The Fall of the Roman Empire

by Michael Grant

  A Greek at the court of Attila told Priscus of Panium (Barbaras) in Thrace, an envoy of the Eastern Empire, how low his personal opinion of the Roman officers was. And Attila's description of war against the Western Empire as 'more bitter' than war against the East was a good deal less of a compliment to the might of the West than it sounded, because he did not mean that he found its soldiers formidable: what he meant was that he appreciated the warlike qualities of the Goths, who by now formed such an important part of the Western army.

  For that was why the Emperors were glad to commute the military obligations of Roman provincials for gold: they could buy German recruits to fill their places. This recruitment, in itself, was nothing new. In the earlier days of the Empire, the auxiliary units had already included many Germans, mainly serving under Roman officers. Then, early in the fourth century, Constantine greatly increased the enrolment of such men, mostly recruited under contract on an individual basis, and officered by Romans. In the light of this development, Porphyrius, who wrote a bad poem in praise of Constantine, could justifiably declare to him: 'Your Rhine furnishes you with armies.' Apart from certain prisoners of war who had been compulsorily mobilized, these Germans were not in the slightest degree enemies of Rome, but were only too eager to enlist in its service. They saw the Roman Empire not as an enemy but as a career.

  Julian the Apostate (361-3) expressed disgust for Constantine's 'pro-barbarism'. Yet he had no time, during his short reign, to reverse this trend, and probably he could never have done so, since the German soldiers had already become indispensable.

  When Valens, before the disastrous defeat at Adrianople, invited Visigoths into the Imperial provinces, his major justification for this move was the prospect of enlarging the army - and increasing the revenue as well, since the sum which provincials would contribute in order to escape their military service amounted to more than he would need to pay the Germans. But then, in 382, it was Theodosius I who took the fateful, decisive measure. For the German 'allies' or federates whom he enrolled as soldiers were not merely individual recruits any longer, but whole tribes enlisting under their own chieftains, who received from the Roman Emperor an annual sum, in cash and kind, to pay the troops they thus continued to command. These men joined the army as volunteers on very easy terms, and were allowed to withdraw from it if they provided a substitute.

  In 388, Ambrose emphasized the decisive role of the Germans in Theodosius' army - and he might have added the non-German Huns as well, since they too provided Rome with many soldiers at this time. Once introduced, the new federate participation in the army grew apace. And it grew with particular speed because the battles between Theodosius i and rival contestants for the throne were fought between a great many German and other non-Roman troops on either side.

  Although the flatterers of Emperors praised their wisdom in mobilizing such men, the process was widely denounced by other Romans and Greeks. Synesius declared it futile to entrust the defence of the flock to the very wolves who ravened against it, men of the same race as the Romans' slaves. Jerome, too, pronounced that the Romans were now the weakest people on earth, since they depended wholly on barbarians to fight for them. And the fifth-century pagan historian Zosimus, who agreed with Jerome about little else, likewise deplored that Theodosius had reduced the truly Roman army to nothing at all. That was still not yet quite true. But it was only a slight anticipation of the truth: for the Roman army, apart from the Germans, was approaching extinction.

  Since the problem of obtaining other recruits had become so desperate, Theodosius' action in replacing the Roman soldiers by Germans was probably the best practical remedy that was available to him. It also offered remarkable opportunities for racial partnership, although, owing to a blend of Roman prejudice and German turbulence, these were not effectively seized, and in consequence the federate units became disillusioned and unreliable.

  In order to supplement their dubious services, the central government made occasional endeavours to mobilize local defence groups against the recurrent invasions. There were precedents for such measures, for example the defence of Treveri (Trier) from a usurper in the 350s. But then in 391 the right of using arms against 'brigands' was granted, contrary to the usual practice, to all indiscriminately, on the principle, enunciated by the Historia Augusta, that men will fight best when they are defending their own property.

  Around the turn of the century, again, there were occasional sporadic instances of local defence, but they were neither numerous nor very effective. In the desperate crisis of the invasion of Italy in 405, the state appealed to provincials to join up as temporary volunteers 'for love of peace and country' - but without any conspicuous success. Movements towards autonomy, three years later, in Britain and Brittany may have been exercises in concerted self-help. It was soon afterwards, in 410, that Honorius wrote to Britain instructing the authorities there to arrange their own protection; and the British once again received a similar message thirty years later. In Italy, when Gaiseric and his Vandals threatened the country, its citizens were authorized to carry arms. In Gaul, too, in 471-5, the people of the Arverni (Auvergne), inspired by their bishop Sidonius, defended their capital Arverna (formerly Augustonemetum, now Clermont-Ferrand) against the Visigoths.

  Yet such efforts at local self-defence are only worth mentioning because they were so exceptional. They played no substantial part in military events. And as for the Roman army itself, apart from the unruly federates, its end was indeed now at hand. A ' legal pronouncement of Valentinian in in 444 scarcely contrived or attempted to conceal the desperate situation, since the Emperor openly admitted that his military plans had been totally frustrated.

  There was collapse on every side. Britain, despite all exhortations, was completely lost. Along extensive stretches of the Danube, the troops had already been disbanded at the beginning of the century, while the frontier crumbled around them and no one paid their wages any more. Only the strip of the river that lay closest to Italy remained in Roman hands until the end.

  A certain Eugippius, in his biography of a local monk, wrote about this Danube garrison's last days in about 482. He told how the frontier forces and the frontier itself finally disintegrated, and recorded how the ultimate surviving unit at Castra Batava (Passau) sent some men back to Italy to draw the last instalment of pay that they would ever receive. Meanwhile in Italy itself there were no longer any Roman troops whatever. The country's ultimate Roman army, the army of Odoacer which forced the last Western Emperor to resign, consisted entirely of federates.

  If the Romans had been able to maintain an army, they might well have saved themselves from destruction. Their failure to raise the troops any longer was one of the principal causes of their downfall. In later Rome too, there had been a total lack of mutual sympathy between army and civilians; and this discrepancy between defence needs and the people's willingness to fulfil them contributed materially to the downfall of the Roman West.

  But why did such a discrepancy ever reach these catastrophic proportions? The answer lies a little below the surface, in the deep cleavages which shattered the structure of late Roman society. And it is these cleavages which must now be investigated.

  II

  THE GULFS BETWEEN THE CLASSES

  The Poor against the State

  The principal reason why the civil population would not maintain the army and fill its ranks was the massive burden of taxation demanded for this purpose - a gigantic imposition which alienated the poor from the states for ever, in a disunity of fatal proportions. The perilous situation into which oppressive tax policy had plunged the Western Roman world was correctly analysed by the unknown writer On Matters of Warfare. As he expressed the matter, in the cautious terms appropriate to a memorandum designed for the Imperial bureau, 'the vast expenditure on the army must be checked, for that is what has thrown the entire system of tax payments into difficulties'.

  In one sense, this was unfair; or at least it only dealt with part of the
problem. For huge expenditure on the army was necessary, if the Empire was going to be able to survive at all. The expense of defending the frontiers had become truly colossal. In 360, when the state treasurer Ursulus happened to visit the ruined site of Amida, now Diyarbakir in southern Turkey - which the Romans had been forced to abandon - his bitter comment concentrated on the financial aspect: 'Behold with what courage the cities are defended by our soldiers, for whose abundance of pay the wealth of the Empire is already becoming insufficient.'

  The remark later cost Ursulus his life, at the hands of the soliders he had criticized. And, indeed, even if his censure of the fall of Amida was justified, and even if wastages of money were not uncommon, it still remained true that the army had to be maintained, so that the money for its upkeep simply had to be found. But it did not prove possible to find it. When Valentinian in confessed that his plans for the army had failed, he blamed the failure upon lack of funds. There was not enough money, he said, for his existing forces, let alone for new recruits.

  The writer On Matters of Warfare, not content with pointing to the general problem, has a number of specific suggestions to make: though, unfortunately, they are not always very useful. One such proposal - which he recognizes to be a perilous point to make to his masters - is that the government should cut down or abolish the bonuses it habitually paid to soldiers and civil servants alike, since he regards these payments as the principal cause of the Empire's decline. But earlier rulers, too, had found it a political necessity to distribute whatever gifts they could, whether the proceeds of taxation or of plunder, among their troops and their henchmen.

  Certainly the unknown author was justified in saying that the bonuses heavily burdened the taxpayer. But the only trouble was that it might be suicidal to cut them. He also suggested demobilizations at a younger age, in order to save higher salaries. But this too was probably not a practical possibility, owing to the absence of manpower to replace those who were discharged.

  Another anonymous author of the same period, one of the biographers of the Historia Augusta, refers with enthusiasm to an alleged statement by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Probus (276-82) that since things, under his rule, were going so well, there would soon be no need for a Roman army any longer.

  . . . What great bliss would then have shone forth, if under his rule there had ceased to be soldiers! No rations would now be furnished by any provincial, no pay for the troops taken out of the public largesses, the commonwealth of Rome would keep its treasures forever, no payments would be made by the prince, no tax required of the holder of land! It was in very truth a golden age that he promised.

  It was indeed, and the golden age never arrived. What happened, instead, was exactly the reverse: the army became larger and larger. The Historia Augusta, however, was entirely correct in identifying the army as the principal cause and recipient of taxation. When, therefore, Valentinian I and Theodosius I both made gigantic efforts, in their different ways, to strengthen the military forces, heavy taxes were the inevitable result. Owing to the absence of floating capital, the government could not, in the modern fashion, throw part of its burdens on posterity by creating a public debt.

  As far as Valentinian, at least, was concerned, this taxation was imposed with considerable reluctance, since Ammianus specifically informs us of that Emperor's desire to grant the provincials financial relief. But whatever his personal wishes, he felt obliged to allow Petronius Probus, his praetorian prefect in Italy, Illyricum (Yugoslavia) and North Africa, to resort to very severe extortions, and towards the end of the reign taxation rose steeply.

  As for Theodosius I, his laws show a passionate desire to increase the influx of revenue by every possible means. 'No man', he pronounced in 383, 'shall possess any property that is tax exempt.' And he set out by a whole spate of regulations to enforce this principle, with ever-increasing harshness.

  He did so at the cost of unprecedentedly ruthless methods. The employment of such methods for the collection of taxes was no novelty. It had been practised for more than a hundred years past. The third century AD, crammed with critical foreign and civil wars, had witnessed an almost total breakdown of the political structure and of national defence. This was a crisis from which the Empire was only rescued by fantastic military efforts. But the price of maintaining the recovery had been a huge, permanent increase in taxation, and an intensification of all the numerous totalitarian kinds of pressure needed to rake its proceeds into the treasury.

  And now the pressure had become more exacting still. Successive Emperors each tried to turn the screw a little tighter, and a torrent of laws and edicts of Theodosius 1 shows that he, in particular, tightened it almost to breaking point. It was no use the poet Claudian patriotically denying that the provinces were hard hit by taxes, or the envoy Priscus of Panium (Barbaros) in Thrace, half a century later, assuring an expatriate Greek that all was for the best in the Imperial arrangements.

  Valentinian 111 openly admitted the savagery of his own system, and even remitted arrears of taxation - at least for the rich. When Majorian came to the throne shortly afterwards, and Sidonius welcomed his accession with a congratulatory address, he managed to insert a reference to the tax burden which oppressed his native Gaul. And the new Emperor himself issued a legal pronouncement deploring these severities with a vivid frankness that left nothing to the imagination.

  During the emergencies of the third century, the custom had grown of demanding tax-payments in goods rather than cash - a reversion (like the payment of soldiers by the same means) towards the barter systems of primitive times. Towards the end of the Empire, this taxation policy began to be reversed, and levies in kind were increasingly commuted to gold once again -first of all, the provision of horses, oxen and uniforms for the army, and then the regular land-tax previously payable in grain, wine, oil and meat. This was a sort of recovery, in terms of general, long-term concepts of progress. Yet it did not help the men and women who were hardest hit by taxation.

  And to make matters worse, the population was gravely inconvenienced by the inadequacies of the currency, which was far inferior to the well-planned coinages of earlier Imperial times. It was true that, after a period of unreliable gold issues, Constantine had done well to reintroduce a stable unit in this metal, the solidus. But that was of little use to the vast majority of the inhabitants of the Empire, who rarely if ever possessed a gold coin at all (although payment in gold was required for certain taxes); and even Theodosius' new gold denomination, one-third of the solidus in size, did not seriously help to bridge the gulf. He and his colleagues also issued a small silver coin, but it did not last for any length of time. Most people never saw anything but a coinage of bronze or lightly silvered bronze, and this, moreover, as time went on, was able to buy less and less.

  This inflation was largely caused by increases in the face-value of the solidus. This ostensible value, in terms of its bronze fractions, was no less than forty-five times larger in 400 than it had been one hundred years previously. That meant that the government issued more and more of the bronze pieces - without withdrawing many in the form of taxation, so often paid in gold -so that they cluttered the market and became worth progressively less and less in terms of goods. The authorities remained unconcerned about this unfortunate result, since the bronze,

  being a token currency, could be issued at quite arbitrary face-values, bringing a large profit to themselves. And in any case, like everyone else in the ancient world, they were unaware of the economic law insisting that if the number of coins increases and the goods available remain the same, then prices are bound to rise.

  The resulting hardship was colossal, as it had already been during successive inflations throughout the previous century. The trades-people of the Western provinces, who were mainly Greeks and Jews, must have found life almost intolerable, especially as the government's choice of mints, which were distributed to suit the needs of the army, showed not the slightest concern for their convenience. Money-changer
s, too, are seen complaining to the Roman city-prefect Symmachus that they could scarcely carry on. And another difficulty which caused hardship to everyone was that unofficial forgery of the coinage was rampant.

  This unfavourable currency situation became harder still for the population to bear when, early in the fifth century, the Western government virtually gave up any attempt to provide small change at all, only producing restricted issues of the minutest bronze denomination. It is true that this reduction of the number of new bronze coins probably brought the inflationary process to a belated end. But the absence of any other token coinage at all, and the extreme scarcity of silver currency too, must have made all transactions of every kind - except for the few who possessed a large supply of gold pieces - a good deal more laborious and hazardous ever, than they had been before.

  This inconvenience, however, was merely a side-issue compared to the main horror: which was the crushing taxation. Besides, the payment of these huge taxes was only part of the contribution a citizen had to make to the state. There was also widespread requisitioning of his personal services. For example, he was compelled to provide wood and coal, especially for the use of state arsenals and mints; to boil lime; to supply expert labour of various kinds, if he possessed the qualifications; and to help maintain roads, bridges and buildings. One Emperor alone, Honorius, pronounced no less than ten edicts on the condition of the major roads, of which the decay had caused the Imperial postal service, operated by a system of requisitions, to fall into serious disorder.

  To remedy this crisis, the recruiting of compulsory labour grew tougher. 'The service of one's country', it has been said of late Rome, 'had become something very like a forced loan.' And yet there were far too many exemptions: notably the clergy (to some extent), lessees of Imperial properties, and the upper class in general - though they would have been by far the best equipped to bear the burden.