The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History

by Peter Heather

  The size of the late Roman army remains a hotly debated topic. We have a pretty good idea of the paper strength of the army under the Severan emperors of the early third century, immediately before the rise of the Sasanians. It consisted of thirty legions of 5,000-plus men each, and a similar number of auxiliaries, making a grand total of around 300,000 troops. But attempts to calculate total army size for the late Empire on a similar basis, even though we have a pretty complete listing of its units dating from about AD 400 in a source called the Notitia Dignitatum (see pp. 246–8), founder on the fact that the theoretical strength of the various types of unit generated by the reorganization clearly varied, and we are not sure how big some of them were. Argument has turned, therefore, on two reported global figures: one of 645,000; the other, referring specifically to the time of the eastern emperor Diocletian (reigned AD 284–305), of 389,704 plus 45,562 in the fleets, making a total of 435,266 men. Both estimates are problematic. The first figure is given by the historian Agathias, writing in the early 570s, in a passage which favourably contrasts the 645,000 with a military establishment in his own day of 150,000 as a means of criticizing contemporary emperors. It was entirely to his point to exaggerate the past figure. The figure of 435,266 commands, a priori, greater credibility both because of its precision and the fact that the context is non-polemical. But it, too, is given by a sixth- rather than a fourth-century writer, in a text composed over two hundred years after Diocletian’s death, which is hardly ideal. We also know that substantial military reorganization continued after Diocletian’s reign, with the distinction between comitatenses and limitanei becoming fully formalized under Constantine. Even if we accept the figure as accurate, then, there is every reason to suppose that the army continued to expand subsequently; historians’ estimates have therefore ranged between 400,000 and 600,000. Even a lower estimate would suggest that between the early third and mid-fourth centuries the 300,000-strong Roman army increased in size by at least one-third, and quite possibly by substantially more.16

  That there was such a large increase is placed beyond doubt, to my mind, not only by the evolving strategic situation – the fact that Rome now faced a rival superpower in the east – but also by the fact that the late third and early fourth centuries saw a major financial restructuring of the Empire. The largest item of expenditure had always been the army: even an increase in size of one-third, a conservative estimate, represented a huge increase in the total amount of revenue that needed to be raised by the Roman state. Ask a modern state to fund an increase of 33 per cent or more in its largest budgetary item, and you would soon see bureaucratic hair turning grey. It is entirely consistent with both the size of the new Persian threat, and of even the lowest estimates for late Roman military expansion, that the fiscal patterns of the Empire had to be radically transformed as part of its response to the rise of the Sasanians. Much of the Roman response to third-century crisis has often been attributed to the emperor Diocletian. But while his reign saw many reforms brought to completion or substantially advanced, most of these changes were long-term processes rather than the product of a single mind. This was certainly the case with the reorganization and expansion of the army, and equally true of the financial reforms required to fund it.

  The first fiscal response of third-century emperors to the onset of crisis was to lay claim to all existing sources of revenue. Sometime in the 240s–60s, first of all, long-established city revenues – the proceeds of endowments, local tolls and taxes – were confiscated by the state. City officials continued to have to raise the monies and administer the endowments, but the proceeds could no longer be spent locally. This change has often been blamed on Diocletian, but none of our sources for his reign, many of them hostile to his financial reforms, mentions it. It was one of the easiest possible, and hence probably one of the first, responses to financial crisis. These new funds were not inconsiderable, and in the fourth century a portion was sometimes returned to the cities by emperors who wished to curry local favour.17

  This income was not enough, however, to cover the entire cost of the new army, and in the late third century emperors also pursued two further strategies. First, they debased the coinage, reducing the silver content of the denarii with which the army was customarily paid. Those of Gallienus (reigned 253–68), for example, were essentially copper coins, containing less than 5 per cent silver. This strategy produced more coins, but the inevitable result was massive price inflation. Diocletian’s Prices Edict of AD 301 fixed the price of a measure of wheat, which in the second century had cost about half a denarius, at no less than a hundred of the new, debased denarii. Comparative evidence suggests that you have about a month before merchants realize that the new coins are even worse than the old ones and put the prices up, so each debasement bought hard-pressed emperors a brief breathing space. Debasement and price-fixing were no long-term solution, since merchants just took their goods off the shelves and operated a black market instead. In the longer term, the only remedy was to extract a greater proportion of the Empire’s wealth – its Gross Imperial Product – via taxation. This too was instigated in the depths of the third-century crisis, when, at particular moments of stress, emperors would raise extraordinary taxes, in the form of foodstuffs. This bypassed problems with the coinage, but, by the nature of its unpredictability, was very unpopular. Finally, under Diocletian, a new regular tax on economic production, the annona militaris, was fully systematized.18

  The sudden appearance of a Persian superpower in the east in the third century thus generated a massive restructuring of the Roman Empire. The effects of the measures it took to counter the threat were not instant, but the restructuring eventually achieved the desired outcome. By the end of the third century, Rome had the strategic situation broadly under control: enough extra troops had been paid for to stabilize the eastern front. In AD 298 the emperor Galerius, Diocletian’s co-ruler, won a major victory over the Persians, and from that point on Persian power was more or less effectively parried. There were some further, occasionally dramatic, Roman losses in the next century, but also some victories, and generally speaking the new military establishment was doing its job. Roman–Persian warfare now centred on periodic sieges of massively defended fortifications rather than seriously damaging campaigns of manoeuvre such as Shapur’s invasions of Syria. Fortresses might occasionally be lost, such as Amida in 359, but this kind of defeat bore no resemblance in scale to the disasters of the third century. The strategic clock could not be put back, but both military and fiscal structures had expanded appropriately to cope with the greater Persian threat.19

  It is important to recognize, however, just how much of an effort the Romans had to make in order to achieve this state of affairs. Confiscating city revenues and reforming general taxation were not easy matters. It took over fifty years from the first appearance of the aggressive Sasanian dynasty for Rome to put its financial house in order, and all this required a massive expansion of the central government machine to supervise the process. As we saw in Chapter 1, from AD 250 onwards there was a substantial increase in the number of higher-level imperial bureaucratic posts. Military and financial restructuring, therefore, had profound political consequences. The geographical shift of power away from Rome and Italy, already apparent in embryo in the second century, was greatly accelerated by the Empire’s response to the rise of Persia. And while multiple emperors co-reigning had not been unknown in the second century, in the third it was the political as well as administrative need for more than one emperor that cemented the phenomenon as a general feature of late Roman public life.

  As a string of emperors was forced eastwards from the 230s onwards to deal with the Persians, this left the west, and particularly the Rhine frontier region, denuded of an official imperial presence. As a result, too many soldiers and officials dropped out of the loop of patronage distribution, generating severe and long-lasting political turmoil at the top. In what has sometimes been called the ‘military anarchy’, the f
ifty years following the murder of emperor Alexander Severus in AD 235 saw the reins of Roman power pass through the hands of no fewer than twenty legitimate emperors and a host of usurpers, between them each averaging no more than two and a half years in office. Such a flurry of emperors is a telling indicator of an underlying structural problem. Whenever emperors concentrated, at this time, on just one part of the Empire, it generated enough disgruntled army commanders and bureaucrats elsewhere to inspire thoughts of usurpation. Particularly interesting in this respect is the so-called ‘Gallic Empire’. When Valerian was captured by the Persians in 259, civilian functionaries and military commanders on the Rhine frontier put together their own regime under the leadership of a series of generals, who ran Gaul for the best part of three decades. It was an entirely non-separatist, properly Roman regime: quite simply a way of making sure that a satisfactory slice of the imperial cake was distributed in their own corner of the Empire.20

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  IN THEIR DIFFERENT WAYS, then, both of the Empire’s most dangerous neighbours profoundly influenced its development. The relatively low level of economic achievement prevalent among the warmongering and politically fragmented Germani imposed a barrier to imperial expansion beyond which it was too unprofitable to continue. As a result, Rome’s European frontiers came broadly to rest along the Rhine and Danube. The Near East, home to an equally martial population, had a stronger history of political cooperation and an economy capable of supporting a larger population in a wider variety of activities. The catalyst provided by the Sasanian dynasty turned the region into a rival superpower, whose appearance on the scene forced the Roman state to take stock. Army, taxation, bureaucracy and politics: all had to adapt in order to meet the Persian challenge. The one aspect of the Empire that did not adapt was its ideological world view, and, within that, the position it allocated to all these ‘barbarians’.

  Barbarians and the Roman Order

  IN THE SUMMER OF AD 370, a group of shipborne Saxon raiders slipped out of the River Elbe, and headed west along the north coast of continental Europe. Avoiding the defended Roman frontier, they eventually disembarked in northern France, probably somewhere west of the Seine. The Romans quickly brought up enough troops to force them to negotiate. As Ammianus Marcellinus, our best fourth-century Roman historian, reports it:21

  After a long and varied discussion, since it seemed to be in the interest of the state, a truce was agreed upon, and in accordance with the conditions that were proposed the Saxons gave as hostages many young men fit for military service, and then were allowed to depart and return home without hindrance to the place from which they had come.

  But things were not what they seemed. While negotiating, the Romans secretly placed heavy cavalry, together with some infantry, between the Saxons and their ships:

  The Romans with strengthened courage pressed upon the Saxons from all sides, surrounded them, and slew them with their drawn swords; not one of them could again return to his native home, not a single one was allowed to survive the slaughter of his comrades.

  Ammianus continues:

  Although some just judge might condemn this act as treacherous and hateful, yet on careful consideration of the matter he will not think it improper that a destructive band of brigands was destroyed when the opportunity at last presented itself.

  As far as Ammianus was concerned, when it came to despatching barbarians, double-dealing wasn’t a problem.

  Killing barbarians still went down extremely well with the average Roman audience. Roman amphitheatres saw many different acts of violence, of course, from gladiatorial combat to highly inventive forms of judicial execution. A staggering 200,000 people, it has been calculated, met a violent death in the Colosseum alone, and there were similar, smaller, arenas in every major city of the Empire. Watching barbarians die was a standard part of the fun. In 306, to celebrate his pacification of the Rhine frontier, the emperor Constantine had two captured Germanic Frankish kings, Ascaricus and Merogaisus, fed to wild beasts in the arena at Trier. He also made very sure that a wider audience around the Empire heard of his triumph.22 If no barbarian kings were available, there were always alternatives. In 383 our old friend Symmachus, then Urban Prefect of Rome, wrote to the emperor Valentinian II to say how much the Roman audience had enjoyed feasting their eyes on the spectacle of some rank-and-file Iranian-speaking Sarmatian being slaughtered by gladiators. What’s striking is Symmachus’ commentary:

  Rumour does not conceal the splendid outcome of your wars, but a victory gains greater credence if it is confirmed by sight . . . We have now seen things that surprised us when they were read out to us: a column of chained prisoners . . . led in procession, and faces once so fierce now changed to pitiable pallor. A name which was once terrifying to us [is] now the object of our delight, and hands trained to wield outlandish weapons afraid to meet the equipment of gladiators. May you enjoy the laurels of victory often and easily . . . let our brave soldiers take [the barbarians] prisoner and the arena in the city finish them off.23

  For him these deaths symbolized that civilized Roman order would continue to prevail over the barbarian forces of chaos.

  The antipathy towards barbarians so uninhibitedly expressed in the arena rested, for articulate Romans, on much more than mere hatred. At more or less the same moment as the Saxons were being ambushed on Rome’s north-west frontier, the orator and philosopher Themistius, employed as an imperial spin-doctor, was standing in front of the Senate of Constantinople to justify the policies of his employer, the emperor Valens. The speech contains one particularly telling remark: ‘There is in each of us a barbarian tribe extremely overbearing and intractable – I mean temper and those insatiable desires which stand opposed to rationality as Scythians and Germans do to the Romans.’24

  Barbarians had their own well defined place in this Roman universe, based on a specific vision of the cosmos. Human beings, Romans argued, consist of two elements: an intelligent, rational spirit, and a physical body. Above humankind in the cosmos there exist other beings who, although endowed with greater and lesser powers, all share the characteristic of being formed purely of spirit. Below humankind are animals, encompassing pure physicality. Humanity is unique in combining both spirit and body, and from this flowed the Roman vision of rationality. In fully rational people – such as elite Romans, of course – the rational spirit controlled the physical body. But in lesser human beings – barbarians – body ruled mind. Barbarians, in short, were the reverse image of Romans loving alcohol, sex and worldly wealth.

  Barbarian irrationality showed up in other ways too. As far as a Roman was concerned, you could easily tell a barbarian by how he reacted to fortune. Give him one little stroke of luck, and he would think he had conquered the world. But, equally, the slightest setback would find him in deepest despair, lamenting his fate. Where Romans would calculate probabilities, formulate sensible plans and stick to them through thick and thin, hapless barbarians were always being blown all over the place by chance events. Barbarian society was also collectively inferior: a world where might equalled right, and where those with the largest biceps triumphed. Barbarians thus provided the crucial ‘other’ in the Roman self-image: the inferior society whose failings underlined and legitimized the superiorities of the dominant imperial power. Indeed, the Roman state saw itself not as just marginally better than those beyond its frontiers – but massively and absolutely superior, because its social order was divinely ordained. This ideology not only made upper-class Romans feel good about themselves, but was part and parcel of the functioning of Empire. In the fourth century, regular references to the barbarian menace made its population broadly willing to pay their taxes, despite the particular increases necessitated by the third-century crisis.25

  Although the strategy worked well enough, casting their neighbours beyond the frontiers as the antithesis of Roman order while using them as a peg on which to hang the burden of taxation was not without its own costs. The image of the barbarian made a
nyone from outside the Empire seem a threat, and also, by definition, a lesser human being belonging to a benighted society. The overwhelming implications of this attitude were, first, that conflict should be the normal state of relations between Roman and non-Roman; and second, that the Roman Empire should be victorious in whatever it aspired to. What did divine favour mean, if not security against defeat at the hands of those lacking that divine favour? The supreme imperial virtue – again often represented pictorially on coinage as a deity awarding a crown of laurel leaves as this suggests, was one of victory. And any failure to deliver it could be taken as a sign that the current incumbent of the purple was not the right man for the job.26