The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History

by Peter Heather

  Rather than in the Roman Senate, the critical political audience of the fourth-century Empire was to be found in two other quarters. One of these was a long-standing player of the game of imperial politics: the army, or, rather, its officer corps. It is traditional to talk of ‘the Roman army’ as a political player, but in normal circumstances the rank and file didn’t have opinions of their own, and wherever we have more detailed narrative accounts it is always groups of senior officers that are involved in deciding who should succeed to the purple or organizing coups. The fact that the battle order of the army had changed since the time of Julius Caesar naturally affected which of its officers played a leading political role. In Caesar’s time, the army came in the form of legions of over 5,000 men, each in itself a major military formation. Individual legionary commanders – legates (who were also usually of senatorial background) – thus tended to be significant in their own right. By the fourth century, the key figures in the military hierarchy were the senior general officers and staffs of mobile regional field armies, called comitatenses. Broadly speaking, there was always one important mobile force covering each of the three key frontiers: one in the west (grouped on the Rhine frontier and – often – in northern Italy as well), another in the Balkans covering the Danube, and a third in northern Mesopotamia covering the east.32

  The other key political force in the late Empire was the imperial bureaucracy (often called palatini: from palatium, Latin for ‘palace’). Although bureaucrats did not possess the military clout available to a senior general, they controlled both finance and the processes of law-making and enforcement, and no imperial regime could function without their active participation. There always had been bureaucratic functionaries around the emperor, and they had always been powerful. In the early Empire, the emperor’s freedmen were particularly feared. What was new in the late Empire was the size of the central bureaucratic machine. As late as AD 249 there were still only 250 senior bureaucratic functionaries in the entire Empire. By the year 400, just 150 years later, there were 6,000. Most operated at the major imperial headquarters from which the key frontiers were supervised: not in Rome, therefore, but, depending on the emperor, at Trier and/or Milan for the Rhine, Sirmium or increasingly Constantinople for the Danube, and Antioch for the east. It was no longer the Senate of Rome, but the comitatensian commanders, concentrated on key frontiers, and the senior bureaucrats, gathered in the capitals from which these frontiers were administered, who settled the political fate of the Empire.33

  The imperial throne was generally passed on by dynastic succession, but only if there was a suitable candidate who could command a reasonable degree of consensus among the generals and bureaucrats. The emperor Jovian, for example, left an infant son on his death in 364, who was passed over, and in 378 the unrelated Theodosius I was elevated to the purple because, although two sons of Valentinian I had already been made emperor, the second, Valentinian II, was still too young to rule effectively in the east. There were also times of dynastic discontinuity. In 363/4 the Constantinian dynasty ran out of appointable heirs, prompting a cabal of senior generals and bureaucrats to discuss a range of possible candidates. In practice, army officers tended to get the nod at such moments (first Jovian in 363 and then, after his early death, Valentinian in 364), but the higher bureaucracy was involved in the process, and it was not impossible for its members to contemplate bidding for power. On the promotion of Jovian in 363, a bureaucrat of the same name was lobbed down a well because he posed a potential threat, and in 371 a senior pen-pusher by the name of Theodorus was executed for plotting against Valentinian’s brother Valens. This plot involved a seance where Theodorus and his friends asked for the name of the next emperor. The ouija board spelled out Th-e-o-d – at which point they stopped to open a bottle of Falernian, one of the most expensive wines of antiquity. If they’d only carried on, they could have saved themselves both false hopes and nasty deaths, since Valens’ successor was called Theodosius.34

  A potent combination of logistics and politics had thus worked a fundamental change in the geography of power. Because of this, armies, emperors and bureaucrats had all emigrated out of Italy. This process also explains why, more than ever before, more than one emperor was needed. Administratively, Antioch or Constantinople was too far from the Rhine, and Trier or Milan too far from the east, for one emperor to exercise effective control over all three key frontiers. Politically, too, one centre of patronage distribution was not sufficient to keep all the senior army officers and bureaucrats happy enough to prevent usurpations. Each of the three major army groups required a fair share of the spoils, paid to them in gold in relatively small annual amounts, and much larger ones on major imperial anniversaries (such as the quinquennalia which brought Symmachus northwards). Their officers also liked all the promotions and distinctions – not to mention invitations to dinner – which flowed from the imperial presence. The same was true on the civilian side. No regime could afford to concentrate all its patronage in just one capital, or too many bigwigs would be left out of the loop. In the fourth century this political necessity was generally appreciated, and where an emperor did try to rule alone for any extended period there was usually trouble. Late in the century, Theodosius I was based in Constantinople, and for his own dynastic reasons (he wanted his two sons each eventually to inherit half of the Empire) refused to appoint a recognized counterpart in the west. As a result, he was faced with rumbling discontent there, as well as dangerous usurpers, who found plentiful support among the bureaucrats and military officers who felt they were not getting a fair share of the imperial cake.

  THIS ECLIPSE OF Rome’s importance in both politics and administration was no sudden development. As far back as the first and second centuries AD emperors had become increasingly peripatetic, already sometimes operating with an imperial colleague to help them deal with problems as they arose.35 Between 161 and 169, Lucius Verus was co-Augustus alongside Marcus Aurelius. By the fourth century, the glory days of the Republic, when it was home to every faction and conspiracy of importance and when the Senate’s resolutions played a major role in the running of the state, had gone for ever. The Senate’s role within the Empire was now essentially ceremonial, its actions and members playing only a marginal role in the acquisition and exercise of power. Individual senators remained rich and might have significant political careers.36 But even here, there was an important limitation. The late Roman senatorial career ladder – the cursus honorum – was an entirely civilian one, involving no military commands. This militated against a senator taking the ultimate step towards imperial power, which tended, as we have seen, to be the preserve of generals. Senatorial minutes were forwarded to the emperor for his perusal (of course he read them . . . ), imperial despatches kept the Senate informed about important matters (it was a mark of honour, and one sometimes enjoyed by Symmachus, to be picked to read them out) and the Senate could make representations by embassy to the emperor on matters of particular significance to its own members. But it was not much involved in active policy making, and little courting of its opinion took place, except when it came to deciding the size of its annual ‘voluntary’ contribution to the imperial finances. The Senate was full of wealthy men who paid a useful amount of tax and might enjoy important careers, but it was no longer – as a body – a major player in struggles over power and policy.

  Not surprisingly, therefore, membership was gradually downgraded. Before the fourth century, the senators of Rome (titled clarissimi, ‘most distinguished’) enjoyed a unique status. They were immune from obligations to serve on other city councils, and enjoyed various financial and legal privileges. In the course of the fourth century, a number of developments altered this situation. First, emperors slowly but surely advanced large numbers of their new bureaucrats up the social scale towards senatorial status. Initially, this happened piecemeal, but in AD 367 the emperor Valentinian introduced a major reform of the honours system which aligned and combined all the possible mar
ks of social status that could be acquired in both the civilian and military branches of imperial service into one system, where clarissimus became everyone’s aim. From then until the end of the century, there was a marked inflation which saw huge numbers of bureaucratic jobs acquire the clarissimus grade. The 6,000 top imperial functionaries of AD 400 were all occupying jobs that involved senatorial status either in post or upon retirement. The traditional senatorial families of Rome thus ceased to occupy their unique social niche. Even worse, the large numbers of new clarissimi made it necessary for emperors (in order still to have something to bestow) to subdivide the senatorial class and create two higher grades – spectabiles and illustres – which by and large could only be obtained by active bureaucratic service rather than by birth. At broadly the same time, between the 330s and the end of the century, a succession of emperors passed measures that created a second and equal imperial Senate in the new capital of the east, largely by promoting new men but also by transferring some old Roman senators already resident in the east.

  Between AD 250 and 400, then, the blue-blooded senators of Rome saw their cherished position eaten away by the emergence of a vast senatorial class, as well as the slow but steady rise of a sister body in Constantinople.37

  All these developments created a political world that Julius Caesar would not have recognized. The first among equals had become a divinely appointed ruler of what some historians have christened the ‘inside out’ Empire from the geography of its active capitals, generally operating with at least one colleague of equal status and exercising wide-ranging authority over every aspect of life. The imperial bureaucracy had emerged as the new Roman aristocracy, replacing the demilitarized and marginalized Senate of Rome. These developments also explain, of course, why, when they went bearing gold in search of the emperor Valentinian, Symmachus and his embassy had to make the trek to Trier. Between them, these transformations raise another, still more fundamental issue. The Roman world in Caesar’s day had been physically just as large, but there had been no need for two emperors or for such a wide distribution of patronage to prevent usurpation and revolt. What, then, had changed between 50 BC and AD 369? To find the answer to this question, we must take a closer look at the destination of Symmachus’ embassy: the city of Trier, command centre for the Rhine frontier.

  Rome Is Where the Heart Is

  ROMAN TRIER started out as a small military installation, set on a strategic ford across the River Moselle in the old heartlands of the hostile Treveri. The city that greeted Symmachus and his fellow ambassadors in winter 368/9, however, was no military camp, but the populous and prosperous bastion of Romanitas – ‘Romanness’ – of the Rhine frontier region. If the ambassadors had approached the city from the west, they would have entered by the Porta Nigra – the Black Gates – the finest example of a Roman city gateway still standing in any part of the former Empire. Surrounded by modern buildings, it still impresses. In the fourth century, its impact was much stronger. You were first faced with a massive iron portcullis; if admitted, you were led into a courtyard, then through to the gate proper. On either side were four-storey arcaded towers, bristling with guards ready to pour down missiles on any hostile force trapped between the portcullis and the gate. This particular gateway owes its survival to a tenthcentury Holy Man who made it his cell. Hence it eventually became a church, whereas the rest of the Roman city walls and gates have long since been quarried for building stone. In Symmachus’ day, the gate punctuated a 6-kilometre wall, 3 metres thick and 6 high, which enclosed a city area of 285 hectares. Another massive gateway dominated the bridge over the Moselle, which had long since replaced the original ford and is pictured in a fourth-century gold medallion struck at Trier.

  Inside, the city was no less impressive. In the early fourth century, the whole north-east quarter was rebuilt as the functional and ceremonial centre of imperial rule in the region. From the 310s, the work was carried forward by different members of the Constantinian dynasty, then, after the death of its last representative, continued by their non-dynastic successors. Palace, cathedral and circus – together with a set of perhaps private imperial baths – the ‘Kaiserthermen’ – now dominated this part of the city. Many late Roman imperial ceremonies were orchestrated in the circus, and underground passages led from the palace to the imperial box there. The ground-plan of the cathedral, which, literary sources indicate, was complete by the late 360s, was recovered in excavations after the Second World War. Above ground, you can still see remains of the bath complex and, more or less intact, the basilica – the emperors’ great audience chamber. Like the Porta Nigra, this also survived into the medieval period by dint of becoming a church and now stands stark and isolated in the middle of a one-way traffic system.38

  Back in the fourth century, the basilica was flanked by porticoes and the more private areas of the palace, but would still have stood out as impressive: 67 metres long, 27.5 wide and 30 from floor to ceiling, it could virtually hold the Porta Nigra twice. The basilica is of particular interest to us because it was here that Symmachus and his embassy presented the emperor Valentinian with the gift of gold they had brought from Rome. The building’s exterior was originally finished in white plaster. In its current state, the inside is as plain as the outside, but this was not its fourth-century form. The floor then consisted of black and white tiles arranged in geometric patterns, marble veneering stretched from floor to the windows, and niches indicate that the walls were decorated with many statues. The ambassadors would have entered this splendid edifice through its main doors to the south, to discover the emperor sitting opposite them in the apse at the far end. Normally, the imperial presence was veiled from the rest of the audience hall by curtains, through which the outlines of the great and the good could just be made out. On a great ceremonial occasion such as the presentation of crown gold, however, they were drawn back. The civilian and military dignitaries of court would have stood along the sides of the hall, sporting their gorgeous robes and arranged in rows strictly reflecting the order of precedence that Valentinian had established so clearly just a couple of years before. The impression was of splendour and order, and the eye was led irresistibly to the imperial personage. Then, one short speech and the job was done.39 The ambassadors were free to go.

  But Symmachus didn’t leave. He stayed in and around Trier for the rest of the year. This gave him plenty of time to contemplate the city, its countryside and its inhabitants. What would have struck him immediately was that Trier was Roman to the core, and had been for a long time. The new imperial buildings had been grafted on to what was already a fully Roman city. Set just inside the gateway to the bridge over the Moselle, on the eastern side, was one of the two largest bath complexes in the western Empire outside of Rome, the socalled ‘Barbarathermen’ (the other was the ‘Kaiserthermen’). This huge public amenity, comprising porticoed courtyard, cold, tepid and hot baths and a gymnasium, had been constructed in the second quarter of the second century and was still going strong when Symmachus arrived. Close by stood municipal buildings comprising the forum, the law courts and the meeting house of the city’s ruling council. This, the political heart of the city, had been reworked many times over the years, but the first Roman public building had been erected as long ago as the first century. About the same time, the city had also acquired an amphitheatre; set in the hillside to the east, opposite the baths, it was larger than the surviving Roman amphitheatres of Arles and Nîmes in modern France. Just south-west of the amphitheatre, in the so-called Altbachtal, were some fifty temple shrines, forming the largest shrine complex in the western Empire. In addition, although it has not been found, we know there was a temple somewhere in the city dedicated to Rome’s governing deity: Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Trier later acquired a theatre and, in the third century, an improved water supply: an aqueduct 12 kilometres long was built, running down from the Ruwer valley in the hills behind the city to service its fountains and its sewers. From the beginning of the second cent
ury AD the city had been a properly Roman urban space, and it had continued to evolve.

  This transformation wasn’t just true of Trier. Throughout northern Gaul, Roman cities dotted the map. You could also find them in Britain, Spain, North Africa, the Balkans, Asia Minor and the Fertile Crescent. Based on Greek antecedents, many such cities were already to be found in the Mediterranean area at the time of the Roman conquest. Elsewhere some were erected in the first century AD; in more backward places like Britain, perhaps the second. Their number varied from region to region, and once you left the Mediterranean hinterland they became comparatively sparse. The extent of the transformation should not, however, be underestimated. Caesar’s ghost, had it made its way as far north as Symmachus’ embassy, would have been astonished. In his day, northern Europe had been marked only by odd native hill-forts, numerous rustic villages and the odd Roman military encampment. Now it was an almost entirely Roman landscape, its towns the administrative bedrock of the Empire. For a Roman town was more than its urban core: it also possessed, and administered, a dependent rural territory. By the fourth century, barring very few exceptions, the Empire in administrative terms consisted of a mosaic of city territories, each city governed by a city council (curia) of decurions (also known as curiales).40

  In the course of his year at Valentinian’s court, Symmachus was entertained by many grandees. Some lived in fine Roman town houses; odd fragments of one or two of these, usually in the form of beautiful mosaic floors, have been unearthed within the modern city. Many also owned luxurious dwellings in the surrounding countryside, which, because they do not lie beneath a modern town, are much better known. The grandest so far excavated – at Konz – was situated about eighty kilometres upstream at the confluence of the Moselle and the Saar. It stood high up on a steep river bank with magnificent views, and its buildings spread over a rectangle of about 100 by 35 metres, the whole edifice focused on a central audience hall complete with apse. There is good reason to think that this might have been the imperial summer retreat of Contoniacum. If he was lucky enough to get an invitation here, Symmachus will have been royally entertained.