The Fall of the Roman Empire

by Michael Grant

  Nor blushed to see barbarian furs preside

  In courts, while Latium's laws were laid aside.

  For in Claudian all the old traditional prejudices came out all over again. The barbarians, he declared, were nothing but savages, bent only on war and banditry. The Huns slew their own parents, and then took delight in swearing oaths over their dead bodies. And what a disgusting thing it was when a mixed marriage took place with an African, and 'a coloured bastard besmirched the cradle'! Jerome, too, denounced Rome's'purchase of her life from the barbarians with gold and precious things', and repeated, with scriptural quotations, that they were just like wild beasts.

  As for Symmachus, one of his highly cultured letters tells a story which shows his racial attitudes in a deplorable light. Gladiatorial games were still continuing at Rome, and Symmachus, as city prefect, imported a group of twenty-nine Saxons for these combats. But before the performance could take place, he complains, these men contrived to strangle themselves, or one another, in their cells. Greatly annoyed at this considerable waste of money, Symmachus spares no word of sympathy for the miserable captives, but merely regards them as uncooperative louts and outsiders who have played a dirty barbarian trick.

  This contempt and hatred were deeply ingrained. Even Orosius, who took such an unusually enlightened view of the Germans as a political force, qualifies his verdict by a damping statement of his own personal feelings: 'I saw the barbarians, and I had to avoid them because they were harmful, flatter them because they were the masters, pray to them although they were infidels, flee them because they laid traps.'

  Salvian, too, for all his insight into the future role of Germans in the Western world, does not fail to comment on the nauseating stink of their bodies and their clothing. And for all his favourable comparison of their simple, untutored virtues with the vicious corruption of the Romans, he also finds time to abuse each of their tribes in turn, describing the Goths as perfidious, the Alans as rapacious lechers, the Alamanni as alcoholics, and the Saxons, Franks and Herulians as wantonly cruel.

  Another who had accepted the role of the Germans in contemporary life, Sidonius, likewise makes it clear that he only does so with extreme personal reluctance, since he, too, is disgusted by the coarse, ignorant, brutish habits of even the best among his German neighbours. He does not like the noisily gregarious skin-clad Goths, or the tattoos worn by the Herulians. Nor is he attracted by an unfragrant custom of the genial but boorish Burgundians, men 'in body and mind as stiff as stocks, and very hard to form' who smear their hair with rancid butter. The way in which Germans mourn their dead by gouging their cheeks with bloody scars does not appeal to him either. He can no longer write six-foot verses, he says, while he lives in the midst of the ill-smelling seven-foot giants with tow hair.

  In fact, Sidonius' apparently tolerant attitude to the Germans is only superficial, or diplomatic: he himself wants to have nothing to do with them at all. 'You shun the barbarians', he wrote to his friend Philagrius, 'because they have a bad name. I shun them even if their name is good.' And to another friend Syagrius, who was unusual because he spoke good Burgundian, Sidonius can only express sarcastic mockery for that helpful talent. In other words even this cultured and intelligent man, who was so well aware of the political significance of the Germans, failed to see the slightest value in having social relations with them, and was only too glad to keep them at arm's length.

  On the all-important psychological level, the vision of partnership had utterly failed. The upper-class leaders of Rome were too much the prisoners of their inherited cultural stereotypes to meet the Germans half-way with any positive cooperation or social acceptance.

  The Romans' intellectual and emotional response to the challenge of barbarian co-existence was depressingly inadequate at every level. At best, they viewed the immigrants with a contemptuous and imperfectly concealed aversion, based partly on superficial characteristics that they found distasteful, and partly on traditional, ignorant prejudice. This blend of preconceptions provided a sterile and harmful picture of these Germans' faithless, lecherous, sub-human characters, wholly alienated from all that was civilized. The Romans deliberately imposed on their new and unwelcome neighbours a kind of spiritual apartheid, viewing them as an unabsorbable lump of marked men, encapsulated by a wall of eloquent or silent dislike.

  Surviving records of these immigrants show their consciousness of this imposed inferiority. On a tombstone from southern Gaul, two Germans apologetically record that their racial origin is 'part of the stain that baptism has washed away'. In the same spirit an epitaph from Antwerp announces that the dead man, Murranus - who came from the Danube region - had composed it himself 'since mere wretchedness teaches even barbarians to write'.

  Other Germans, however, inevitably reacted in a very different fashion to all this hostility around them by refusing to become Romanized after all. Since they were less articulate than the Romans, no literary expression of their feelings has come down to us. But the facts themselves loudly illustrate their reaction. For the scheme of enrolling German federate units in the army proved a failure: disliked and despised as they were, they retaliated by disliking Rome, whose glories they had once hoped to share.

  Theodosius I'S initial idea of enlisting these units had not been a bad one. It had offered a chance of ethnic partnership and it was the best practical remedy at his disposal. Germans were good fighters, and cost less than Roman soldiers. If their military operations could be limited to what was required of them, and if, the fighting once over, they could be persuaded to return quietly to their new homes, then all would be well. In due course, therefore, the employment of such federate units greatly increased. The immigrants enrolled in ever larger formations, which virtually became parts of the regular army.

  Despite a widespread, determined Roman impression to the contrary, the individual German soldiers in Roman units generally remained loyal. But the sad fact was that the federate units, although performing good service in certain emergencies, on more numerous occasions could not be trusted to carry out orders and proved totally unreliable. Indeed, they were in an almost perpetual state of turbulence and revolt. This was partly owing to a natural indiscipline, and a greed for more and more land. But it was chiefly, one may suppose, because they knew themselves to be surrounded by the hatred of the Romans, to whom, therefore, they felt little fidelity. And they were also well aware that some of Rome's very best generals, even officers of the calibre of Constantius III, preferred, in their recurrent wars, to spend allied and German rather than Roman blood.

  In consequence, acts of insubordination and downright disloyalty by federate units rapidly multiplied. In 409, for example, they culpably failed to prevent other German tribes from crossing into Spain. Thirteen years later, they abandoned their Roman commander in that country in favour of his Vandal enemies once again their fellow-Germans. Subsequently, the federate forces got completely out of hand and proved a grievous peril, doing Rome a lot more harm than good.

  The great experiment, therefore, had turned out to be a disaster. Instead of leading the way to a new form of unity it had created deadly disharmony within the very heart of the Empire. The mass recruitment of Germans was not delaying Rome's collapse after all. Instead, it was helping to bring the edifice down. But in itself it had been a sensible plan. The trouble was that the Romans were not ready for it.

  It has been maintained that Rome fell because the purity of its race was polluted. The opposite is rather the case. Although much changed by racial intermixture in the course of the centuries, the Roman ethnic character had not necessarily changed for the worse. Indeed, it was a pity it was not changed more, by symbiosis with the Germans. Rather than deploring genetic pollution, it would be nearer the truth to maintain that Rome's downfall was accelerated by its total failure, once the Germans had been admitted within the Empire, to assimilate them by blending the two races.

  Of course, economic and technological borrowings, at an everyday level,
were made by both sides. On the German side, these were the result of their eagerness, at least at first, to take over whatever advantages they could. And, conversely, a considerable list of Rome's technical debts (for example the long, slashing German sword) made the writer On Matters of Warfare conclude that 'the barbarian nations are by no means accounted strangers to invention'. Yet official policy took no heed of such things, and vigorously reinforced the general Roman desire to segregate these immigrants.

  It was bad enough when the local governors and commanders brutally exploited the Visigoths before the battle of Adrianople. But at least they were not acting on Imperial orders. However, such orders, designed to keep Romans and Germans apart, had already been forthcoming elsewhere by that time. For a law of Valentinian I and Valens in 370 deliberately failed to tolerate intermarriage between Roman citizens and German immigrants, insisting, on the contrary, that this must be avoided by the most stringent methods.

  And similar vetos were even extended to superficial matters, such as clothing. Among Rome's borrowings from the barbarians were specific forms of dress. Noblemen, for example, liked to wear woollen shirts of a Danubian pattern, Saxon trousers, and cloaks from northern Gaul fastened at the shoulders by German filigree brooches.

  But the Imperial authorities took a remarkably grave view of these fashions. In 397 the wearing of trousers inside the city of Rome was forbidden under threat of perpetual exile and confiscation of all property. Then followed three further edicts, and in 416 the wearing of barbarian furs and skins in the capital and its environs was likewise declared illegal, even for slaves.

  If Aetius, the greatest leader of the age, had not been struck down in 454, even at that late date something might still have been saved, at least for a time, out of the wreckage of Roman-German relations. For he showed exceptional skill and tact in dealing with the Germans, as Gibbon's deserved tribute points out. 'The barbarians, who had seated themselves in the Western provinces, were insensibly taught to respect the faith and valour of the patrician Aetius. He soothed their passions, consulted their prejudices, balanced their interests, and checked their ambitions.' But Aetius was murdered by his own incapable monarch Valentinian in. And so the divisive process speeded up and entered upon its ruinous phase.

  Roman estrangement from the Germans, on the official and unofficial planes alike, was considerably enhanced by differences of religion. For whereas the tribes which remained outside the Empire were pagans, those which settled within its borders became Christian. But they were of the Arian persuasion, and between this sect and the Catholics, who controlled the Roman government, the doctrinal differences, as indicated in Appendix 1, ran wide and deep.

  The Germans had originally become Arians because the fourth-century missionary who first worked with them, Ulfilas, was an Arian. He did not live to see the final conversion of the Visigoths, but his work bore such abundant fruit that, during their settlement in the Balkans, they underwent mass conversion to the Arian faith. Subsequently this Arian brand of Christianity became the religion of every German nation, and every German general, within the Empire.

  Although Arianism, as they interpreted it, was a somewhat arid and static affair, imposed on the rank and file from the top downwards, Germans found it much easier to understand than the Catholic form of Christianity, because the Arian doctrine that the Son must be younger than the Father, and therefore in a sense inferior, corresponded with the paternal structure of their society.

  This religious difference, between the Arian Germans on the one hand and the Catholic church of the Western Empire on the other, only served to widen and deepen the already profound gulf between Germans and Romans.

  There were, certainly, a few voices raised to remind people that the Germans were at least Christians, of a sort. According to Augustine and Orosius, that was why the capture of Rome by Alaric, an Arian like his compatriots, was conducted with due respect for church property. And Salvian added the lesson that the Germans, in spite of their regrettable heresy, still behaved better, on the whole, than Catholic Romans did. Yet these viewpoints were exceptional, and indeed deliberately paradoxical. Far and away the more common view was that friendship with the Germans, already a most unattractive idea, was made impossible by their Arianism. Indeed, this condemned them to eternal damnation.

  These powerful racial and religious attitudes, diffused through every level of the population, inevitably led from time to time to outbreaks of violence against the Germans. Theodosius i, who not only allowed Visigoths to settle en bloc within the Empire but actually found their chieftains personally likeable, was at pains to keep these hostile demonstrations in check. Yet he was not always successful. When for example, in 390, the crowd at Thessalonica in northern Greece lynched the local military commander, Butheric (because he had imprisoned a favourite charioteer for homosexuality), it was largely because he was a German that he suffered this fate.

  Five years later, Stilicho found it easy to arrange the assassination of his Eastern counterpart Rufinus because of Rufinus' pro-German connexions; and in 399 the Goths at Constantinople were systematically slaughtered by the local population. Next, in 408, Honorius found it quite easy to remove Stilicho – because Stilicho, too, was a German. Before his execution, the Roman troops - with the Emperor's approval - murdered the German chiefs in the Imperial entourage, and then, after Stilicho was dead, the families of barbarian federate soldiers throughout Italy were massacred as well.

  The attacks upon the Empire by German invaders, and most of all Alaric's invasion, roused these anti-German feelings to fever heat. Moreover, it was inevitable that this hostility felt by the Romans, whether justified or merely founded on prejudice, should also be directed against the federate tribes and states already settled within the frontiers. Such feelings contributed largely to the events of the following years, during which the attitude of the German immigrant tribes, at first not too unfriendly to Rome, was replaced by a more and more aggressive drive towards virtual independence - culminating, under Gaiseric the Vandal in North Africa, in the attainment of a complete independence which was uncompromisingly and virulently hostile.

  Gaiseric, who raised the Vandal monarchy to heights of authority unprecedented among the German nations, faced the Romans with a fearful problem. True, he firmly based his government on Roman models. Yet his powerful personality confronted all the old Roman hatreds and prejudices against the Germans with an even more relentless German retaliation against Rome. Although the Roman and Romano-African population of North Africa, which outnumbered his own Vandals by a hundred to one, was allowed to keep its existing legal privileges and its leading men were retained in administrative posts, their exclusion from any political influence was total.

  Moreover, Gaiseric lost no time in making a concentrated attack on the great Romano-African landowners. He also extended his onslaught to include the Catholic clergy. Under the German regimes in Gaul and Spain, there had been, on the whole, surprisingly little friction between the Arian conquerors and the Catholic church. But now came a big change, when Gaiseric launched violent persecutions designed as a deliberate counterblast to the Catholic persecution of Arianism in other parts of the Western world.

  Under a sixth century successor of Gaiseric, one of the Catholic bishops in North Africa, Victor of Vita, wrote most gloomily about the situation.

  . . . You few who love the barbarians and are always singing their praises, condemning yourselves out of your own mouths, do but consider their name and reputation. Could any other name but that of barbarian, which signifies savagery, cruelty and terror, fit them so well? One may coddle them with kindness, woo them with assiduous service, all they think of is their envy of the Romans.

  Their design is obvious - all the time they are trying to besmirch the glory and honour of the Roman name. Their desire is that no Romans shall survive. If they spare their subjects in one or another case, it is to exploit them as slaves.

  While Gaiseric was at work, King Euric of the V
isigoths was making his people in Gaul and Spain into another separate nation, once again much expanded and once again wholly independent; and he too displayed an equally intolerant hatred of the Catholics, subjecting them to vigorous oppression.

  Euric also regulated the relations between his German and Gallo-Roman subjects by issuing, in 475, a new legal code, which was to exercise strong influence upon medieval law. Although he himself did not know Latin very well, his chancellor Leo was compared to Tacitus and Horace, and the Codex Euricianus was drawn up by Roman jurists and was heavily Romanized in character. Nevertheless, it totally rejected any amalgamation between the two main peoples in his realm, declaring them to be irremediably separate and distinct. The Code of Euric was published only one year before the Western Empire finally collapsed: and the segregation between the Germans and Romans which these laws enforced sums up excellently one reason why the collapse was inevitable - because the idea of a constructive union between the two races had failed.

  To keep the Germans out of the Roman Empire had long since ceased to be within the bounds of possibility. But instead there had existed a unique, unrepeatable opportunity to create a working partnership between Romans and Germans. At one time, certain leading Germans had wanted it. But it was up to the Romans to transform this co-existence into a positively cooperative union. Because of their traditional, ingrained attitudes, the opportunity was tragically lost.

  That is to say, ethnic disunity was a major cause of Rome's downfall. To retain in one's midst a substantial and disappointed racial minority, without taking effective steps either to integrate it or to treat it on psychologically equal terms, was to invite serious trouble; and the Romans failed to meet the challenge.

  V

  THE GROUPS THAT OPTED OUT

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