Fall of Rome

source: le Figaro, 17.10.2014

author: Jean-Louis Voisin

translation: doxa-louise

WHAT THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE CAN TEACH US

FIGAROVOX/GREATCONVERSATIONS - to mark the publication of the book by Michel De Jaeghere, Les Derniers Jours, the director of Figaro History tells us the fall of Rome, and looks for deep causes.

It is current practice to go from journalism to historian. For some, the passage is swift. With a risk for confusion between the instant and the long term. For Michel De Jaeghere, the exercice is serious. A classical undertaking, with no mixing of genres.  From the eight floor of the Haussmann Boulevard building where the Figaro has its headquarters, he directs Figaro Hors-Série and Figaro Histoire. But he has given himself the means of adding to the activity of journalist  that of historian. And, the culmination of fifteen years of work, he gifts us with a large book, Les Derniers Jours, given over to the 

end of the Western Roman Empire. He has read literary and legal sources, gone through archeological works, visited the sites, Rome in particular, met with professional historians, analysed their studies, their works and their articles, has organized them and meditated on their meaning to forge a personal idea of that phenomenon which has fascinated men since the Renaissance. From journalism, he has kept the style and concern for his reader. The result? These six hundred pages, dense but lively, sometimes surprising, which invite reflection and where everyman will sharpen that quality which the ancients were often wary of: la curiositas.

Why this passion?

The fall of the Roman Empire in the West remains, according to Eduard Meyer, a German historian from the beginning of the XXth century, ‘the most interesting and important event of universal history’. It has never ceased to be of interest to the educated and the learned. The disappearance of a millenial construct, which had been the bearer of a prestigious civilization, and had united under a common scepter all the peoples of the Mediterranean, could not but strike the imagination. All epochs have wondered whether the destiny of Rome could not eventually be theirs. In effect, whatever precautions one might take to avoid all anachronism, we necessarily look to the past as a function of the perspective and questions of our own time. This was already true in the XVth and XVIth centuries when the fall of the Roman Empire gave rise to fertile discussions among European intellectuals and artists. Before them, contemporaries to the catastrophe, be they pagan (such as Eunapius and Zosimus) or Christian (Orosius, Salvian) had attempted to give meaning to this traumatism. Some would see the effects of the wrath of the abandoned gods of paganism; others would interpret toward a punishment for sins committed in a world become Christian in name only.

Renaissance humanists discovered Roman Antiquity from literary texts and works of art dug up from the Italian soil. They were the first to wonder how such a brilliant civilization could disappear, and how. History was giving them a chance to distinguish themselves from Northern Barbarians and the Greeks of Byzantium, as well as exult in their own creative power, which was linking with, through naturalism, this glorious past, after the obscure moments coming to be known as the Middle Ages.

In the XVIIIth century, during the Enlightenment, this musing continues. It shows traces of then dominant ideas. Montesquieu incriminates a form of despotism which overlooked intermediate bodies, and would thus overpower Roman patriotism by ruining the aristocratic families on which the old republicanism had been based. For Voltaire, little doubt about the culprit to the downfall of Rome: it is Christianity, which would have acted to disarm the empire by distracting citizens from the defence of the terrestial city, to concentrate their attention on the business of heaven. The case will be made with remarkable erudition by the British historian Edward Gibbon in his famous Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. At this same time, the German Herder was reassuring his compatriots that the germanic invasions had been to great benefit. That these had renewed the world, by infusing the energies of the peoples of the forest and the steppe to an exhausted civilization.

The XIXth century sees both the coming to fruition a critical history, which ceases to accept unquestioningly literary sources, and the multiplication of ideological frameworks trying to bend the complexities of the real to an explanation which would justify the political  orientations of their authors. The knowledgeable from all countries assemble causes, 

align hypotheses, to the point of exhaustion. In the XXth century, we find a multiplicity of essais, with as underlying theme, after World War One, an anguished meditation of the well-known aphorism from Paul Valéry: ‘We, civilizations, now know we are mortal.’ Two books have covered these travails, that of Santo Mazzarino, La Fin du Monde antique.Avatars d’un thème historiographique, and that of Alexander Demandt, Der Fall Roms; the first in 1959, the second in 1984.

In the many explanations of the disappearance of the Western Empire (Alexander Demandt furnishes a census of 210, from apathy created by warm baths to poisoning by led in the canals for running water!) we find that same anguish of peoples facing the prospect of their own disappearance.

Why, after so many, might one want to produce yet another book on this subject?

Historians have come to a somewhat different view on the end of the Roman Empire in the last forty years, in particular due to the impact of the works of two university researchers, the Irishman Peter Brown and the Canadian Walter Goffart. Under their influence, the notion that the downfall of the westerly empire meant catastrophe has been abandonned by the dominant historiography. One currenly prefers the view of fertile transformation and mutation, almost painless and almost peaceful, which has thankfully led to the civilization of Medieval Europe. Peter Brown treats the sequence from the end of the second century to the VIIth, from Marcus Aurelius to Mohammed, as a coherent whole. Building on the rehabilitation of the Christian Empire of the IVth and Vth centuries proposed, in the 1960s and 1970s, by the well-known French historian Henri-Irénée Marrou emphasizing the intellectual, political and artistic renaissance for which the Constantinian monarchy had been the theater, he prolongs the benefits to the centuries which have immediately followed the disappearance of the Western Empire. Romanized Barbarians would thus have maintained the essentials of Roman institutions and permitted the flowering of a ‘late Antiquity’ which one would have no reason to find inferior to that which had been in the shadow of a powerful Rome. Walter Goffart, for his part, points out that the empire was never the object of a war of conquest and the settlement of Barbarians in the Roman world was, above all, the fruit of a process whereby local elites had come to terms with new peoples, because the latter seemed better poised to give them a peaceful enjoyment of their possessions than a far away and powerless State. These works are, in many ways, novel and very interesting. This approach has nonetheless ended up hiding the violent sequences, the wars, the pillage, which have characterized this passing of the flame. Preoccupied by the undisputable elements of continuity which the historian 

can identify within change, the new vulgate comes to denying that the erasure of the political structures of the Western Empire translated to, as was shown with brilliance by the historian and archeologist Bryan Ward Perkins, a stunning fallback in material living conditions, a disappearance of Art, of literaty culture and, finally of peace and well-being. It tends, in this respect, to become the ideological underpinnings of a view divorced from fact, which appears to promulgate the equivalence of cultures and the wonders that Barbarians would necessarily bring by giving the so-called civilized an opportunity for a happy mingling.

It is yet true that the collapse of Graeco-Roman civilization had neither the speed nor the uniformity which the Romantic imagination assigned to it. The Roman world had undergone, for two centuries, profound changes. Large blocks of classical culture had disappeared without waiting for the event of 476. Large aspects of social life survived nonetheless. The thermal baths of Diocletian, the most important ever constructed in the Roman Urbs, were functional until  the Ostrogoths under Vitiges cut the aquaducs in 537. Recent digs have unearthed magnificent domi, buried intact up to the first third of the VIth century. But care must be taken not to mistake the froth for the wave. For the break meant, at that same moment, a retraction of cities, the disappearance of city schools, the erasure of villages, the retreat of cultivated lands and the spread of forests and moors, a return to a barter economy. Charlemagne will build in wood, in the IXth century, the major part of his palaces, whereas the meanest horse stall, the most humble barn had been, at the height of Roman peace, made of stone and covered with a tile roof.

‘The movement of history always happens over long periods and never completely erases anything, perhaps only over very slow meanders, asserts the historian of Roman law Aldo Schiavone. Under any break(...), one can find the links still there and bind the most radical of the new to a past close or far. But this quest (today very much in vogue with historians) is meaningless(..) unless it is capable, at the same time that it works to show the presence of forms which have resisted between Late Antiquity and the world of the Middle Ages(...), to never loose sight of the significance of that which broke. If it doesn’t forget that only the extent of the catastrophe makes valuable the fact of finding, under the rubble, the network - most often underground or peripheral - which managed to survive.’

To account for ‘the extent of the catastrophe’, going back to the facts becomes necessary, a form of discipline sometimes neglected by the specialists of social history, as was recognized recently by a most eminent of their representatives. That is why I wanted to write, with this book, a history which recounts facts in their complexity. I opted for a narrative form by making room for the highly colorful characters which illustrate them, for the diversity of peoples, for the succession of generations.

In theory, this is straightforward, but how should a period be chosen?

When the Scirian king Odoacer exiled the young Romulus Augustulus to Naples, onSeptember 4, 476, the event was hardly noticed. This does not suffice to argue, as is often done, that it had been without consequence. Civilization did not go down because the ultimate child emperor had been deposed. But this act constituted the culminating point of the political crisis which had shaken the Roman Empire for a century and during which it had proven incapable of stopping the influx of unconquered hordes on its lands. All definition of period hinges on convention and is open to question. The issue is not new: Bossuet established the end of the Roman Empire to the rise of Constantine, Renan placed it a century and a half later ( as in the film Gladiator!): at the end of the reign of Marcus Aurelius... Discussions which one hesitates to qualify as bizantine oppose those in favour of the name ‘Bas-Empire’ to those favouring Late Antiquity to refer to the period going from the fall of Severus in 235 to the end of the Western Empire in 476 or to the death of Justinian in 565.

The heart of the events recounted in my book are situated between 376 (the decisive influx of Goths into Thrace during the reign of the Emperor Valens) to 476 ( the deposition of Romulus Augustulus). But to understand the evolutions of the Roman Empire, if only spatial, to follow the migrations of the Germanic tribes, their progressive entry into the Empire and the Roman army, to compare what it is possible to compare, I had to take a few side paths in the prior period. Similarly with the closing  period, and go beyond the marker date of 476.

Those Barbarians are not a novelty for Rome: they were known in the first century B.C...

They long lived in endemic anarchy, scattered in a dust of minuscule tribes. All this changed in the Second century, when they started to form coalitions giving them, for the first time, the necessary size to confront the Roman army. Sometimes under the leadership of someone, others through an alliance of families or faced with the necessity of resisting newer groups, come from  the east. These ‘swarms of peoples’ are less ethnic groups than groupings born of circumstance. Their first significant incursion into the Roman world dates from the reign of Marcus Aurelius, in the Second half of the Second century. They will shake up the Third century. The situation will be saved because of the energetic actions of a succession of Illyrian Emperors. Yet the Roman victories did not mean the return of all these Barbarians  to their native forests. Far from it: being prisonners of war, many settled in the country to repopulate deserted lands. New incursions are repulsed by Christian Emperors in the Fourth century, without really halting the immigration phenomenon; the Empire sees established on its lands some one million Germans between Diocletian and Theodosius: soldiers or immigrants, prisonners settled on the borders or called on to work the land on the domains of large landowners. Indeed Emperors hired them in great numbers to counter the effects of the demographic crisis (the Roman world was devasted by epidemics and wars, without ever having a much flowering natality), make up for the little interest in peaceful populations for the military life. In parallel, outside its own empire, and as always, Rome shows favour to certain Barbarian Chiefs, helps them set up client kingdoms whose elites will gradually become more Romanized.

After the massive entry of Goths into Thrace, in 376 (itself provoked, as will be the waves of the Fifth century, by the push provided by the great migration of Huns out of Central Asia), and their victory on the imperial army of 378,  at Andrianople, the peoples who enter the Empire transform it. Around an initial core, a leader who was trained in the Roman army, they constitute autonomous warring gangs which grow through the absorption of other peoples; the Wisigoth nation is thus born on roman soil. The government, no longer capable of driving them to the frontier, short on regular troops, ends up confirming their presence and giving military missions to these peoples, who remained led by their own leaders; giving them, in lieu of pay, lands which will become the first drafts of autonomous kingdoms within the Roman Empire. The last shock is provided by the disbandement of the Empire of Attila, after his death, in 453. It liberates the peoples which the King of the Huns had held under his authority. These then pour into the West. Do they form for Rome a ‘salutary immigration’ , as argued by the general director of the Palazzo Grassi in 2008,  as she organized in Venice a magnificent exposition on Rome and the Barbarians? The meticulous examination of facts to which I have forced myself permits some measure of doubt.

Did osmosis not eventually win out on confrontation?

Such a statement of opposition is superficial. The Romans indeed adopted, under the influence of Germanic immigration, some habits of the Barbarians. There was even a law in Rome forbidding the wearing of pants! The Germans in turn fell under the influence of the Romans. this permitted their adopting modes of organization which made them more efficient in their wars against the Romans. Their peoples were, for a large part, the fruit of imitation of social structures and of the Roman army.

But these mutual influences in nothing reduced the violence of the confrontations. Because the decisive point is that Rome had shown its weakness in admitting to its territory peoples it had not been able to submit and had legalized their presence without ever beating them on the ground. Contrary to what is argued these days, there were indeed Babarian invasions. Barbarians were in no way ‘invited’ into the Empire. They entered in great numbers through immigration but also, in numbers at least equal, through violent invasion, through lines of defence, pillaging cities and engaging in massacres of  populations as much in Italy and Greece as in Gaul, in Spain and in Africa. The only notable exception are the Thervingi Goths (later to form the kernel of the Visigoths) who were authorized in 376, on their request, to enter the Empire by the Emperor Valens. But these revolted after a few weeks and when they gained, by treaty, in 418 the right to establish themselves in South-Western Gaul, they had to their credit eleven successive campaigns against the Roman army, the capture of Rome itself and the pillage of the Italian peninsula. Holing up in the Garonne Valley, they had conquered, in the subsequent fifty years, a territory going from the Loire to the Straights of Gibraltar. Even though he dismisses the notion of Barbarian Invasions, Peter Brown himself, contrary to certain of his followers, would not deny  the reality of a violent intrusion of stranger populations in the Empire. ‘These intrusions, he makes precise, are not on-going and destructive attacks, nor are they a systematic campaign of conquest. Rather it is the case of an overflowing of immigrants from the underdeveloped countries of the North toward the rich lands of the Mediterranean.‘ In this vein, he has remarked, with some irony, that the only heritage from the Visigoth language to the Spanish is the word to designate the executioner...

Today one readily points out that the Barbarians did not suddenly appear in a world unknown to them; they had for decades, centuries, established with it political, diplomatic or military relations; that they had for a long time been subject to Roman influence and that none among them aimed to destroy the Roman Empire. Totally true. But they wanted to lay hands on the wealth produced by civilization, not having been able to adopt the disciplines that had permitted its production, and they provoqued, by their violent irruption, its dislocation.

Which is stronger toward this dislocation? The Barbarians or internal disintegration?

It is difficult to distinguish in a cut and dried manner between the internal and the external causes to the fall of the Roman Empire. It is thus impossible to deny the decisive character of the great migration of the Huns, which, as brilliantly shown by the British historian Peter Heather, acted to in some sense ‘throw’ the Germanic world onto the West. But this migration was doubtlessly encouraged by the possibility of making profitable pillage raids on the riches of the Roman World, and this possibility was itself put forward by the weakness of Roman defence, the difficulty, for an Empire which, in the Fifth century, had a population, in the West, of no more than 25 million inhabitants, and needed to finance its military apparatus by the limited resources of an agricultural economy only, of holding the huge border of the Upper-Danube and Rhine. It was made possible by the ambiguity of a patriotism which made the majority of the inhabitants of the Roman World  take the Empire to be an obvious form, inevitable, of the political sphere, and consider Romanity as a superior form of social life, but never led them to think one or the other were worth fighting for, that one might put one’s life on the line to defend these.

The external forces weighing on the Roman Empire, North and North-East with the Germanic peoples first, then with the Huns, to the East with the Persians, forced, symmetrically, its leadership to invent new political experiences, which themselves were not without consequence. Among these, one of the most fruitful was that of the tetrarchy imagined by the Emperor Diocletian at the end of the Third century. Learning the lessons of previous crisis, he understood that the defence of the Roman World exceeded, in times of crisis and upheaval, the forces of a single man (keeping in mind the immensity of the Empire and the fact that a rapid courrier rarely exceeded 100 kilometers per day). He thus set up in a pragmatic manner a system comprising four hierarchically ordered emperors occupying administratively and militarily different geographical areas. Reunified under Constantine, the Empire was once again divided by his sons, then under the Valentinians, and lastly at the death of Theodosus in 395. As a result, in the Fifth century, these two Empires became more and more foreign to each other. We have periods of collaboration and periods of tension. Decisive facts: the East is much richer than the West and Constantinople locks out Barbarian populations from joining the Eastern provinces, which remain at once prosperous and under its control. In the West, we have a contrary situation: vulnerable because first exposed to invasions, the provinces are ruined by the pillage raids of the Barbarians, and they often escape the hold of the government of Ravenna, owing to a succession of invasions and usurpations. As a result the Emperors of the East will receive during the Fifth century fiscal resources eight times superior to those of the West, while it is the latter who remained the nexus of military effort.

What lessons can be learnt from the end of the Roman Empire?

The first is undoubtedly that it is illusory to pretend to make subsist a zone of civilization surrounded by a periphery left to anarchy and misery. Because prosperity will always invariably attract to itself populations which are aware of it. Civilization’s vocation is thus to extend itself until it meets up with a competitor civilization, with which to form relations, establish a concert of nations. It is significant that for Rome, the death blow came from the Barbarians, and not the Persians which had been over centuries the rival superpower. Its error had been to stop conquests in the Barbaricum, the great germanic forest. The Romans made the judgement that the profit to be made in the colonization of Eastern Europe was not worth the superhuman effort that its conquest and Romanization would have entailed. They were victims of this short-sighted view, which brings to mind the comtemporary Cartierism. The fall of the Roman Empire was not the result of a clash of civilizations ( the Germans had but a rudimentary culture - one cannot, to my mind speak of civilization for a world which ignores the city, place of exchange, ordering and hierarchization - and their elites were themselves in the process of being romanized). It was the consequence and the violent solution to a difference in level of development. Problem is that it led to a collapse of living standard for both the home population and the immigrants, and event for the Barbarians who had stayed in Germany, who ceased to profit from the exchanges they had enjoyed with the Roman world.

The second is that multinational empires are worthless in defence. They excel at expansion, so long as they are carried by the irresistable character that  power seems to give to their domination, enriched by the resources their annexations bring on. But they are incapable of creating in their populations the devotion that a sentimental attachment to a carnal homeland alone can inspire in its citizens. Their inhabitants can be much attached so long as they provide prosperity and peace. But they will rarely accept to threaten the comfort they provide by sacrificing their lives in its defence. Such empires are then condemned to perpetual conquests, or disappearance. The sentinels of the Tartary Desert know that they but have to wait, for the inevitable collapse.