The Fall of the Roman Empire

by Michael Grant

  However, various ways of evading this compulsion were found. There was also a considerable list of exempted categories, including not only professional men, clergy, and lessees of state farms, but all Senators too, and the 'knights' who came next to the Senators in financial qualifications. This unwillingness of the rich to join the town councils meant that the membership of these bodies devolved upon the upper sections of the middle class. That is to say, all possessors of land below the Senators and knights were eligible to join - or rather, forced to join - if, within the city's territorial boundaries, they owned twenty-five Roman acres (fifteen by modern measurements).

  And their offspring, when their turn came, were likewise enrolled under compulsion. (In this respect they were on a par with the commercial corporations, which had become an essential feature of the life of the later Roman Empire, and may also be regarded as representatives of the middle class. For the food-supplying and shipowning corporations provided such vital services to the state that they too were harnessed to their jobs by inherited compulsion, which is the subject of a stringent law of Valentinian I.)

  The functions of the city councillors were very different from what they had been at earlier epochs. At a time when the growing loss of their dries' autonomy had caused their actual municipal duties to become minimal, they instead found themselves virtually transformed into agents of the central authorities. For far and away their most important duty nowadays was to carry out work for the government, and, above all, to collect its revenues. It was incumbent upon councillors, and their sons when their turn came, to induce their fellow-citizens to disgorge the money taxes demanded by the state, as well as the required levies in kind: foodstuffs, clothing and the like. Moreover, the councillors were even required to assist in the management of Imperial mines and estates and to help call up recruits for the army.

  Since these were their tasks, it was inevitable that, regarded from below, they should look like oppressors. The Emperor Julian, too, agreed with this view, and did his utmost to curb what he regarded as their exploitation of the people - though Ammianus, usually his admirer, gave him no credit for this, being himself of the city-councillor class.

  To Salvian, the councillors' behaviour towards the poor seemed horribly brutal: he saw them as rapacious persecutors of widows, orphans and monks. 'What cities are there,' he cried, 'and not only cities but even towns and villages, in which they are not so many tyrants?' For people who felt as Salvian did, it had not been comforting when Theodosius i let the appointment of the Defenders of the People, who were supposed to protect the poor from oppression, get into the hands of these members of the councils.

  One can scarcely blame the overtaxed destitute populations for taking this view. Yet it was too one-sided all the same, since the situation of the councillors, also, was appallingly difficult. From the beginning of the fourth century onwards, the government redoubled its strenuous, almost neurotic, efforts to ensure that they did not abandon their posts and their hereditary duties. Julian's efforts to prevent them from acting heavy-handedly were paradoxically accompanied by particularly vigorous attempts to round them up and keep them at their jobs; and subsequently the Code of Theodosius n contains no less than 192 edicts threatening and brow-beating them with every sort of menace.

  For example, they were not allowed to sell their properties without permission. And they must not even travel abroad, for to do so was declared to be 'an injury to their city'. If they ignored this injunction, they found, after five years' absence, that their possessions had been confiscated. They were denied the asylum provided by churches - sharing this disqualification with insolvent debtors, Moreover, any landowner's bailiff who connived at their flight from their duties was liable to be burnt at the stake. There was unconscious black humour in an edict of 365 which forbade the imposition of a councillor's status on any man as a punishment.

  To describe this state of affairs as disunity was putting it mildly: the councillors and the government were perpetually at war. The anonymous writer On Matters of Warfare was shocked by their sufferings at the hands of the authorities - and, although probably of council rank himself, he seems to have been a reasonably objective man.

  According to the rhetorician Libanius, the official intimidation of councillors who remained recalcitrant actually went as far as brutal physical violence.

  . . . It is that which has chiefly emptied the council chambers. There are perhaps other causes, but this especially, lashes and subjection to such corporal injuries as not even the most criminal slaves endure.

  In many cities, your Majesty, after these floggings, this is what the few surviving town councillors say: 'Goodbye house, goodbye lands! Let one and the other be sold, and with their price let us buy liberty!'

  What destroyed these men, the orator goes on to say, and degraded them to such a slavish condition, was their enforced personal liability for their whole region's tax deficits, which they were often quite unable either to prevent or make good.

  In the conflict between the government and the taxpayer, they were hopelessly caught in the middle. Yet it was a remarkable situation that any man who occupied the supposedly dignified office of city councillor should be flogged by agents of the central government. Nor can the testimony of Libanius easily be dismissed as mere rhetorical fiction. For when Theodosius I exempts councillors from blows of a whip loaded with lead, it is evident from what he says that this is the treatment they had been receiving.

  A further edict of the same ruler declares in preposterous language that 'like men dedicated with religious headbands, the council members must guard the perpetual mysteries'. For while always ready enough to employ pressure and force to keep these functionaries at their posts, Emperors sometimes remember to show a tardy consideration for their feelings of dignity. They are urged not to be 'forgetful of the splendour of their birth'. Valentinian in frankly admits their overwhelming burden, and Majorian declares them to be 'the sinews of the commonwealth and the hearts of the cities'. But it was much too late for such poetic compliments to have any effect.

  A. H. M. Jones, in The Later Roman Empire (1964), doubted whether the lives of this Roman middle class of the fourth and fifth centuries were really as grim as has been made out. But if his great work has a fault, it is that he tends occasionally to minimize the hardships of the age, which were painfully real. He was right, however, to point out that (as in the case of the oppressions of the agricultural labourer) there was at least a saving grace of governmental inefficiency - the very repetitiveness of the Imperial pronouncements, and their strident tone, are sure signs that they were not being fully enforced. In consequence, many city-councillors contrived to escape to honorary senatorial rank, or to Imperial service, or to the army, or to the clergy, and others just somehow disappeared from view.

  Nevertheless, the lives of councillors had become little less than unendurable. By this time, except for merchants, they are almost the only representatives of the once resplendent middle class about whom we hear anything at all. And they were in almost total decline - mere harassed agents of the central government. Such distress was almost universal. Crushed between the upper and lower millstones, the middle class had virtually been squeezed out of existence.

  Obviously, in a society which had always so largely depended on this class, its destruction contributed very substantially to the Empire's downfall. For it left a vacuum which nothing could fill, and meant that from now onwards the population mainly consisted of very rich and very poor. No doubt, the traditional urban culture had always exhibited a disequilibrium, since the towns were parasites upon an agrarian economy. Nevertheless, that was the culture which had held the ancient world together,

  so that the obliteration of its middle-class nucleus meant that this world could not remain in existence any longer.

  III

  THE CREDIBILITY GAP

  6

  The People against the Bureaucrats

  So throughout the last two centuries of the
Roman world there was a fearful and ever-increasing loss of personal freedom for all, except the very rich and powerful. Ever since the arch-regimenter Diocletian declared that 'uncontrolled activity is an invention of the godless', each of the leading rulers in turn hammered the nails in more fiercely. The Roman Empire had become a prison: or a military camp in a perpetual state of siege, where each man was assigned a place he must not desert. And his descendants must not desert it either.

  And so the whole of the population was in conflict with the government: there was disunity, or rather a whole series of disunities, on a colossal scale. The authorities desired and enforced the very greatest degree of regimentation that it was possible to obtain - even if this meant servitude for almost everybody - since this seemed the only way to raise the money needed to save the Empire.

  And yet the result was just the opposite to what was intended. Paradoxically, this regimentation did not halt the disintegration of the Roman world, but accelerated its destructive progress. The individual spirit of initiative that alone could have kept the commonwealth alive was stifled and stamped out by the widespread deprivation of personal freedom, which thus became one of the most potent reasons for Rome's collapse.

  The downward process was also precipitated by the vast size and deteriorating quality of the civil service employed to extort this greatly needed revenue. It was, moreover, a self-perpetuating body - because in common with so many other elements in late Roman society its membership assumed a hereditary character. Civil servants were at first allowed to enrol their sons in the same posts as they themselves held, and then, in the time of Valentinian i and Theodosius i, they found themselves compelled to do so. Yet even Theodosius, in 394, declared a further practice by prudent parents to be preposterous - their enrolment of their children, when they were still infants, in the same ministries to which they themselves belonged.

  Since the beginning of the fourth century there had been a new Imperial aristocracy of service, so that successive Emperors of that period did not have to enlist the aid of a hostile hereditary nobility but could make use of a more docile body of helpers. Later, however, the civil servants of this new brand gained confidence, and felt able to exhibit a serene defiance of the Emperors. And they for their part, although they confusingly intervened in the administration at any level they pleased, failed to prevent the bureaucracy from encroaching gradually on their power, which its representatives finally reduced to paralysis.

  Valentinian I found on one occasion that he had been granting pardons to murderers without his knowledge, or even the knowledge of his personal staff. This distressed him, since he was eager to check up on everything he could. It was in order to impose this firm hand and make sure that the process of supervision was as thoroughgoing as possible that he initiated a major expansion of the whole machinery of government, importing professional administrators, often from his own Danubian territories. Senators hated and feared this element, and in the course of the fifth century they took their revenge by permeating the senior ranks of the administration until it virtually became an appendix of the Italian and Gallo-Roman nobility.

  Valentinian I had disciplined his bureaucrats strictly, equating their duties with military service. Nevertheless, their relations with army officers were frequently strained, owing to jealousies on both sides. Yet it remained the principal duty of the civilian officials to serve the army, by keeping it supplied with manpower and money, and as these military demands became more and more pressing the number of functionaries rose to correspondingly vast dimensions. The governor of Africa, now northern Tunisia, employed 400 subordinates; the Director of Imperial Largesses was assisted by 834.

  There were also whole armies of spies, to round up political suspects. They were particularly concentrated in the Imperial postal service, where they doubled as dispatch-carriers and kept the government informed of any suspicious movement they noticed. Certain Emperors, notably Julian, tried to cut down the espionage service to a more modest size. But it was too characteristic of the times to be checked, and all attempts to keep its dimensions and activities within reasonable bounds proved unsuccessful.

  And so the later Roman Empire was essentially a bureaucratic state. It would be too simple, however, to regard these bureaucrats as wholly bad. For one thing, the Roman government possessed no police force, and had to rely on its civil service to enforce law and order. And so, for a time at least, these officials, whatever their faults, played a substantial part in holding things together. Indeed, had it not been for them, the Empire would have collapsed long before it did. But ultimately their numbers became altogether excessive; and so did their capacity to dominate the state.

  The laws of Theodosius 1 reveal that this had become alarmingly apparent to the Emperor himself. But a perusal of these Imperial pronouncements also shows us something much worse - thus confirming the evidence of many an ancient author. For it becomes clear that the bureaucracy of the later Roman Empire was not only rigid, over-conservative and slavish, but also desperately corrupt. The writer On Matters of Warfare does not, like some thinkers of the age, blame everything on the landowners. Instead, he concentrates on the faults of the Imperial bureaucrats - which he sees as a still more sinister pressure group. And he does not seem to be overstating his case, because the works of his contemporaries, too, confirm that efficient public servants had become so rare that they are singled out in astonished tones for exceptional praise.

  The best type of man just did not go into such jobs at all. This was partly because promotion was so narrowly hereditary, and partly also because many of the most competent people had been diverted to the Christian clergy, leaving the service of the state to less gifted, less reliable, and above all less scrupulous careerists. Besides, the Western Empire was too poor to pay its ministerial staffs decently - and this made them ready to grab whatever they could. Even retired officials still remained rapacious. 'An office once held,' remarked Salvian, 'gave them the privilege of a perpetual right to rob others.'

  It was the easiest thing in the world for civil servants and ex-civil servants to evade orders from governors and demands from tax-collectors. And what counted, when you wanted these functionaries to come to a decision, was all too often influence and graft -known as 'the selling of smoke'. It has been declared that moral corruption was one of the causes of Rome's downfall, and when we look at the civil service this claim seems conspicuously justified. Nor, unfortunately, were even the few competent Emperors good judges of the integrity of their subordinates. For example, Valentinian I and his brother were notorious for the selection of men described by Ammianus as detestable.

  The outcome of this wildly uncontrollable proliferation of dishonest bureaucracy was shocking. Administration was paralysed. Remedies, if applied at all, proved ludicrously ineffective. Ten years after the death of Valentinian I, public criticism of these defects had become so loud that the authorities, in an absurd act of self-defence, pronounced it an act of sacrilege even to discuss the merits of anyone chosen by an Emperor to serve him. For the government was all too clearly aware of the bureaucrats' corruption, as well as of their power. It sought to combat such practices by frequent and strident edicts, regulations and warnings. Successive rulers threatened their officials with fines, banishment and torture and even death. In 450 Valentinian in specifically denounced tax collectors and a wide range of other financial officials. Then Majorian, too, assailed them in menacing and even insulting terms. But all this was clearly not of the slightest avail.

  Nor did the principal administrative remedy to which Emperors resorted prove any more helpful. This was ever intenser centralization, which not only slashed personal freedom still further but harnessed the government with increasing responsibilities which it was quite unable to carry.

  The organization of the Empire was much more complicated than it had been in earlier times. Since the beginning of the fourth century AD, the West and East together comprised one hundred provinces, just twice as many as t
here had been before. The increase had been intended to guarantee that no minutiae of administration were over-looked by the provincial governors. And it was also designed to ensure that no governor should feel himself strong enough to try to grab the throne for himself.

  In neither of those aims was the reorganization successful. Fearing that this might prove the case, and realizing that it was beyond their capacity to supervise every governor personally, Emperors employed no less than two sets of intermediary officials to help them with the task.

  First, there were the heads (vicars) of thirteen 'dioceses', among which the hundred provinces were divided. Second, these thirteen dioceses were distributed among three, later four, praetorian prefectures, each under a separate prefect.

  In the days of the earlier Empire, the praetorian prefect had been the commander of the Emperor's military bodyguard and, at times, his chief of staff as well. But now there was a complete change. For although the prefectures were still of enormous importance, they had assumed, for the most part, a civilian character. The prefects of the later Empire were the magnificent personages who, under the immediate direction of the ruler himself and in constant touch with his inner cabinet or Consistory, controlled the government of the Imperial territories. 'To their wisdom', as Gibbon observed, 'was committed the supreme administration of justice and of the finances, the two objects which, in a state of peace, comprehend almost all the respective duties of the sovereign and of the people.'

  Two of these prefects belonged to the West. One was in control of Italy, North Africa, and Illyricum (central Europe as far as the Danube, and, for a period, the Balkans as far as the Black Sea hinterland). His colleague was the prefect of the Gauls, who controlled Gaul, the Rhine provinces, Britain and Spain. Mauretania, in north-western Africa, was divided between these two Western prefectures.