The Rise and Fall of the Roman empire is by far the most remarkable and
memorable event which has occurred in the whole history of mankind. It
is hard to say whether the Rise or the Fall is most worthy of profound
study and anxious examination. The former has hitherto most strongly
attracted the attention of men, from the extraordinary spectacle it
exhibited of human fortitude triumphing over every obstacle, and human
perseverance at length attaining universal dominion. It was the
spectacle most likely to rivet the attention of strenuous and growing
nations--of men in that stage of existence when national ambition is
strong and the patriotic passions ardent, and the selfish interests have
not yet become so powerful as to have generally extinguished the
generous affections. But it may be doubted whether the events that
occurred in the later stages of the Roman empire, are not fraught with
more valuable and important information than those of its earlier
annals. Less interesting to the soldier, less animating to the citizen,
less heart-stirring to the student, they are more instructive to the
philosopher, more pregnant with warning to the statesman. They contain
the only instance yet exhibited among men of a nation sinking from no
external shock, but from the mere influence of internal decay; and point
alone, of all passages in the annals of the species, to the provision
made by nature, in the passions and selfishness of men, against the
possibility of universal dominion.
To any one who attentively considers this all-important subject, two
things must be apparent, of the very highest consequence in arriving at
correct ideas on it. The first is, that the Roman empire did not sink
under the external violence of the barbarians, but under the weakness
and decline which had arisen in its own bosom. The second, that the
causes hitherto assigned by historians and philosophers for this
internal decay, are either vague generalities, having no definite
meaning, and incapable of any practical application, or can be easily
shown, even to the most superficial reader, not to have been the real
causes of the phenomenon.
There can be no doubt that some of the irruptions of the
barbarians--particularly those of the Goths into Romelia, which led to
the fatal battles of Thessalonica and Adrianople; and of Alaric into
Italy, which terminated in the capture of the Eternal City--were very
formidable inroads, and might, in the best days of the empire, have
taxed its strength and resolution to repel. But a little consideration
must be sufficient to show, that, formidable as these invasions were,
they could without much difficulty have been withstood, if the empire
had possessed the strength which it did in the days of the republic, or
in the first two centuries of the Caesars. The Cimbri and Teutones, whom
Marius combated and destroyed on the Rhone and in the north of Italy,
were at least as formidable a body of barbarians as those which four
centuries afterwards overturned the western empire. The forces whom
Caesar conquered in Gaul, Trajan on the Danube, were to the full as
powerful as those which carried the standards of the Goths and Vandals
to Athens and Carthage. AEtius, in the decline of the empire, and with
the mingled Roman and barbarian force of Gaul alone, defeated Attila in
the plenitude of his power, at the head of three hundred thousand men,
on the field of Chalons.
Belisarius, with fifteen thousand men, recovered Africa from the
Vandals; thirty thousand legionary soldiers did the same by Italy under
Narses, and overthrew the whole power of the Goths. So high did the
Roman soldiers still stand even in the estimation of their enemies, that
Totila, the warlike monarch of the Goths, strove to bribe them into his
service by offers of high pay. None had yet been approved equal to these
legionary soldiers in battle; and the manner in which, with infinitely
inferior forces, they repelled the barbarians on all sides, decisively
demonstrates this superiority. The vigour and ability of Heraclius so
restored the empire, when wellnigh sinking under the might of its
enemies, that for a century it was regarded with awe by the barbarous
nations all round its immense frontier. The five provinces beyond the
Euphrates were conquered by the Romans from the Parthians during the
decline of the empire. Nothing is so remarkable, in the last three
centuries of Roman history, as the _small number_ of the forces which
combated around the Eagles, and the astonishing victories which, when
led by ability, they gained over prodigious bodies of their enemies. The
legions had dwindled into battalions, the battalions into cohorts. The
four hundred and fifty thousand men who under Augustus guarded the
frontiers of the empire, had sunk to one hundred and fifty thousand in
the time of Justinian.[3] But this hundred and fifty thousand upheld the
Eastern empire for a thousand years. So feeble were the assaults of the
barbarians, that for above two centuries of that time the single city of
Constantinople, with the aid of the Greek fire, defended itself with
scarce any territory from which to draw support. It was not the strength
of its enemies, therefore, but the weakness of itself, which, after an
existence in the West and East of _two thousand years_, at length
extinguished the Roman empire.
What, then, were the causes of decay which proved fatal at length to
this immense and enduring dominion? Philosophers in all ages have
pondered on the causes; but those hitherto assigned do not seem adequate
to explain the phenomenon. Not that the causes of weakness are baseless
or imaginary; on the contrary, many of them were most real and
substantial sources of evil. But what renders them inadequate to explain
the fall of Rome is, that they had _all existed, and were in full
operation, at the time when the commonwealth and empire were at their
highest point of elevation_, and centuries before either exhibited any
symptoms of lasting decay. For example, the ancient historians, from
Sallust downwards, are loud in their denunciation of the corruption of
public morals, and the selfish vices of the patrician classes of
society, as being the chief source of the decay which was going forward,
while the growth of the republic had been mainly owing to the
extraordinary virtue and energy of a small number of individuals.[4] But
the very circumstance of these complaints having been made by Sallust in
the time of Augustus, and the fact of the empire of the West having
existed for four hundred, that of the East for fourteen hundred years
afterwards, affords decisive evidence that this cause cannot be
considered as having been mainly instrumental in producing their fall.
How is the unexampled grandeur and prosperity of the empire under Nero,
Adrian, Trajan, and the two Antonines, whose united reigns extended over
eighty years, to be explained, if the seeds of ruin two centuries before
had been sown in the vices and corruption of the rich patricians? In
truth, so far was general luxury or corruption from being the cause of
the ruin of the empire, the cause of its fall was just the reverse. It
was the excessive _poverty_ of its central provinces, and their
inability to pay the taxes, which was the immediate cause of the
catastrophe. The nobles and patricians often were luxurious, but they
were not a thousandth part of the nation. The people was miserably poor,
and got more indigent daily, in the later stages of its decay.
Modern writers, to whom the philosophy of history for the first time in
the annals of mankind has become known, and who were aware of the
important influence of general causes on social prosperity, independent
of the agency of individual men, have assigned a different set of causes
more nearly approaching the truth. Montesquieu says, the decay of the
Roman empire was the natural consequence of its extension. This sounds
well, and looks like an aphorism: but if the matter be considered with
attention, it will be found that it is _vox et praeterea nihil_. Those
who, with so much complacency, rest in the belief that the fall of the
Roman empire was the natural result of its extension, forget that its
_greatest prosperity was coexistent with that very extension_. It is
impossible to hold that the decay of the empire was the consequence of
its magnitude, when the glorious era of the Antonines, during which it
numbered a hundred and twenty millions of inhabitants under its rule,
and embraced nearly the whole known habitable globe within its dominion,
immediately succeeded its greatest extension by the victories, unhappily
to us so little known, of Trajan.
More recent writers, seeing that Montesquieu's aphorism was a vague
proposition which meant nothing, have gone a step further, and
approached much nearer to the real explanation of the phenomenon.
Guizot, Sismondi, and Michelet have concurred in assigning as the real
cause of the decay of the Roman empire, the prevalence of slavery among
its working population, and the great and increasing weight of taxes to
support the imperial government. There can be no doubt that these were
most powerful causes of weakness; and that they stand prominently forth
from the facts recorded by contemporary annalists, as the immediate and
_visible_ causes of the decline of the empire. The history of these
melancholy periods is full of eternal complaints, that men could not be
got to fill the legions, nor taxes to replenish the treasury; that the
army had to be recruited from the semi-barbarous tribes on the frontier;
and that vast tracts of fertile land in the heart of the empire relapsed
into a state of nature, or were devoted only to pasturage, from the
impossibility of finding cultivators who either would till the land, or
could afford to pay the taxes with which it was charged. Doubtless the
large proportion--at least a half, perhaps nearly two-thirds--of the
people who were slaves, must have weakened the elements of strength in
the empire; and the enormous weight of the direct taxes, so grievously
felt and loudly complained of,[5] must have paralysed, to a very great
degree, both the industry of the people and the resources of government.
But a very little consideration must be sufficient to show, that these
were not the real sources of the decline of the empire; or rather, that
if they had not been aided in their operation by other causes, which
truly undermined its strength, it might have been great and flourishing
to this hour.
Slavery, it must be recollected, was _universal_ in antiquity, and is so
over two-thirds of the human race at this hour. Much as we may feel its
evils and deprecate its severities, we ourselves, till within these
three centuries, were entirely fed by serfs; and a few years only have
elapsed since the whole of our colonial produce was raised by slave
labour. America and Russia--the two most rising states in
existence--are, the former in part, the latter wholly, maintained by
slaves. It was an army, in a great measure composed of men originally
serfs, which repelled Napoleon's invasion, survived the horrors of the
Moscow retreat, and carried the Russian standards to Paris, Erivan, and
Adrianople. Alexander the Great conquered Asia with an army of freemen
wholly fed by slaves. The Athenians, in the palmy days of their
prosperity, had only 21,000 freemen, and 400,000 slaves. Rome itself, in
its great and glorious periods, when it vanquished Hannibal, conquered
Gaul, subdued the East--in the days of Scipio, Caesar, and Trajan--was to
the full as dependent on slave labour as it was in those of its
decrepitude under Honorius or Justinian. Cato was a great dealer in
slaves; the Sabine farm was tilled by the arms of slaves; Cincinnatus
and Regulus worked their little freeholds entirely by means of slaves.
Rome was brought to the verge of destruction, nearer ruin than it had
been by the arms of the Carthaginians, by the insurrection of the slaves
shortly after the third Punic contest, so well known under the
appellation of the Servile war. It is perfectly ridiculous, therefore,
to assign as a cause of the destruction of Rome, a circumstance in the
social condition of its people which coexisted with their greatest
prosperity, which has prevailed in all the most renowned nations of the
earth in a certain stage of their progress, and is to be found, in our
own times, in states the most powerful, and the most likely to attain
vast and long-continued dominion.
Equally futile is it to point to the weight of the taxes as the main
cause of the long decline and final overthrow of Rome. Taxes no doubt
are an evil; and if they become excessive, and are levied in a direct
form, they may come in the end to ruin industry, and weaken all the
public resources to such an extent as to render a nation incapable of
defending itself. But a very little consideration must be sufficient to
show that it was not, in the case of Rome, the increase of the taxes
taken as a whole, _but the decline in the resources of those who paid
them_, which rendered them so oppressive. If, indeed, the national
establishment of the Roman empire had gone on increasing as it advanced
in years, until at length their charges became excessive and crushing to
industry, the theory would have been borne out by the fact, and afforded
perhaps satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon. But the fact was
_just the reverse_. The military establishment of the Roman empire was
so much _contracted_ as it advanced in years that whereas it amounted to
450,000 men in the days of Augustus, in those of Justinian it had sunk,
as already noticed to 150,000.[6] So far were the forces of Rome from
being excessive in the later stages of the empire or disproportioned to
an empire still, after all its losses, holding so large and fair a
portion of the earth under its dominion, that on the other hand they
were miserably small; and the disasters it underwent were mainly owing
to the government of the Caesars never being able to equip an adequate
army to repel the attacks of the barbarians. The force with which
Belisarius reconquered Africa and recovered Italy, never mustered
_seventeen thousand men_; and the greater part of his successes were
achieved by _six thousand_ legionary followers. It was not the weight of
the national establishments, therefore, but the diminished resources of
those who were to pay them, which really occasioned the destruction of
the empire.
There are two other facts of vital importance in considering the real
causes of the gradual decay and ultimate ruin of the dominion of the
legions.
The first of these is, that the extent of the decay was, in the latter
stages of Rome, _very unequal_ in the different provinces of the empire;
and that while the central provinces, and those in the neighbourhood of
the metropolis, were in the most wretched state of decrepitude, the
remote districts were _in the highest state of affluence and
prosperity_. This important fact is abundantly proved by unquestionable
authority, and it sheds a flood of light on the real causes of the ruin
which ultimately overtook them all.
The state of agriculture in the Italian plains under the Caesars, is thus
set forth by Gibbon:--
"Since the age of Tiberius, _the decay of agriculture had been felt
in Italy_; and it was a just subject of complaint that the life of
the Roman people depended on the accidents of the winds and the
waves. In the division and decline of the empire, the _tributary
harvests of Egypt and Africa_ were withdrawn; the numbers of the
inhabitants continually diminished with the means of subsistence;
and the country was exhausted by the irretrievable losses of war,
pestilence, and famine. Pope Gelasius was a subject of Odoacer, and
he affirms, with strong exaggeration, that in Emila, Tuscany, and
the adjacent provinces, the human species was almost
extirpated."[7]
Of the progress and extent of this decay, Gibbon gives the following
account in another part of his great work:--
"The agriculture of the Roman provinces was _insensibly ruined_;
and in the progress of despotism, which tends to disappoint its own
purpose, the emperors were obliged to derive some merit from the
forgiveness of debts, or the remission of tributes, which their
subjects were utterly incapable of paying. According to the new
division of Italy, the fertile and happy province of Campania, the
scene of the early victories and of the delicious retirements of
the citizens of Rome, extended between the sea and the Apennines,
from the Tiber to the Silarius. Within sixty years after the death
of Constantine, and on the evidence of an actual survey, an
exemption was granted in favour of 330,000 English acres _of desert
and uncultivated land, which amounted to one-eighth of the whole
surface of the province_. As the footsteps of the barbarians had
not yet been seen in Italy, the cause of this amazing desolation,
which is recorded in the laws, (Cod. Theod. lxi. t. 38, l. 2,) can
be ascribed only to the administration of the Roman emperors."[8]