The Fall of Rome

-->

from nytimes.com

Rome’s fall was a cataclysm. How great? Well, it is still used in modern political discourse to justify political positions. Most recently, by Ben Carson attributed the fall of Rome to matters like homosexuality, sports and political correctness. Dr. Carson (the other kind of doctor) is using Rome to make points about his political stance and gain votes. To demonstrate how wrong he is would be … well… obvious and pointless. But it shows the enduring power of Rome as a world empire. So let’s talk about what happened.

People didn’t wake up one day and Rome was gone. That is not to say that individuals did not understand that their way of life was crumbling. In 382, the emperor Gratian removed the altar of victory from the senate house. This event prompted the senate, in 384, to send one of its most prominent member Q. Aurelius Symmachus to the court at Milan to plead with the emperor to restore the altar. In his plea, Symmachus conjures up the spirit of Rome, the goddess Roma, to request the return of the old order. Roma wishes to “use the ancestral ceremonies,” to “live after [her] own fashion,” because “this worship subdued the world to my laws.” While speaking of the sack of Rome by Alaric, Augustine spoke of “this universal catastrophe” (City of God I.9). And later in the fifth century, Sidonius Apollinaris, the erstwhile Urban Prefect of Rome, saw, as Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand, the Visigoths besiege his city.

Roman Dacia

So what happened and why? First, a bit of chronology. The political structures of imperial Rome did not disappear all at once, at the same time, or for the same reasons. The trans-Danubian province of Dacia disappeared between 270 and 275. Britannia was abandoned in 407. There is no administrator for the diocese of Spain (the vicarius) after 401, and, for the diocese of Africa, after 413. Northern Gaul perhaps saw the disappearance of its civil adminitration after Constantius II defeated Magnentius. Certain areas of Gaul developed some form of “self-rule” (the Bagaudae) in the wake of imperial absence, especially in the Loire and certain areas of Brittany. Asterix, it seems, was back by the middle of the fourth century. In the eastern empire, the state of affair endured unimpeded until the reforms of Justinian in the sixth century.

If we start the premise that the fall of Rome was a rather checkered process, it becomes increasingly difficult to find a single cause for its decline. I mean surely sports were prevalent in the east and in the west, so why did the east endure another century or two of imperial rule?

There is no simple answer to this question. Historians have agreed and disagreed. The examples given above are epiphenomena: A.H.M Jones, in his magisterial study The Later Roman Empire, does not mention that Gratian removed the altar of victory. Recently, advances in paleoclimates have shown periods of flooding in certain parts of the western empire in the fourth century. Papyri also indicate that the production of Egyptian grain decreased in the later third century. The correlation is obvious, but the causation less so. Rome had an extensive system of supply of food for its armies and functionaries. The failure would have had to be systemic, and of this, we have no evidence. Barbarians and Christians? Gibbons’ thesis is attractive but has been widely disproved (see here for a survey of the evidence and two books that are worth reading). Any serious study must include a variety of factors.

The fall of Rome was not a linear process of decline either. It was dotted with rebirth and periods of prosperity. Ammianus Marcellinus saw the reign of Julian as ushering in a new era of prosperity, as did the rhetor Libanius. At a more local level, the monopoly over the gold currency enjoyed by the imperial administration meant that a new class of landowners acquired estates in Egypt. During the fourth century, Africa did enjoy a period of prosperity.

In other words, what historians saw and what contemporaries describe is rarely the same thing. It can be difficult, as Picketty describes in Capital, to distinguish between short-term growth and lasting prosperity. The same is true of political and cultural events. Julian was emperor between 360 and 363, and his passing led to a resurgence of Christianizing efforts by the imperial court, not a rebirth of traditional cults. New wealth accumulated was not necessarily distributed. A few extremely wealthy families in Rome controlled the land in Africa. Care for the poor was more than just pastoral rhetoric.

Which brings us back to the US of A. It is difficult not to see some parallels. Both are world empires. The moral rhetoric prevalent in today’s politics, whether to implement “new” policies of social welfare or to “return” to a more traditional age—which does not exist, but that’d be a topic for another time—echoes strangely the debate between Symmachus and the bishop Ambrose. Prosperity is being consolidated into the hands of a few, and individuals are in increasingly precarious positions (student debt for instance). Barbarians in California are revolutionizing social interactions (Facebook anyone?). At the same time, I am not entirely sure anyone can objectively speak of decline.

http://www.worldcrunch.com/culture-society/can-startups-change-the-world-a-french-alternative-to-silicon-valley/barbarians-tech-startups-hackers-entrepreneur-archipel/c3s18598/

This means that the Roman Empire, that collapsed some 1500 years ago, needs to be studied and taught. It is a powerful rhetorical example, one that is easily recognizable. A yet, the sort of abuse exemplified by Ben Carson’s article means that it is also easily distorted to pursue nefarious social goals. Empires do not fail because of morality: that was the lesson of Sodom and Gomorrah. Rome’s fall has undoubtedly yielded some important conclusions, for instance, about the behavior of individuals in times of crisis, or about the mechanisms of recovery. And Rome’s fall will undoubtedly unveil more historical and social processes as new research in that field continues to advance.

As usual a couple of books:

Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome and the Making of Christianity, Princeton University Press, 2012.

Ian Wood, The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages, Oxford University Press, 2013.