and servants sent in the stead of freemen who couldn’t be bothered. In the last days of the empire, men commonly mutilated themselves to escape service, though such a crime was—in theory—punishable by torture and death. Military levies, sent to the great estates, met such resistance that influential landowners were allowed to send money, instead of men, to the army. In 409, faced with an increasingly undefended frontier, the emperor announced the impossible: henceforth, slaves would be permitted, even encouraged, to enlist, and for their service they would receive a bounty and their freedom. By this point, it was sometimes difficult to tell the Romans from the barbarians—at least along the frontier.

  There are, no doubt, lessons here for the contemporary reader. The changing character of the native population, brought about through unremarked pressures on porous borders; the creation of an increasingly unwieldy and rigid bureaucracy, whose own survival becomes its overriding goal; the despising of the military and the avoidance of its service by established families, while its offices present unprecedented opportunity for marginal men to whom its ranks had once been closed; the lip service paid to values long dead; the pretense that we still are what we once were; the increasing concentrations of the populace into richer and poorer by way of a corrupt tax system, and the desperation that inevitably follows; the aggrandizement of executive power at the expense of the legislature; ineffectual legislation promulgated with great show; the moral vocation of the man at the top to maintain order at all costs, while growing blind to the cruel dilemmas of ordinary life—these are all themes with which our world is familiar, nor are they the God-given property of any party or political point of view, even though we often act as if they were. At least, the emperor could not heap his economic burdens on posterity by creating long-term public debt, for floating capital had not yet been conceptualized. The only kinds of wealth worth speaking of were the fruits of the earth.

  Though it is easy for us to perceive the wild instability of the Roman Imperium in its final days, it was not easy for the Romans. Rome, the Eternal City, had been untouchable since the Celts of Gaul had sacked it by surprise in 390 B.C. In the ensuing eight centuries Rome built itself into the world’s only superpower, unassailable save for the occasional war on a distant border. The Gauls had long since become civilized Romans, and Rome offered the same Romanization to anyone who wanted it—sometimes, as with the Jews, whether they wanted it or not. Normally, though, everyone was dying to be Roman. As Theodoric, the homely king of the Ostrogoths, was fond of saying: “An able Goth wants to be like a Roman; only a poor Roman would want to be like a Goth.”

  The citizens of the City of Rome, therefore, could not believe it when toward the end of the first decade of the fifth century, they woke to find Alaric, king of the Visigoths, and all his forces parked at their gates. He might as well have been the king of the Fuzzy-Wuzzies, or any other of the inconsequential outlanders that civilized people have looked down their noses at throughout history. It was preposterous. They dispatched a pair of envoys to conduct the tiresome negotiation and send him away. The envoys began with empty threats: any attack on Rome was doomed, for it would be met by invincible strength and innumerable ranks of warriors. Alaric was a sharp man, and in his rough fashion a just one. He also had a sense of humor.

  “The thicker the grass, the more easily scythed,” he replied evenly.

  The envoys quickly recognized that their man was no fool. All right, then, what was the price of his departure? Alaric told them: his men would sweep through the city, taking all gold, all silver, and everything of value that could be moved. They would also round up and cart off every barbarian slave.

  But, protested the hysterical envoys, what will that leave us?

  Alaric paused. “Your lives.”

  In that pause, Roman security died and a new world was conceived.

  II

  What Was Lost

  The Complexities of the Classical Tradition

  So they kept their lives, most of them. But sooner or later they or their progeny lost almost everything else: titles, property, way of life, learning—especially learning. A world in chaos is not a world in which books are copied and libraries maintained. It is not a world where learned men have the leisure to become more learned. It is not a world for which the grammaticus schedules regular classes of young scholars and knowledge is dutifully transmitted year by placid year.

  Between the Sack of Rome by Alaric in 410 and the death of the last western emperor in 476, the Imperium became increasingly unstable. The large landowners—more and more, laws unto themselves—ignored the emperor’s decrees, going even so far as to use the great public edifices as quarries for private palaces. Rome itself, abandoned by the emperors for the more defensible marshes of Ravenna, saw the s
plendor of its public buildings crumble before the destructiveness of private greed. Though the emperor announced dire punishments for any official who cooperated in this destruction—fifty pounds of gold for a magistrate, a flogging and the loss of both hands for a subordinate—the looting continued unabated. The Vandals were not the only vandals.

  The straight Roman road, solidly paved, unwilling to compromise with the vagaries of local landscape, and for centuries the symbol of safe and unmolested travel, now presented the likelihood of unwelcome adventure. Not only were there bands of highway robbers, increasingly composed of the ruined and the dispossessed; the emperor’s own curiosi (a combination of highway police and customs guards) began to extort bribes from travelers desperate to reach places of greater safety, often halting the wayfarers’ progress when they had no more bribes to proffer. Throughout the countryside, once the very image of Roman peace, illegal brotherhoods of extortionists formed—the proto-Mafiosi. Curiales and other struggling middle-class townsmen, who had been accustomed to sending their infants to be nursed by shepherds in pure mountain air, began to find it impossible to retrieve those children. Snatched away to inaccessible mountain fastnesses, the children were raised brutally as shepherd-slaves, and the name shepherd became synonymous with thief, kidnapper, trafficker in children. The fear of such kidnapping still finds echoes in the lost children and loathsome adults who haunt the deep wood of European fairy tales.

  As barbarian attacks became not a distant possibility but the order of the day, records of ownership and purchase were often lost in raids, thus presenting a fine opportunity to the emperor’s discussores (the super-curiales). These rapacious bullies would descend with a large retinue on a recently looted farm, demanding of the disoriented owner that he render all accounts forthwith. What would follow, as described in the emperor’s own reform-minded, if ineffectual, edict, is enough to curl one’s hair—“innumerae deinde caedes, saeva custodia, suspendiorum crudelitas, et universa tormenta” (“thence innumerable slaughters, savage imprisonment, the cruelty of hangings, and every kind of torture”)