THE text-books of ancient History give the date 476 as the year in which
Rome fell, because in that year the last emperor was driven off his
throne. But Rome, which was not built in a day, took a long time
falling. The process was so slow and so gradual that most Romans did not
realise how their old world was coming to an end. They complained about
the unrest of the times--they grumbled about the high prices of food and
about the low wages of the workmen--they cursed the profiteers who had a
monopoly of the grain and the wool and the gold coin. Occasionally they
rebelled against an unusually rapacious governor. But the majority of
the people during the first four centuries of our era ate and drank
(whatever their purse allowed them to buy) and hated or loved (according
to their nature) and went to the theatre (whenever there was a free
show of fighting gladiators) or starved in the slums of the big
cities, utterly ignorant of the fact that their empire had outlived its
usefulness and was doomed to perish.
How could they realise the threatened danger? Rome made a fine showing
of outward glory. Well-paved roads connected the different provinces,
the imperial police were active and showed little tenderness for
highwaymen. The frontier was closely guarded against the savage tribes
who seemed to be occupying the waste lands of northern Europe. The whole
world was paying tribute to the mighty city of Rome, and a score of
able men were working day and night to undo the mistakes of the past and
bring about a return to the happier conditions of the early Republic.
But the underlying causes of the decay of the State, of which I have
told you in a former chapter, had not been removed and reform therefore
was impossible.
Rome was, first and last and all the time, a city-state as Athens and
Corinth had been city-states in ancient Hellas. It had been able to
dominate the Italian peninsula. But Rome as the ruler of the entire
civilised world was a political impossibility and could not endure. Her
young men were killed in her endless wars. Her farmers were ruined by
long military service and by taxation. They either became professional
beggars or hired themselves out to rich landowners who gave them board
and lodging in exchange for their services and made them "serfs," those
unfortunate human beings who are neither slaves nor freemen, but who
have become part of the soil upon which they work, like so many cows,
and the trees.
The Empire, the State, had become everything. The common citizen had
dwindled down to less than nothing. As for the slaves, they had heard
the words that were spoken by Paul. They had accepted the message of the
humble carpenter of Nazareth. They did not rebel against their masters.
On the contrary, they had been taught to be meek and they obeyed their
superiors. But they had lost all interest in the affairs of this world
which had proved such a miserable place of abode. They were willing to
fight the good fight that they might enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.
But they were not willing to engage in warfare for the benefit of an
ambitious emperor who aspired to glory by way of a foreign campaign in
the land of the Parthians or the Numidians or the Scots.
And so conditions grew worse as the centuries went by. The first
Emperors had continued the tradition of "leadership" which had given the
old tribal chieftains such a hold upon their subjects. But the Emperors
of the second and third centuries were Barrack-Emperors, professional
soldiers, who existed by the grace of their body-guards, the so-called
Praetorians. They succeeded each other with terrifying rapidity,
murdering their way into the palace and being murdered out of it as soon
as their successors had become rich enough to bribe the guards into a
new rebellion.
Meanwhile the barbarians were hammering at the gates of the northern
frontier. As there were no longer any native Roman armies to stop their
progress, foreign mercenaries had to be hired to fight the invader. As
the foreign soldier happened to be of the same blood as his supposed
enemy, he was apt to be quite lenient when he engaged in battle.
Finally, by way of experiment, a few tribes were allowed to settle
within the confines of the Empire. Others followed. Soon these tribes
complained bitterly of the greedy Roman tax-gatherers, who took away
their last penny. When they got no redress they marched to Rome and
loudly demanded that they be heard.
This made Rome very uncomfortable as an Imperial residence. Constantine
(who ruled from 323 to 337) looked for a new capital. He chose
Byzantium, the gate-way for the commerce between Europe and Asia. The
city was renamed Constantinople, and the court moved eastward. When
Constantine died, his two sons, for the sake of a more efficient
administration, divided the Empire between them. The elder lived in
Rome and ruled in the west. The younger stayed in Constantinople and was
master of the east.
Then came the fourth century and the terrible visitation of the Huns,
those mysterious Asiatic horsemen who for more than two centuries
maintained themselves in Northern Europe and continued their career of
bloodshed until they were defeated near Chalons-sur-Marne in France in
the year 451. As soon as the Huns had reached the Danube they had begun
to press hard upon the Goths. The Goths, in order to save themselves,
were thereupon obliged to invade Rome. The Emperor Valens tried to stop
them, but was killed near Adrianople in the year 378. Twenty-two years
later, under their king, Alaric, these same West Goths marched westward
and attacked Rome. They did not plunder, and destroyed only a few
palaces. Next came the Vandals, and showed less respect for the
venerable traditions of the city. Then the Burgundians. Then the East
Goths. Then the Alemanni. Then the Franks. There was no end to the
invasions. Rome at last was at the mercy of every ambitious highway
robber who could gather a few followers.
In the year 402 the Emperor fled to Ravenna, which was a sea-port and
strongly fortified, and there, in the year 475, Odoacer, commander of a
regiment of the German mercenaries, who wanted the farms of Italy to
be divided among themselves, gently but effectively pushed Romulus
Augustulus, the last of the emperors who ruled the western division,
from his throne, and proclaimed himself Patriarch or ruler of Rome. The
eastern Emperor, who was very busy with his own affairs, recognised him,
and for ten years Odoacer ruled what was left of the western provinces.
A few years later, Theodoric, King of the East Goths, invaded the newly
formed Patriciat, took Ravenna, murdered Odoacer at his own dinner
table, and established a Gothic Kingdom amidst the ruins of the western
part of the Empire. This Patriciate state did not last long. In the
sixth century a motley crowd of Longobards and Saxons and Slavs and
Avars invaded Italy, destroyed the Gothic kingdom, and established a new
state of which Pavia became the capital.
Then at last the imperial city sank into a state of utter neglect and
despair. The ancient palaces had been plundered time and again. The
schools had been burned down. The teachers had been starved to death.
The rich people had been thrown out of their villas which were now
inhabited by evil-smelling and hairy barbarians. The roads had fallen
into decay. The old bridges were gone and commerce had come to a
standstill. Civilisation--the product of thousands of years of patient
labor on the part of Egyptians and Babylonians and Greeks and Romans,
which had lifted man high above the most daring dreams of his earliest
ancestors, threatened to perish from the western continent.
It is true that in the far east, Constantinople continued to be the
centre of an Empire for another thousand years. But it hardly counted
as a part of the European continent. Its interests lay in the east. It
began to forget its western origin. Gradually the Roman language was
given up for the Greek. The Roman alphabet was discarded and Roman
law was written in Greek characters and explained by Greek judges. The
Emperor became an Asiatic despot, worshipped as the god-like kings of
Thebes had been worshipped in the valley of the Nile, three thousand
years before. When missionaries of the Byzantine church looked for fresh
fields of activity, they went eastward and carried the civilisation of
Byzantium into the vast wilderness of Russia.
As for the west, it was left to the mercies of the Barbarians. For
twelve generations, murder, war, arson, plundering were the order of
the day. One thing--and one thing alone--saved Europe from complete
destruction, from a return to the days of cave-men and the hyena.
This was the church--the flock of humble men and women who for many
centuries had confessed themselves the followers of Jesus, the carpenter
of Nazareth, who had been killed that the mighty Roman Empire might be
saved the trouble of a street-riot in a little city somewhere along the
Syrian frontier.