by Will Durant
Moral decay contributed to the dissolution. The virile character that had been formed by arduous simplicities and a supporting faith relaxed in the sunshine of wealth and the freedom of unbelief; men had now, in the middle and upper classes, the means to yield to temptation, and only expediency to restrain them. Urban congestion multiplied contacts and frustrated surveillance; immigration brought together a hundred cultures whose differences rubbed themselves out into indifference. Moral and esthetic standards were lowered by the magnetism of the mass; and sex ran riot in freedom while political liberty decayed.
The greatest of historians held that Christianity was the chief cause of Rome’s fall.11 For this religion, he and his followers12 argued, had destroyed the old faith that had given moral character to the Roman soul and stability to the Roman state. It had declared war upon the classic culture—upon science, philosophy, literature, and art. It had brought an enfeebling Oriental mysticism into the realistic stoicism of Roman life; it had turned men’s thoughts from the tasks of this world to an enervating preparation for some cosmic catastrophe, and had lured them into seeking individual salvation through asceticism and prayer, rather than collective salvation through devotion to the state. It had disrupted the unity of the Empire while soldier emperors were struggling to preserve it; it had discouraged its adherents from holding office, or rendering military service; it had preached an ethic of nonresistance and peace when the survival of the Empire had demanded a will to war. Christ’s victory had been Rome’s death.
There is some truth in this hard indictment. Christianity unwillingly shared in the chaos of creeds that helped produce that medley of mores which moderately contributed to Rome’s collapse. But the growth of Christianity was more an effect than a cause of Rome’s decay. The breakup of the old religion had begun long before Christ; there were more vigorous attacks upon it in Ennius and Lucretius than in any pagan author after them. Moral disintegration had begun with the Roman conquest of Greece, and had culminated under Nero; thereafter Roman morals improved, and the ethical influence of Christianity upon Roman life was largely a wholesome one. It was because Rome was already dying that Christianity grew so rapidly. Men lost faith in the state not because Christianity held them aloof, but because the state defended wealth against poverty, fought to capture slaves, taxed toil to support luxury, and failed to protect its people from famine, pestilence, invasion, and destitution; forgivably they turned from Caesar preaching war to Christ preaching peace, from incredible brutality to unprecedented charity, from a life without hope or dignity to a faith that consoled their poverty and honored their humanity. Rome was not destroyed by Christianity, any more than by barbarian invasion; it was an empty shell when Christianity rose to influence and invasion came.
The economic causes of Rome’s decline have already been stated as prerequisite to the understanding of Diocletian’s reforms; they need only a reminding summary here. The precarious dependence upon provincial grains, the collapse of the slave supply and the latifundia; the deterioration of transport and the perils of trade; the loss of provincial markets to provincial competition; the inability of Italian industry to export the equivalent of Italian imports, and the consequent drain of precious metals to the East; the destructive war between rich and poor; the rising cost of armies, doles, public works, an expanding bureaucracy, and a parasitic court; the depreciation of the currency; the discouragement of ability, and the absorption of investment capital, by confiscatory taxation; the emigration of capital and labor, the strait jacket of serfdom placed upon agriculture, and of caste forced upon industry: all these conspired to sap the material bases of Italian life, until at last the power of Rome was a political ghost surviving its economic death.
The political causes of decay were rooted in one fact—that increasing despotism destroyed the citizen’s civic sense and dried up statesmanship at its source. Powerless to express his political will except by violence, the Roman lost interest in government and became absorbed in his business, his amusements, his legion, or his individual salvation. Patriotism and the pagan religion had been bound together, and now together decayed.13 The Senate, losing ever more of its power and prestige after Pertinax, relapsed into indolence, subservience, or venality; and the last barrier fell that might have saved the state from militarism and anarchy. Local governments, overrun by imperial correctores and exactores, no longer attracted first-rate men. The responsibility of municipal officials for the tax quotas of their areas, the rising expense of their unpaid honors, the fees, liturgies, benefactions, and games expected of them, the dangers incident to invasion and class war, led to a flight from office corresponding to the flight from taxes, factories, and farms. Men deliberately made themselves ineligible by debasing their social category; some fled to other towns, some became farmers, some monks. In 313 Constantine extended to the Christian clergy that exemption from municipal office, and from several taxes, which pagan priests had traditionally enjoyed; the Church was soon swamped with candidates for ordination, and cities complained of losses in revenue and senators; in the end Constantine was compelled to rule that no man eligible for municipal position should be admitted to the priesthood.14 The imperial police pursued fugitives from political honors as it hunted evaders of taxes or conscription; it brought them back to the cities and forced them to serve;15 finally it decreed that a son must inherit the social status of his father, and must accept election if eligible to it by his rank. A serfdom of office rounded out the prison of economic caste.
Gallienus, fearing a revolt of the Senate, excluded senators from the army. As martial material no longer grew in Italy, this decree completed the military decline of the peninsula. The rise of provincial and mercenary armies, the overthrow of the Praetorian Guard by Septimius Severus, the emergence of provincial generals, and their capture of the imperial throne, destroyed the leadership, even the independence, of Italy long before the fall of the Empire in the West. The armies of Rome were no longer Roman armies; they were composed chiefly of provincials, largely of barbarians; they fought not for their altars and their homes, but for their wages, their donatives, and their loot. They attacked and plundered the cities of the Empire with more relish than they showed in facing the enemy; most of them were the sons of peasants who hated the rich and the cities as exploiters of the poor and the countryside; and as civil strife provided opportunity, they sacked such towns with a thoroughness that left little for alien barbarism to destroy.16 When military problems became more important than internal affairs, cities near the frontiers were made the seats of government; Rome became a theater for triumphs, a show place of imperial architecture, a museum of political antiquities and forms. The multiplication of capitals and the division of power broke down the unity of administration. The Empire, grown too vast for its statesmen to rule or its armies to defend, began to disintegrate. Left to protect themselves unaided against the Germans and the Scots, Gaul and Britain chose their own imperatores, and made them sovereign; Palmyra seceded under Zenobia, and soon Spain and Africa would yield almost unresisting to barbarian conquest. In the reign of Gallienus thirty generals governed thirty regions of the Empire in practical independence of the central power. In this awful drama of a great state breaking into pieces, the internal causes were the unseen protagonists; the invading barbarians merely entered where weakness had opened the door, and where the failure of biological, moral, economic, and political statesmanship had left the stage to chaos, despondency, and decay.
Externally the fall of the Western Roman Empire was hastened by the expansion and migration of the Hsiung-nu, or Huns, in northwestern Asia. Defeated in their eastward advance by Chinese armies and the Chinese Wall, they turned westward, and about A.D. 355 reached the Volga and the Oxus. Their pressure forced the Sarmatians of Russia to move into the Balkans; the Goths, so harassed, moved again upon the Roman frontiers. They were admitted across the Danube to settle in Moesia (376); maltreated there by Roman officials, they revolted, defeated a large Roman army at Adr
ianople (378), and for a time threatened Constantinople. In 400 Alaric led the Visigoths over the Alps into Italy, and in 410 they took and sacked Rome. In 429 Gaiseric led the Vandals to the conquest of Spain and Africa, and in 455 they took and sacked Rome. In 451 Attila led the Huns in an attack upon Gaul and Italy; he was defeated at Chalons, but overran Lombardy. In 472 a Pannonian general, Orestes, made his son emperor under the name of Romulus Augustulus. Four years later the barbarian mercenaries who dominated the Roman army deposed this “little Augustus,” and named their leader Odoacer king of Italy. Odoacer recognized the supremacy of the Roman emperor at Constantinople, and was accepted by him as a vassal king. The Roman Empire in the East would go on until 1453; in the West it had come to an end.
II. THE ROMAN ACHIEVEMENT
It is easier to explain Rome’s fall than to account for her long survival. This is the essential accomplishment of Rome—that having won the Mediterranean world she adopted its culture, gave it order, prosperity, and peace for 200 years, held back the tide of barbarism for two centuries more, and transmitted the classic heritage to the West before she died.
Rome has had no rival in the art of government. The Roman state committed a thousand political crimes; it built its edifice upon a selfish oligarchy and an obscurantist priesthood; it achieved a democracy of freemen, and then destroyed it with corruption and violence; it exploited its conquests to support a parasitic Italy, which, when it could no longer exploit, collapsed. Here and there, in East and West, it created a desert and called it peace. But amid all this evil it formed a majestic system of law which through nearly all Europe gave security to life and property, incentive and continuity to industry, from the Decemvirs to Napoleon. It molded a government of separated legislative and executive powers whose checks and balances inspired the makers of constitutions as late as revolutionary America and France. For a time it united monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy so successfully as to win the applause of philosophers, historians, subjects, and enemies. It gave municipal institutions, and for a long period municipal freedom, to half a thousand cities. It administered its Empire at first with greed and cruelty, then with such tolerance and essential justice that the great realm has never again known a like content. It made the desert blossom with civilization, and atoned for its sins with the miracle of a lasting peace. Today our highest labors seek to revive the Pax Romana for a disordered world.
Within that unsurpassed framework Rome built a culture Greek in origin, Roman in application and result. She was too engrossed in government to create as bountifully in the realms of the mind as Greece had done; but she absorbed with appreciation, and preserved with tenacity, the technical, intellectual, and artistic heritage that she had received from Carthage and Egypt, Greece and the East. She made no advance in science, and no mechanical improvements in industry, but she enriched the world with a commerce moving over secure seas, and a network of enduring roads that became the arteries of a lusty life. Along those roads, and over a thousand handsome bridges, there passed to the medieval and modern worlds the ancient techniques of tillage, handicraft, and art, the science of monumental building, the processes of banking and investment, the organization of medicine and military hospitals, the sanitation of cities, and many varieties of fruit and nut trees, of agricultural or ornamental plants, brought from the East to take new root in the West. Even the secret of central heating came from the warm south to the cold north. The south has created the civilizations, the north has conquered and destroyed or borrowed them.
Rome did not invent education, but she developed it on a scale unknown before, gave it state support, and formed the curriculum that persisted till our harassed youth. She did not invent the arch, the vault, or the dome, but she used them with such audacity and magnificence that in some fields her architecture has remained unequaled; and all the elements of the medieval cathedral were prepared in her basilicas. She did not invent the sculptural portrait, but she gave it a realistic power rarely reached by the idealizing Greeks. She did not invent philosophy, but it was in Lucretius and Seneca that Epicureanism and Stoicism found their most finished form. She did not invent the types of literature, not even the satire; but who could adequately record the influence of Cicero on oratory, the essay, and prose style, of Virgil on Dante, Tasso, Milton, ... of Livy and Tacitus on the writing of history, of Horace and Juvenal on Dryden, Swift, and Pope?
Her language became, by a most admirable corruption, the speech of Italy, Rumania, France, Spain, Portugal, and Latin America; half the white man’s world speaks a Latin tongue. Latin was, till the eighteenth century, the Esperanto of science, scholarship, and philosophy in the West; it gave a convenient international terminology to botany and zoology; it survives in the sonorous ritual and official documents of the Roman Church; it still writes medical prescriptions, and haunts the phraseology of the law. It entered by direct appropriation, and again through the Romance languages (regalis, regal, royal; paganus, pagan, peasant), to enhance the wealth and flexibility of English speech. Our Roman heritage works in our lives a thousand times a day.
When Christianity conquered Rome the ecclesiastical structure of the pagan church, the title and vestments of the pontifex maximus, the worship of the Great Mother and a multitude of comforting divinities, the sense of supersensible presences everywhere, the joy or solemnity of old festivals, and the pageantry of immemorial ceremony, passed like maternal blood into the new religion, and captive Rome captured her conqueror. The reins and skills of government were handed down by a dying empire to a virile papacy; the lost power of the broken sword was rewon by the magic of the consoling word; the armies of the state were replaced by the missionaries of the Church moving in all directions along the Roman roads; and the revolted provinces, accepting Christianity, again acknowledged the sovereignty of Rome. Through the long struggles of the Age of Faith the authority of the ancient capital persisted and grew, until in the Renaissance the classic culture seemed to rise from the grave, and the immortal city became once more the center and summit of the world’s life and wealth and art. When, in 1936, Rome celebrated the 2689th anniversary of her foundation, she could look back upon the most impressive continuity of government and civilization in the history of mankind. May she rise again.
THANK YOU, PATIENT READER.
FIG. 1—Caesar (black basalt) Altes Museum, Berlin
FIG. 2—An Etruscan Tomb at Cervetri
FIG. 3—Head of a Woman From an Etruscan tomb at Corneto
FIG. 4—Apollo of Veii Villa di Papa Giulio, Rome
FIG. 5—The Orator Museo Archeologico, Florence
FIG. 6—Pompey Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen
FIG. 7—Caesar Museo Nazionale, Naples
FIG. 8—The Young Augustus Vatican, Rome
FIG. 9—Augustus Imperator, from the Villa of Livia at Prima Porta Vatican, Rome
FIG. 10—Vespasian Museo Nazionale, Naples
FIG. 11—Relief from the Arch of Titus
FIG. 12—The Roman Forum
FIG. 13—Temple of Castor and Pollux Roman Forum
FIG. 14—Two Roman Mosaics Top, Museo Nazionale, Naples. Bottom, Capitoline Museum, Rome
FIG. 15—The Gemma Augusta Vienna Museum
FIG. 16—An Arretine Vase From the Loeb Collection, Harvard University
FIG. 17—The Portland Vase British Museum
FIG. 18—Frieze from the Altar of Peace Uffizi Gallery, Florence
FIG. 19—Frieze of Tellus from the Altar of Peace Uffizi Gallery, Florence
FIG. 20—Portrait of a Young Girl Museo delle Terme, Rome
FIG. 21—Clytie” British Museum
FIG. 22—“Spring” A Mural from Stabiae
FIG. 23—Details of Mural From the House of the Vettii, Pompeii
FIG. 24—Mural from the Villa Farnesina Museo delle Terme, Rome
FIG. 25—“Sappho” Museo Nazionale, Naples
FIG. 26—The Colosseum
FIG. 27—Interior of the Colosseum
FI
G. 28—Roman Soldier and Dacian Relief from the Column of Trajan
FIG. 29—Antinoüs Museo Nazionale, Naples
FIG. 30—Altar Found at Ostia Museo delle Terme, Rome
FIG. 31—Arch of Trajan at Benevento
FIG. 32—Ruins of Timgad
FIG. 33—Pont du Gard at Nîmes
FIG. 34—Temple of Iuppiter Heliopolitanus at Baalbek
FIG. 35—Temple of Venus or Baachus at Baalbek
FIG. 36—Arch of Septimius Severus, Rome
FIG. 37—Reconstruction of Interior of Baths of Caracalla
FIG. 38—Mithras and the Bull British Museum
FIG. 39—Sarcophagus of the Empress Helena
Vatican, Rome
About the Authors
WILL DURANT was born in North Adams, Massachusetts, on November 5, 1885. He was educated in the Catholic parochial schools there and in Kearny, New Jersey, and thereafter in St. Peter’s (Jesuit) College, Jersey City, New Jersey, and Columbia University. New York. For a summer he served as a cub reporter on the New York Journal, in 1907, but finding the work too strenuous for his temperament, he settled down at Seton Hall College, South Orange, New Jersey, to teach Latin, French, English, and geometry (1907-11). He entered the seminary at Seton Hall in 1909, but withdrew in 1911 for reasons he has described in his book Transition. He passed from this quiet seminary to the most radical circles in New York, and became (1911–13) the teacher of the Ferrer Modern School, an experiment in libertarian education. In 1912 he toured Europe at the invitation and expense of Alden Freeman, who had befriended him and now undertook to broaden his borders.
