6. The Disintegration of Rome

by ProfDave, ©2022

(Mar. 17, 2022) — Good morning, Ladies and Gentlemen!  It may not be morning when you open this, but we can pretend.  Today we are looking at what we call – for convenience’s sake – the end of the ancient world, more than 1500 years ago.

Before tackling the “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” two things must be kept in mind.  First, the Roman Empire did not end in 476.  It went on for another thousand years ruled from its economic capital in Constantinople.  Secondly, even in the West, Roman civilization did not suddenly disappear.  Henri Pirenne has convincingly argued for the continuity of much of Mediterranean economy and culture.  Rather, the Roman West changed.

Indeed, the late Roman Empire was a very different society from the early Roman Republic.  A city state had conquered the world.  The institutions that represented the wisdom of the forum and the courage of the farmer-soldier were not adequate for a great empire.  First came the professional army, then the Imperator, then the cosmopolitan mix of religion, culture, and world views.  Augustus, wise and public spirited, consented to operate the Empire out of his hip pocket for the Senate.  His soldiers and servants created an efficient and pragmatic regime, allowing a broad variety of self-government, idealized as the Pax Romana.  This, in turn, brought the benefits of free and safe travel, commerce, and cultural exchange: the golden age of Rome.

Unfortunately, the whole structure depended on the wisdom and diligence of the emperor.  A bad Imperial decision could produce rebellion and mayhem all along the frontier (as in the Jewish wars).  The chief weakness was succession.  Legitimacy depended on the Senate, but the Senate had no real power to enforce political over military will.  Adoption worked for a while.  The emperor would adopt his best lieutenant as his son. but when the philosopher king, Marcus Aurelius, willed the empire to his worthless biological son Commodus (180), it led to a century of chaos.  The “barracks Emperors” were playthings of their armies and the armies were a mutinous rabble.  Soldiering had become the hereditary trade of poor provincials and border tribes.  They hated the urban elites who controlled Republican politics.  The link between the Roman legions and the Roman civilization (Rome itself) had been seriously weakened.  While the legions fought each other to see which general would be emperor, the borders were threatened all around. 

What is remarkable is that Roman civilization did not end in the 3rd century!  Politically, respect for Roman law, Roman citizenship, and Roman tradition had been lost.  Local self-government had been overwhelmed and the empire had become too big for consensus.  With recurring coups and civil wars, the benefits of Pax Romana were lost.  Resources were wasted, wealth was decimated by high taxes and civil unrest.  Trade was shrinking.  The roads and the seas were no longer safe from pirates and bandits.

The reforms of Diocletian (284-305) restored order at the cost of creating a police state, a price that Rome was ultimately not able to sustain.  He broke the Empire down into four manageable chunks: Italy, Gaul, Dacia, and the East.  He divided the Empire in half, taking the richest part (the East, ruled from Constantinople) for himself, and giving Italy (ruled from Milan, not Rome) to his most loyal general.  Each “Augusti” would then choose an understudy “Caesar” for Dacia and Gaul respectively.  They would withdraw the best legions from the frontier and keep them close to themselves as mobile strike forces against insurrection.  It worked for a while, but they still fought and the taxes required to support the Imperial bureaucracy accelerated economic decline until they could no longer pay for the legions.  By the 4th century only the Christians were growing and building, and the Empire was enrolling Goths and Vandals to defend the frontier in exchange for land.  At the end, it was a Vandal general with German legions who defended Rome against the Huns.  It was finally determined that the title and trappings of “Caesar” were not worth maintaining.  Constantinople was too far away and local Kings were quite good enough.  But life went on.

But why couldn’t the Romans hold it together?  We have given an outline of how it all fell apart, but not entirely why.  Was it foreign invasion?  Indo-European tribes had been drifting south and west for 900 years.  The Romans called them all Germanii.  The northern soils of Scandinavia and Germany were rich, but heavy and difficult to cultivate.  Hungry children and excess males drew them to the Empire: Danes, Jutes, Angles, Saxons, Franks, Burgundians, Thuringians, Alemani, Marcomani.  Sometimes by infiltration, sometimes by raiding, sometimes as federates – mercenaries in exchange for land.  Out of central Asia in the 4th century came the Oriental Hsiung-hu (Huns), fierce pony people who dyed themselves blue, pushing the nomadic Indo-European Goths, Vandals, and Slavs before them.  The Huns pushed the Slavs and the Slavs pushed the Germanii and they all wound up in the Empire.  A dispute with Visigoth (West Goth) Federates led to the defeat and death of the Emperor Valens at Adrianople (near Constantinople) in 378.  In 410 they sacked Rome itself.

Valentinian III lost Africa to the Vandals, Aquitania to the Visigoths, Britain to the Saxons, Spain to the Suebi, and Gaul to the Franks.  Attila’s Huns threatened Milan, the Western capital, in 452.   The Roman legions who faced them were mostly Germanii led by a Vandal general.

Or was it internal disorder?  Diocletian’s reforms did not end succession disputes, carried on by the sword.  The disruption of law and order, administration, business and trade was incalculable.  Not to mention the diversion of troops and resources.  Efforts to exert totalitarian control over the entire Mediterranean were prohibitively expensive.  The dependence on German legions to defend the borders, while concentrating Romans holding onto power may not have been a good idea.

Economic factors also have a role.  Slave labor destroyed the small farmers, and displaced free labor, leading to economic stagnation.   Technical innovation was discouraged.  The Romans had lost whatever work ethic they had had.  Manual labor was for lesser beings.  The unemployed flocked to Rome for free bread and circuses.  Italian agriculture languished as grain was imported from Egypt and Anatolia.  There were coinage problems, as gold was drained away to China for luxury goods.  Taxes were driving people out of business.

Or, we could blame demographics.  The population of the western Roman Empire was declining by the fifth century.   A declining birth-rate failed to replace those lost by war and pestilence.  Slaves were no longer being replaced by fresh conquests.  Immigration only partially compensated.  There were less and less Romans, cultivating less and less land, paying less and less taxes to maintain less and less infrastructure.  For the most part, the barbarians took up lands left vacant by more Romanized populations.  They came to enjoy the empire, not to destroy it, but those who sustained it were in short supply.

Edward Gibbon’s 18th century Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a classic example of the tradition of moralism that tells you as much about the time it was written as it does about the 5th century.  Did the rise of Christianity sap the distinctive moral strength of the Romans?  The pagan minority asserted as much in 410 when Rome was first sacked by the Visigoths: Rome fell because the gods had been neglected.  Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, wrote his monumental City of God in response.  The “City of Man” suffered for its own cruelty and mistakes.  Moralists from the days of the late Republic bemoaned the loss of Roman civic virtue.  Wealth and power tempted great men to dissolute living, impiety, adultery and loss of patriotism.  Lesser men and women envied and aped the lifestyles and morals of the rich and famous. 

The moral arguments make sense but are difficult to quantify.  Moral decline is only lamented when the lament-ors have moral standards.  So, when Cicero complains, is it because things are bad or because Cicero is good?  Great civilizations do require great public service.  Divorce, promiscuity, and infanticide lead logically to population decline – such as marked the Empire in its last century.

The Christians certainly did transform Rome.  New elites rose to prominence, wealth, and power.  Chariot races replaced gladiatorial contests.  Infanticide and abortion were suppressed, but celibacy became a civil right – a demographic wash.   Family was reinforced and slavery weakened.  A pent-up demand for church building was released.  The old gods, the way of the ancients, and the old virtues had pretty much lost their hold five hundred years back, with the Republic.  Emperor worship depended on the popularity of the emperor and never fit with the traditional core.  What remained was augury and household superstition.  Did the shift to Christianity disrupt the Empire more than the vain attempts to eradicate it?  The mainstreaming of a Christian worldview certainly added to the cultural and religious ferment of the late Empire – and gave the East a new sense of direction – but came too late to save the traditional political systems of the West.  It took another 500 years to replace them.

So what is your explanation?

More influential yet – at least among pagan elites – was neo-Platonism.  The two major schools were Epicureanism and Stoicism, from Greece.  Epicurus (about 306 BC) had taught that happiness could be found by avoiding pain and sorrow through withdrawal and serenity.  Roman followers tended to materialism and quiet pleasures, avoiding commitments and excess.  Stoicism, originally taught by Zeno (335-361BC), emphasized duty, self-control, renunciation of passions and indifference to pain.  The world was ordered by reason and fate.  There was no such thing as chance.  “Whatever is, is good.”  Neo-Platonism as a metaphysical religion, taught an order of being from God down to dirt.  As in Plato, things were shadows of ideas, ideas were shadows of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.  The Good, the True, and the Beautiful were, in turn, shadows of an impersonal God.

For the common people there was a wide variety of mystery cults from Egypt and Asia offering salvation, spiritual knowledge, occult powers and the like through multiple levels of secret rituals and knowledge.  Rooted in nature religion and a mix of Eastern survivals, they elevated inner experience and intuition over reason.

Christianity (see lecture 5) began as a very controversial Jewish sect (“The Way”) that acknowledged Jesus of Nazareth as the Jewish Messiah (“Christus” in Greek) and proclaimed his resurrection.  It spread rapidly through the worldwide Jewish network of synagogues and among Gentile believers in the God of Moses.  Scarcely thirty years after the crucifixion, it had crossed over to the Gentile community, and soon after Christians were finally expelled from the synagogues.  Opening the kingdom of heaven to the heathen and refusing to join in the Jewish wars – to recognize Bar Kochba as Messiah – were unforgiveable.  Christians forsook the Jewish Sabbath to celebrate Sunday as the day of the resurrection.  Without the umbrella of Jewish exemptions, Christians were subjected to sporadic persecution for not conforming to Roman civil religion.  Christ was Lord, not Caesar.  Otherwise , they were good citizens, but if push came to shove, they would die singing rather than offer just one pinch of incense to the spirit of Caesar.

Until 323, Christianity was countercultural.  It was firmly committed to the Jewish heritage of ethical monotheism, high moral standards, and written Scriptures.  Jesus Christ was not a new god, but the Elohim of Genesis 1:1, the Word of God that made heaven and earth become flesh.  Yet his death and resurrection offered reconciliation to God for all the peoples of the earth.  Roman and neo-Platonic cosmology had an eternal cosmos, subject to impersonal Fate.  Christianity saw a personal Sovereign as both creator and sustainer, and also imminent in the church and in the believer.  Greco-Roman civilization regarded time as cyclical.  Christians saw it as moving forwards, towards the Kingdom of God.   Most Romans regarded nature as unpredictable, subject to the whims of the gods.  Christians regarded nature as the rational product of a rational deity. 

Roman society was hierarchical – like Neo-Platonism.  Like the Greeks, and more so, Romans saw human value only in the privileged, the strong, and the beautiful.   “In Christ” there was “no Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free.”   Slaves became bishops.  Exposed infants were rescued.  The ill and handicapped were tended at great personal risk – even the pagan ill.

The legalization and patronization of Christianity under Constantine changed everything for the church.  Lost was persecution and martyrdom, found was wealth and power.  Large numbers sought baptism, no longer hindered by fear but encouraged, perhaps, by favor.  The Roman love of order and hierarchy soon infected the church, and Platonism colored its theology.  Worst of all, instead of providing unity to the Empire, long simmering doctrinal conflicts broke out into the open.  Would those who had caved under the recent persecution be forgiven and restored?  Eventually most were.  Christianity built a new Empire of faith that survived the West Roman Empire and became a firm foundation of the East.   In the last years, it was only the church that was growing and organizing all Europe into parishes. And of course it was the church that kept Roman literature alive in the monasteries after Rome was overrun.

David W. Heughins (“ProfDave”) is Adjunct Professor of History at Nazarene Bible College.  He holds a BA from Eastern Nazarene College and a PhD in history from the University of Minnesota.  He is the author of Holiness in 12 Steps (2020).  He is a Vietnam veteran and is retired, living with his daughter and three grandchildren in Connecticut.