The Roman Empire

Copyright © 2004 Alan J. White; all rights reserved.    Last updated January 2004.    Thumbnail images herein are clickable.

Mysteries

Despite being relatively well-documented, the Roman Empire poses a number of questions of great importance which, despite much speculation, have never yet been convincingly answered:

1. Why Rome?
2. Why the death of the republic?
3. Why the East-West split?
4. Why Christianity?
5. Why the decline and fall?
6. What did Rome bequeath?

Why Rome?

Rome started as a small city in backward Italy. From that base, the Romans conquered their way around the Mediterranean Sea and constructed a huge empire. To do this, they had to defeat many peoples famous for their fighting abilities – Carthaginians, Greeks, Gauls, etc.

Any one of the numerous small cities round the Mediterranean could, in principle, have done that – but the Romans actually did it. Why? What precisely was it that they had that other peoples didn't have? In the past, they would have been cast in the role of a genetically superior master race, but such theories are out of fashion. Could their achievements be accounted for by a combination of factors, such as the following?

1. Their republican constitution, by giving all Romans a stake in the fruits of military success, spurred them to victory. However, there were other republics in the region, such as the Greek city states and colonies, and Carthage – suggesting that the Roman republic had some extra 'magic ingredient'.
2. The Roman state was in practice oligarchic – dominated by a militaristic élite; competition between aristocratic clans to surpass each other in fame and glory led to an insatiable appetite for war and victories. However, other classical republics were oligarchic – most of the Greek states were, with the exception of Athens and its allies.
3. Roman traditional virtues included simplicity, frugality, honesty, dutifulness and civic-mindedness. Even aristocrats lived by these standards, and so were admired and respected by the common citizens – enhancing patriotic solidarity and increasing the willingness of the common Romans to fight for their city.
4. There was less competition in the western Mediterranean lands, which were poorer, less populated and less politically developed than the eastern lands, so Rome got off to an easy start. The only competition in the West came from the Etruscans (in the area of modern Tuscany), the other Italian cities and tribes, Greek colonies such as Neapolis (Naples) and Tarentum (Taranto), the Gauls (who rampaged through Italy in the fourth century BC), and the Carthaginians (based in Tunisia and Spain). These groups were rarely organized enough to combine against Rome.
5. Carthage was by far Rome's most serious opponent in the West, and defeating it developed and toughened Rome's land and sea forces.
6. By mastering the western Mediterranean, Rome made itself the greatest power in the Mediterranean area, and was then able to conquer the divided Greek-dominated lands of the eastern Mediterranean piecemeal.
7. Once lands around the Mediterranean had been conquered, Rome's strength was such that it was relatively easy to conquer northern territories such as Gaul and Britain, since they were poor, sparsely populated and divided.

Few authors commit themselves directly to explaining the fundamental causes of the success of the Roman republic. However, Crawford (pp. 31-32) at least gives reasons, essentially geographical, for Rome surpassing the other Latin cities in the early days of expansion: "Rome ... possessed by reason of her position, controlling a route along and a route across the Tiber, certain peculiar strategic advantages" and "Unlike the other members of the Latin League, Rome also came under strong Etruscan influence and under her Etruscan kings expanded at the expense of her Latin neighbours" (Rome was just about the closest Latin city to Etruria).

Why the death of the republic?

In the first century BC, the Romans, with a great, newly-acquired empire at their feet, discovered that success brought difficult and unexpected problems. There were demands for land within Italy to be distributed more fairly between large aristocratic estates and the smallholdings of ordinary Romans, and demands that Roman citizenship should be extended to non-Roman Italians in return for their assistance in the military campaigns. These and other demands were opposed by a conservative element in the senatorial élite which jealously protected aristocratic privileges and wealth. In the context of this conflict, the political process came increasingly to be characterised by corruption, mob violence, assassinations and proscriptions. Armies were recruited from among non-Roman Italians who did not owe allegiance to the state and tended instead to be loyal to their generals, who would pay them in plunder, slaves and plots of land in Italy at end of campaign. A new breed of strongman emerged – politician-generals such as Marius, Sulla, Pompey and Julius Caesar, who used their armies – effectively private armies – to bid for supreme power, causing civil wars to break out one after another.

The solution to all these problems turned out to be to have an emperor, and for him to be given many of the powers of the republican political institutions. The outcome was the death of the republic, and the emergence of an autocratic monarchy – increasingly authoritarian, oppressive, stifling and destructive. The final outcome was the fall of the empire and a western European dark age of terrible depth and duration. Rome was seen to have been a monstrous dead end, a failed experiment in applying the idea of the republic to a large state.

A number of thinkers have applied themselves to the difficult task of explaining precisely why the Romans found it so difficult to construct a large-scale state with a republican government– something that we in the modern world take for granted. Here are some of their efforts.

Montesquieu, writing in the eighteenth century, thought that the expansion of the empire beyond Italy made the outlying armies and the generals who commanded them less loyal to the state and increasingly powerful and free-standing. He also thought that it was the extension of citizenship, not the lack of it, that brought the republic to its knees. The following is from Chapter IX of Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline:

Montesquieu also linked the death of the republic to its success at overcoming all its enemies:

Finer (pp. 432-433) mentions the stinginess of the Senate – how they were reluctant to hand out public domain lands to poorer Roman citizens, how they were reluctant to reduce the price of grain to poorer citizens. He also says of the armies:

On the extension of citizenship to Italian allies he says:

He quotes P. A. Brunt (Fall of the Roman Republic, Oxford, 1988) as also blaming the senatorial nobility's jealous refusal to share power and wealth with any other group. The quarrels between the Senate and the Italian allies, equites, urban plebs and peasant citizens resulted in constitutional breaches, viz. (1) disputes over constitutional rules between the senators and the tribunes (common citizens' representatives), (2) "the piecemeal abandonment of the restraints on the powers of any one single magistrate or tribune, such as, for instance, collegiality and annuality", (3) escalating political violence culminating in civil war and mass executions, and the scrapping of the ancient constitution by Sulla. He also says the political process was plagued by:

What was the senatorial élite so afraid of? They seemed to think that the only alternative to élite rule was a populist tyranny. Perhaps the particular event that lingered in their memory was the five-day reign of terror in 86 BC initiated by Marius and Cinna, in which many senatorials were killed. Marius was a successful politician-general from the equites, the class below senators. The élite perhaps thought that by making concessions to the poorer classes, they were empowering these people and therefore their 'representatives' – people such as Marius, the Gracchus brothers (populist politicians, active 133-121 BC), Saturninus (demagogue, killed 100 BC), Drusus (land-reform politician, killed 91 BC), and Julius Caesar (populist politician-general, dictator 48-44 BC).

Incidentally, the first mass killing of senatorials was when Sulla marched on Rome (another first) in 88 BC and had some of his enemies killed, some outlawed. He later conducted more extensive and bloodier proscriptions in 82 BC.

So, it was all the Senate's fault, then? But the outcome was that they lost the very powers, privileges and wealth they had jealously guarded – taken from them by Augustus and his successors. Was there no way that they could have retained their position by sharing some of their power with the other groups? Would expanding citizenship have been such a disaster? Is it inconceivable that the Roman state could have evolved from an empire governed by an élitist republic into a full-blown republican federation? We now know that a sub-continental federal republic is possible: modern states such as the United States of America and India are examples. Perhaps they only work because of modern transportation and communication technologies. The Dutch republic flourished in the 17th century despite having no such technologies – but it was small and oligarchic. Questions still remain; the mystery stands unresolved ...

Why the East-West split?

At Emperor Diocletian's command, in the later third century AD, the empire was split in two, each half having an emperor (titled Augustus) and deputy emperor (Caesar). Around AD 324, Constantine the Great reunited the empire, but this was not a permanent settlement, and the empire ever after had a chronic tendency to divide into western and eastern halves, with Rome and Constantinople (modern Istanbul) as the capital cities. Many commentators have cited this a major factor in the decline and fall of the empire, because it created distracting rivalries between the two halves, and disrupted the common economic market of he Mediterranean world.

Finer (pp. 570-571) simply says:

This begs the question of why the empire felt more besieged than in earlier times when the empire had fended off barbarians with relative ease. Part of the answer would be the rise of the formidable Sassanid dynasty in Persia in the third century AD. However that does not explain why Rome was apparently less able to deal with the threat of the Germanic barbarians in the north. And there are other logical loose-ends. For instance, why did the empire naturally divide into two parts – why not three or four? Alright, the West tended to speak Latin and the East Greek, but does that consitute a full explanation? Secondly, twin empires are not exactly commonplace – in fact not a single one is to be found anywhere in the history books, at least not a permanently-established one as the late Roman Empire more-or-less was. Finally, surely, the very arrangement of two empires side by side is inherently unstable – like two bulls in a field, or two kings in a kingdom – one would expect them to fight it out until one had defeated the other.

The mystery remains unresolved.

Why Christianity?

Christianity was born in the Roman province of Judea. It spread throughout the Roman Empire despite murderous persecution and despite competition from other emergent religions such as the cults of Mithras and Serapis. At length, thanks to Constantine the Great, it became the main religion of the empire. It survived its fall, and came to dominate post-Roman Europe. Inescapably, therefore, a powerful relationship existed between the Roman Empire and Christianity. In investigating the true nature of that relationship, a number of questions arise:

1. Why did the Romans persecute the Christians so harshly?
2. What was it about the Christian religion that made it expand despite persecution?
3. What was it about the empire that made it a fertile breeding ground for Christianity?
4. Why did Rome eventually adopt Christianity?
5. What role if any did Christianity play in the decline and fall of the empire?

Why did the Romans persecute the Christians so harshly?

The Romans were generally tolerant regarding matters such as language, skin colour, ethnos or religion. They seemed to be content if the followers of religions other than their own polytheistic paganism, acknowledged the supremacy of the Roman gods. However the two monotheistic religions, Judaism and Christianity, found it hard to acknowledge the existence of the Roman gods, let alone their supremacy. Both were therefore severely persecuted. Christian martyrs suffered tortures such as being beaten or boiled in oil, before being killed by the sword or spear, killed in the arena by wild beasts, burnt alive, stoned to death, crucified, dragged to pieces, hanged on a tree, or killed in many other ways.

Finer (pp. 562-563) says:

Wells (p. 239) gives the reasons for the persecution of Christians as disobedience, obstinacy, exclusivity and secrecy. He creates an impression of a cohesive, dedicated cult secretly infiltrating all provinces and all strata, but perhaps appealing especially to the servile classes. Undermining the obedience of the servile classes would naturally worry the Roman authorities.

What was it about the Christian religion that made it expand despite persecution?

To Christians, the virtues of the faith are obvious, and the reasons for its spread equally so. But viewed from a purely rationalist perspective, the explanation for its spread is less abundantly obvious – especially bearing in mind that Christianity was more fiercely persecuted by the Romans than all other religions, with the possible exception of Judaism.

Gibbon (ch. 15) gives five causes of the growth of Christianity:

1. The inflexible zeal of the Christians inherited from the Jews.
2. The doctrine of a future life.
3. The miraculous powers of the primitive church.
4. The austere morals of the first Christians.
5. The development of church government.

It is not clear to me why these would make Christianity decisively more attractive than other emergent religions, or indeed the old paganisms.

What was it about the empire that made it a fertile breeding ground for Christianity?

It would help to know if Christianity spread outside the empire as well as within it. There isn't much evidence that it did – suggesting that the empire provided peculiarly fertile soil.

Perhaps the appeal was that Christianity promised the imminent coming of the Kingdom of God – desperately needed sooner rather than later if you were a member of the oppressed servile classes in ancient Rome! For evidence of the millennial nature of Christianity (that it predicted a thousand-year rule of God on earth): "I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God" – Jesus' own words (Holy Bible, New International Version, Luke 9:27).

Why did Rome eventually adopt Christianity?

"Ask Constantine" would be the trite response. Emperor Constantine I the Great ruled the Western Roman Empire AD 306-324, and the whole empire AD 324-337. In 312, before the battle of the Milvian Bridge near Rome, he had a dream or saw a vision telling him to use the sign of the cross as a battle symbol. He attributed his subsequent victory to Christ, and committed himself to the faith from that time on. He did not receive baptism until shortly before his death, but in the fourth and fifth centuries Christians often delayed their baptisms until late in life.

Constantine's conversion was not an unmixed blessing to the church; he used the church as an instrument of imperial policy and imposed his imperial ideology on it. Christianity did not become the universal religion of the empire overnight, however. Under Emperor Julian 'the Apostate' (ruled AD 360-363), persecution returned – but this was not a permanent situation, and by about a century after Constantine's conversion, Christianity was generally accepted by all Roman subjects.

His revelation before the battle of the Milvian Bridge may have disposed Constantine to Christianity. Alternatively, the fact that his mother Helena, low-born and a concubine or wife of his father, was a Christian may have had its effect – but note that she herself may not have converted until Constantine did. Whatever – even if Constantine's conversion is taken as purely accidental, it is startling that all subsequent emperors (Julian excepted) continued to adhere – suggesting something of the inevitable about the capture of the emperors and their regime by the Christian church.

What role if any did Christianity play in the decline and fall of the empire?

Gibbon lists some disadvantages and advantages of Christianity to the Romans, and of these the disadvantages are the more striking – as follows (general observations after ch. 38):

So there! A bold, or foolhardy, position for an eighteenth century Englishman to take! But why would the emperors (not just Constantine) adopt a religion as harmful as that? Perhaps Christianity's message of humility and obedience made the state more stable, so that the emperors were prepared to ignore its disadvantages. Or, perhaps the emperors themselves were genuinely captivated by the virtues of the faith. Or, perhaps Christianity was adopted for machiavellian reasons – it has been suggested that Constantine saw advantages in being served by Christian administrators who were hated by the majority of the population, and were therefore forced to support the emperor for their own survival. Or, perhaps the negative effects of the religion are an illusion – after all, Europe in the High Middle Ages onwards didn't seem to suffer any ill-effects, on the contrary!

Wells (pp. 221-222) states that Christianity caused major changes in Late Roman cities, implying that similarly revolutionary changes in the Roman way of life, the consequences of which are difficult to comprehend. See below.

Why the decline and fall?

This is the ultimate old chestnut; as many theories have been propounded for the fall of Rome as for the building of the Great Pyramid! Here is just a sample of some of the causes (contributory or otherwise, cockamamie or otherwise) that have been put forward:

1. Environmental degradation.
2. Climatic change.
3. Lead poisoning.
4. Decadence.
5. Christianity (see above).
6. The stirrup.
7. Economic ill-effects of division of the empire into eastern and western halves.
8. Loss of patriotism by the legions when dispersed to the corners of a vast empire (see below).
9. The imposition of taxes on city-dwellers, leading to a decline in urban life, the end of the idea of the empire as a galaxy of city-states and a flight to the land by wealthy men - the formation of self-contained villa estates.
10. Germanic barbarians, pressured by the Huns, in the fourth and fifth centuries AD.
11. Arabs in the seventh century AD.
12. The policy of using barbarians as federates and mercenaries, thus developing their economic and military strength.
13. Disease (a virulent strain of malaria reached Italy in the mid-fifth century; BBCi has details).
14. Famine and plague in the mid-sixth century AD (Catastrophe, David Keys, 1999, Century Books, ISBN 0 7126 8069 1).
15. Excessive taxation, inflation, and over-regulation (see below).
16. A general pathology of empires (see below).

Let us look at what some of the more well-informed commentators say.

Finer

Sam Finer (p. 600) lists the essential weaknesses of the late Roman Empire as:

And (p. 601) gives ultimate the consequences of those weaknesses:

Gibbon

Edward Gibbon (ch. 35) describes the plight of the Romans as the end approached as follows:

And as for the causes (general observations after ch. 38):

The "partial institutions of Constantine" may be a reference to Christianity. See above.

He discusses the translation of the capital of the empire from Rome to Constantinople, but concludes that it was not this but the division of the empire, and the rivalry it caused, that accelerated the breakdown of the empire.

Wells

Colin Wells (pp. 218-219) records some of the early symptoms of decay in the reign of Marcus Aurelius (ruled AD 161-180):

He dismisses some of the more, in his eyes, foolish theories as follows (pp. 219-220):

And his own version of the cause (p. 220):

Wells (pp. 221-222) also warns not to misinterpret the apparent decay of late Roman cities:

East v. West

The East-West split merits further consideration. Why did the West fall before the East? Because its borders were longer? Because its economic resources were poorer?

Perhaps the correct explanation is an economic one. From long before the rise of Rome, the western Mediterranean had been more economically backward than the eastern Mediterranean, whose agriculture and trade had been developed by proximity to the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East. The Romans, arguably, did not succeed in fully developing the economy of the West – its apparent wealth was a result of transfers from East to West. The East subsidised the West throughout the Roman period. Upon the collapse of the empire, the West was found to be incapable of supporting its civilisation economically, and so collapsed into chaos. The continued poverty of the West explains the fact that it neither unified itself nor was unified by conquest from outside, since it was hardly worth the trouble of conquering for a thousand years after the collapse of the western empire.

Continuing that line of reasoning, the East continued to support civilised life because of its more developed economy. It was overrun in the seventh century by the Arabs, and the Islamic and Byzantine successor states managed to sustain a civilisation because of the more developed economy of the eastern Mediterranean landscape. Perhaps the western Mediterranean and particularly western Europe only became important when cereal crops that were productive in northern latitudes slowly, over the centuries, appeared.

Another explanation for the supremacy of the East over the West in late Roman and post-Roman times might be that the East benefited from trade with eastern Europe and the Baltic. A trading vessel can get from the Mediterranean Sea to the Black Sea via the Hellespont, the Sea of Marmara and the Bosphorus. Once in the Black Sea, it can reach Ukraine, southern European Russia, and ultimately the Baltic via rivers such as the Danube, Dniester, Dnieper and Don.

Constantinople (present-day Instanbul) stands on a headland at the neck of the Bosphorus, and commands a huge north-south trade bottleneck, as well as being at a major crossing-point for east-west, Asia-Europe, trade. That trade would have been a lucrative source of revenue, and may explain why the city was one of the most important in the world from the fourth to the twentieth centuries, as the capital of the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman empires.

The lands north of Constantinople and the Black Sea, i.e. Eastern Europe and the Baltic region, typically provided timber, hides, tallow, metals, dried fish, amber and slaves. Slaves were particularly important; Constantinople was a great slave emporium. Over the centuries, the Mediterranean and the Middle East obtained a large proportion of its slaves from eastern Europe via Constantinople. The word 'slave' is derived from 'Slav', the ethnic name of the peoples predominating in eastern Europe.

I feel that the Byzantine empire was really a city-state – once, that is, Arab expansionism had reduced it to just Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria. It remained that size from roughly AD 650 to AD 1450, shrinking towards the end under Ottoman attacks. The capital city of that city-state was of course Constantinople, a great city, seat of the autocratic and Orthodox Christian Byzantine emperor, with huge defensive walls (on the landward side: triple walls, the highest being 100 feet, 30 metres). Thessalonika was the only other city of any size. Constantinople needed its hinterland mainly as a recruiting ground for soldiers and as a source of food. Its revenues came, I would guess, mainly from the transit dues on trade passing through it, particularly slaves.

In conclusion, there seem to be strong arguments in favour of the view that the Eastern Roman Empire, and its diminutive Byzantine successor empire, persisted longer than the Western Roman Empire for economic reasons.

Economic Mismanagement

The ugly symptoms of mismanagement of the Roman economy are spelled out by Bruce Bartlett in an article in the Cato Journal. His article bears a somewhat tendentious title, but nevertheless seems to be an accurate summary of the economic history of the Roman state. It is a saga of unjust grain subsidies, oppressive taxation, debasement of the coinage, inflation, price controls; of cardinal economic errors such as tying the people to their land, home, jobs, and places of employment – resulting in flight from the land, from jobs and from trade.

His final paragraph accurately conveys the inescapable impression of shockingly incompetent economic management by desperate emperors:

I feel that this economic decay was not the cause of the fall of Rome, but a symptom – because there were other trends going on at the same time, as listed below, and surely the true cause must explain all of these at one fell swoop. A purely economic causation would place economic deterioration in the driving seat, and would not allow for there to be any negative input into the economic process – but of course there was at least one: the increasing difficulties of arranging for the defence of the empire meant harsher and more desperate taxation. Surely the economy was one factor in a cycle of causation: "A causes B causes C causes A". The task in hand is to explain why such causal loops operated downwards in the late period, when they had operated upwards in earlier periods – vicious circles had replaced virtous circles.

Incidentally, for further confirmation of this general picture, see Finer, pp. 591-594.

Chronic Internal Pathology

The Roman Empire was never static; it was always in motion; internal forces were perpetually at work reshaping it. A list of some of the trends in the mature Roman Empire may help to illustrate this:

• Reduction in power of the old senatorial élite, and the republican institutions through which they ruled.
• Reduction in importance of Italy; more provincials in government.
• Destruction of decurial (town-councillor) class (Finer, p. 600).
• Flight of élites from cities to villas in the countryside, where they lived on self-contained estates and were reluctant to contribute to the upkeep of the legions.
• Soldiers recruited less and less from Italy, more and more from border provinces and ultimately from beyond the frontiers.
• Military officers increasingly recruited from the provinces and lower social strata; decreasingly linked to the land-owning élite (Finer, p. 600).
• Increasing gap between army and civilians.
• Greater leniency and humanity (at least under the Antonines, AD 98-192 – Wells, p. 218).
• Citizenship extended – but mainly to extend duties rather than rights.
• Power increasingly centralised.
• Increasing bureaucracy.
• Economic decline.
• Suppression of freedom of movement and employment in later centuries (Finer, p. 599).
• Emergence of 'new' religions – Mithraism, cult of Isis, cult of Serapis, etc (Wells, pp. 238-239) – and Christianity.

Personally, I find it impossible to read the history of the late Roman Empire without seeing chronic decline. The symptoms were legion, and the above list gives a rough but compelling impression. Chronic decline implies a chronic pathology.

The Germans who invaded the western empire, and the Arabs who invaded the eastern half came from sparsely populated, impoverished, technologically backward, politically divided lands. The Roman Empire had a huge population, powerful economy, many sophisticated technologies and administrative systems, and was politically united under a well-thought-out government system. Furthermore, the Romans were, or had been the foremost warriors in all the world. The decline and fall of the Roman Empire must therefore have been the result of an internal pathology – its military vulnerability was self-inflicted.

Furthermore, the protracted nature of the decline and fall, stretching, with ups and downs, from the third to the seventh centuries, makes it clear that the pathology was ingrained and substantial – not the result of the incompetence of one emperor, or the result of one freak accident like a famine or an outburst of steppe barbarians such as the Huns.

I believe the main cause of the fall of the Roman Empire was this chronic internal pathology. The other factors – barbarians, epidemic, lead poisoning, etc – were secondary causes, triggers or merely symptoms. The empire was going to fall; it was only a question of when, and under what circumstances.

As for the precise nature of that pathology, well, it seems natural to look firstly at the heart of the system – the emperorship. An institutional paranoia is apparent: the tendency of the emperor, like a black hole at the heart of a galaxy, to jealously devour all other concentrations of power and wealth and thereby unnoticingly to alienate or destroy all the groups that could have helped the state survive – Senate, citizens, Italians, educated classes, city dwellers, decurions (town councillors), etc. The emperorship was finally left isolated and alone, with only its army to protect it – with all other classes and groups completely alienated from it and obstinately reluctant to provide the taxes and services to maintain the defensive armies. The empire, dyslexic, destitute, defenceless, was hewn apart by barbarian armies.

Beyond that conjectural explanation, which I am only too well aware is simplistic and lacking in rigor, I cannot go at this time. If you know of any useful sources, or have any other comment to make, please drop me an email – see contact page.

General Pathology of Empires?

According to Karl Marx, capitalism contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction, and many have said the same of empires – with slightly more justification. Do all empires contain an intrinsic, self-destructive flaw? If so, is it the same in all empires? And if so, precisely what is it?

Let us define the problem more precisely. Do all political monopolies have an identical inherent flaw that causes them to unavoidably disintegrate? For the purposes of this exercise, any state with no rival state of comparable size within marching distance will serve as a political monopoly.

Finer gives detailed explanations of the decline and fall of only two other empires: China under the Tang dynasty (pp. 796-803) and the Turkish Ottoman Empire (pp. 1206-1209). In both cases, an apparently inexorable downward spiral is apparent, just as we have seen in the Roman Empire. The symptoms in the case of the Tang Empire are:

• Incompetent emperors.
• Faction-fighting at court.
• Eunuch servants of the emperor becoming politically powerful and feuding with ministers.
• Incompetent local- and central-government administrators.
• Unpatriotic local élites.
• Widespread sale of offices.
• Increased division of wealth between rich and poor.
• Taxes inefficiently and corruptly collected, with much tax going into the back pockets of those who collected it.
• Flight from the land by peasantry – landless vagrants.
• Peasant uprisings.
• Banditry.
• Mutinies.
• Disloyal generals.
• Loss of control of outlying provinces.

These symptoms seem however to have emerged quite swiftly during c. AD 850-907. There is no sign of the protracted decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Indeed the Chinese long-term trajectory seems to be completely different from the Roman one – a series of empires (sometimes loosely referred to as dynasties) rising and falling consecutively in the same landscape, as opposed to a single empire of the Mediterranean, going through a single cycle of rise and fall over a longer timescale and with no recovery after the final disintegration. On a second look however, cyclical behavour can arguably be discerned in the recovery after the AD 235-284 anarchy, and the recovery under Justinian. Nevertheless, overall, Chinese civilisation seems to have been more centralised and therefore more brittle – prone to abrupt system collapse, but readily able to regenerate itself.

In the case of the Ottoman Empire, the symptoms were:

• Overpopulation – landless vagrants.
• Banditry.
• Monetary inflation caused by the inflow of American silver.
• Less revenue – a consequence of the end of expansion.
• Incompetent sultans (emperors) – sons of sultans kept in 'cage'.
• Harem women becoming politically powerful.
• Sultans retreating into palatial seclusion.
• Mutinies.
• Military changes, such as the demise of the timariot cavalry and the abandonment of the devshirme recruitment system, a decline in discipline among the Janissaries (pressed Christian-born troops) – the emergence of firearms and cannon stimulated change.
• Land changes – timars ('feudal manors') replaced by tax farms; emergence of large estates; reduction of peasantry to dependency.
• Emergence of near-autonomous beys (provincial governors).
• Arbitrary confiscations of private fortunes to stave off financial crisis.
• Flight from the land by peasantry – landless vagrants.
• Widespread sale of offices.

One seems to see glimmerings of similarities between these sets of pathological symptoms. Certainly there seems to be a common tendency to get into a vicious circle of cause and effect leading to a downward spiral – about which all the king's horses and all the king's men can apparently do nothing. In particular, the tendency of economic problems to give rise to political, social and military problems, and for those to problems to beget more economic problems is striking.

A complete list of monopolistic empires whose demise might be studied in connection with this problem would be as follows.

1. Egyptian Old Kingdom (and possibly also Middle Kingdom)
2. Assyrian Empire
3. New Babylonian Empire
4. Achaemenid Persian Empire
5. Roman Empire
6. Arab Caliphate
7. Ottoman Empire
8. India (various dynasties/periods)
9. China (various dynasties/periods)
10. Various South American civilisations

Perhaps other non-monopolistic polities ought also to considered: anything from the Hittite Empire and New Kingdom Egypt to the Soviet Union.

At this point, my reasoning has to come abruptly to an end. A detailed, rigorous and conclusive proof would seem to be far distant, and might require the development of a general theory of the dynamics of human societies, presently nonexistent. Nevertheless if you know of any relevant sources, or have any other comment to make, please drop me an email – see contact page.

What did Rome bequeath to subsequent civilisation?

"What did the Romans ever do for us?" Well, aqueducts, sanitation, roads, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, a fresh water system and public baths – and peace. But a lot of those things got lost in the post-Roman dark age in the West. Anyway, for a more informed view ...

Finer

Finer (pp. 601-4) dismisses Rome's government system (polyglot empire, autocracy, professional bureaucracy), city foundations, roads and languages for a variety of reasons: unoriginal, fell into total or partial disuse in the post-Roman Dark Ages, would have happened anyway, etc.

The first genuinely original contribution that he lists is the 'consocial' state:

The outcome of the above was that the empire evolved into a federation in which the original master-slave relationship between Rome and Italy on the one hand and the other provinces on the other had dissolved. The second original contribution was the state as an abstract idea:

Next:

Next:

Finally:

The above can however be criticised. Consocial states, which to a first approximation means federations, such as Switzerland or, on a larger scale, the United States, have been reinvented time after time subsequently. Nobody seriously suggests that the world would have never stumbled on the idea of the federation if it had not been for the Romans.

The abstract idea of 'the state' arises automatically whenever a government system becomes institutionalised enough to impose its own personality on its rulers, and to perpetuate itself from generation to generation. Nothing of substance would have been withheld from posterity, that it could not readily have invented for itself, if the Romans had not invented the 'abstract state'.

The Roman idea of law – not merely a set of rules imposed by the state, but a justice accessible to all as of right; pervasive and implying a law-bound state – was submerged in the post-Roman dark age in the West and did not survive, so cannot have bequeathed itself to subsequent states.

The adoption of Roman (Justinian) laws in western Europe from the 12^th century on, implies an awareness of the inadequacy of the laws of mediaeval Europe, and an ambition to replace them with something superior. With that ambition in place, Europe was sure to find the superior law code it wanted – if the Justinian codes had not existed, it could have obtained such laws from some other source, Islam say, or by constructing one for itself. In fact, the latter might have been preferable, since, as Finer says (p. 603), "Much [Roman] criminal and public law might well be defective ...".

The glorious legacy of the Roman Empire is in fact like the "emperor's new clothes": non-existent. The Roman Empire was a monstrous failure. Apart from the rump empire of Byzantium, it was wiped from the map by a new Islamic civilisation in the East and by outright barbarism in the West. The western European dark age was both prolonged (half a millennium) and deep – bringing an almost complete collapse of literacy, of urban life, of the moneyed economy and of long-distance trade, bringing massive political fragmentation down to states the size of Northumbria or Normandy, plagued by waves of barbarians one after another. Rome had exploited the energy of the Greek-style republic to conquer and extinguish all the other classical republics of the Mediterranean area, and had then murdered its own republic in favour of an autocracy that evolved into a hideously oppressive and stifling tyranny.

In short, the Roman Empire contributed nothing positive to posterity, and instead destroyed any possibility of something resembling the modern state evolving from Greek city-republic prototypes. The world would probably have been a better place if it had never existed.

Agriculture North of the Alps?

Perhaps however, the Romans made an accidental contribution to the future: they helped develop agriculture north of the Alps. It is noticeable that the centre of gravity of civilisation in Europe has moved northwards between Roman times and now. Perhaps the underlying reason is the emergence of strains of crops such as wheat and barley that flourish in cold, wet soils, enabling increased population in northerly lands. Perhaps the Romans helped the process by opening up northwestern Europe to progressive agriculture.

Roman Feudalism?

Another conjectural contribution: feudalism. During the late 3^rd and the 4^th centuries AD, a villa economy apparently flourished in Britain, and, I believe, elsewhere in the Roman Empire. Were these large landowners required to arrange for their own defence against marauders? This if true might be seen as the prototype of mediaeval feudalism. What drove the establishment of the villas and the large estates they dominated? Could it be that later emperors wanted the outer provinces to defend themselves so that the legions could be closer to hand and under control? Possibly the development of the mediaeval warhorse was accelerated by the Roman preference for cavalry from the time of Constantine the Great onwards.

The Idea of Rome

The main legacy of Rome lies in the collective memory of humankind, especially Europeans. The people of every post-Roman century have been fascinated by Rome. Its scale, grandeur, longevity and the power of its emperors have always impressed. King Edwin of Northumbria in the 7th century was always preceded by a standard-bearer carrying a Roman-style tufa (winged globe mounted on a spear), to which he presumably thought he was entitled as overking of Anglo-Saxon England. Charlemagne, king of the Franks, had himself crowned "Roman Emperor" by the Pope in Rome on Christmas day AD 800 – although his empire only consisted of France, Germany and Italy, approximately, and disintegrated not long after his death. From the Renaissance, Europeans studied Roman as well as Greek texts with fervour – the classics became the keystone of higher learning.

Today, if you enter "Roman Empire" into an Internet search engine you will get more than 1,000,000 items. There you have the legacy of Rome: a great bundle of ideas and historical facts, that act as a touchstone for our thinking about life and society. If the Roman Empire was unimportant, why have I written this?

Key Dates

References

Crawford – The Roman Republic, Michael Crawford, 1978 (2nd ed. 1992), Fontana, ISBN 0 00 686250 0. A general history of the Roman republic from the earliest times to 44 BC (assassination of Julius Caesar).

Wells – The Roman Empire, Colin Wells, 1984 (2nd ed. 1992), Fontana, ISBN 0 00 686252 7. A general history of the Roman Empire from 44 BC (assassination of Julius Caesar) to AD 235 (death of Severus Alexander; start of fifty years of military anarchy).

Finer – The History of Government from the Earliest Times, S. E. Finer, 1997, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0 19 820664 X. A three-volume comparative review of all significant government systems in world history. A huge achievement; immensely important.

Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon, abridged by D. M. Low, fourth impression March 1968, Chatto & Windus, SBN 7011 0173 8. For an online version, try: http://www.ccel.org/g/gibbon/. A classic work, written in the 18^th century in high rhetorical style.

Montesquieu – Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline, Charles Louis Montesquieu, trans. David Lowenthal, 1965, New York: The Free Press. Another 18^th century work of considerable interest despite its antiquity.

Bartlett – Cato Journal (journal of the Cato Institute), volume 14, number 2, fall 1994, How Excessive Government Killed Ancient Rome, Bruce Bartlett. An article which uses the escalating economic problems of the Late Roman Empire as a stick with which to beat modern top-heavy governments – tendentious regarding modern government, but very revealing regarding the Roman Empire.

De Imperatoribus Romanis – an online encyclopaedia of Roman emperors. Gives biographies of all emperors. Also an atlas, coins, family trees, and battle descriptions (with maps).

Wikipedia – online encyclopaedia – useful as a general historical resource.

RomanBritain.org.uk – interesting!

Roman-Britain.org – fun!