The Fall of the Roman Empire

[Fade the Butcher]

Your thoughts? The old thread was lost, unfortunately. Peter Heather has a new book out about this subject. I haven't got it yet but plan on doing so.

[Felix the Cat]

Hm. What were the main points made in the previous thread?

[Jonathan]

Uh, I had to hand in an essay on this last year. It was something along the lines of "Did the Roman Empire Collapse in the 5th century?". We were supposed to say "No, it had been in decline for several decades before hand". I actually decided to say "Yes, it did suddenly collapse". I did alright too.

What's the actually focus of this thread btw?

[Fade the Butcher]

Hm. What were the main points made in the previous thread?There were only a few responses to it before I logged off. The causes of the collapse of Roman authority in the west is a good topic that will generate interesting discussion. Was it caused by the barbarian invasions, Christianity, racial degeneracy, failure of leadership, socioeconomic changes, 'lead poisoning' etc?

[Felix the Cat]

This is a tricky subject both because it has multiple causes, and also because there is no consensus on what constitutes the "Roman Empire"

There was a Greek-speaking Orthodox Christian state in Eastern Europe for a thousand years after the conventional "fall" of the Empire. Are we including it in the definition?

There was also a Catholic German-speaking state in Central Europe and Northern Italy which called itself the "Roman Empire", and which lasted right up to 1806

[Fade the Butcher]

We are talking about the Western Roman Empire specifically, not Byzantium or the Holy Roman Empire. The decline of both of these would be good subjects for others threads though.

[albion]

The Western Roman Empire is the name given to the western half of the Roman Empire after its division by Diocletian in 286 AD. It would exist intermittently in several periods between the 3rd Century and the 5th Century, after Diocletian's Tetrarchy and the reunifications associated with Constantine the Great. Theodosius the Great was the last Roman Emperor who ruled both east and west, and he died in 395 AD. After him the Roman Empire was definitably divided and the Western Roman Empire ended with the abdication of Romulus Augustus under pressure of the Germanic chieftain Odoacer on September 4, 476 AD.

Despite brief periods of reconquest by its counterpart, the Eastern Roman Empire (also called Byzantine Empire), the Western Roman Empire would never rise again. The Eastern Roman Empire would survive for another millennium.

As Western Roman Empire it fell, a new era in western european history began: the Middle Ages.

Influenced by the last remnant of the Western Roman Empire, the Roman Catholic Church, the new war-like "barbarian kingdoms" would rise from the ashes of Western Roman Empire and would eventually adopt roman culture and roman law. Increasingly, these "barbarians" also saw themselves more and more as the "true heirs" of Rome.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Roman_Empire

[Billy Score]

Civil wars and treachery played a part in its demise as well. How many emperors (especially in the later days) died of natural causes? how many times would a general be hailed as emperor by the army only to have the senate conspire against him and assasinate him, replacing him with a choice of their own? Then this one would be assasinated by the army in retaliation etc. Or multiple generals being hailed as emperor and having to fight both the current emperor and each other? Incessant civil wars don't help anyone.

[Petr]

One of the truly great legacies of republican Rome to the West was its concept of peasant-soldier: unlike, say, the Spartans, the Romans were not too proud to cultivate the earth themselves, instead of letting helots or slaves do it for them. Plebeian farmers were the backbone of early Roman armies, and this meant that there was no separate military caste.

After the Roman army went professional (transformation began around 100 BC with Marius and was over around 200 AD with Septimius Severus), and expecially after they began to recruit soldiers from warlike minorities like Illyrians or Germans, the board was set for endless coups and civil wars.

(In the similar manner, Abbasid Caliphate began to collapse after the 9th century AD when it became addicted to using Turkish slave-warriors as its military muscle)


Petr

[Kodos]

Civil wars and treachery played a part in its demise as well. How many emperors (especially in the later days) died of natural causes? how many times would a general be hailed as emperor by the army only to have the senate conspire against him and assasinate him, replacing him with a choice of their own? Then this one would be assasinated by the army in retaliation etc. Or multiple generals being hailed as emperor and having to fight both the current emperor and each other? Incessant civil wars don't help anyone.

Actually the frequency of civil war declined after Constantine.

[Kodos]

We are talking about the Western Roman Empire specifically, not Byzantium or the Holy Roman Empire. The decline of both of these would be good subjects for others threads though.

The real point of no return was after Theodosius let tribes settle en masse on Roman lands in return for allegiance...

[Felix the Cat]

Of course, the Germans would argue that they *reinvigorated* the dying empire and so artificially prolonged its existance long after it would otherwise have collapsed

[Jonathan]

One of the truly great legacies of republican Rome to the West was its concept of peasant-soldier... there was no separate military caste.
I'd dispute this. The idea of the peasant soldier was more or less done away with after the fall of the Empire when European society was divided into "Those who work, those who fight, and those who pray". "Peasant soldiers" only became popular again as wars intensified.

[Fade the Butcher]

I am going to jump into this debate after I finish up my response to the Jared Diamond thread. There are a few other threads I still have to reply to. Just giving you guys a heads up. :)

[Billy Score]

Actually the frequency of civil war declined after Constantine.
Outright civil war, maybe. However constant coups and assasinations did not stop and were on the rise (Valentien III and all of his successors were either assasinated and deposed or just deposed, usually ruling as the mouthpiece for a German Master of the Horse. Ricimer and later Odoacer both did this)

[Ambrosio Spinola]

I'd dispute this. The idea of the peasant soldier was more or less done away with after the fall of the Empire when European society was divided into "Those who work, those who fight, and those who pray". "Peasant soldiers" only became popular again as wars intensified.

The republican concept of peasant soldiers was already over at the time of Marius. As wars extended further and further away from the metropolis and campaigns grew longer and there was a need for a more and more professional army so the conecpt of peasant soldiery died away and gave birth to the Roman Army most of us are used to see in movies and read in books. I would not classify late roman Limitanei as peasant soldiers either.

[Jonathan]

The republican concept of peasant soldiers was already over at the time of Marius. As wars extended further and further away from the metropolis and campaigns grew longer and there was a need for a more and more professional army so the conecpt of peasant soldiery died away and gave birth to the Roman Army most of us are used to see in movies and read in books. I would not classify late roman Limitanei as peasant soldiers either.

Take it up with Petr :p

Only Joking, good post.

[Kodos]

Outright civil war, maybe. However constant coups and assasinations did not stop and were on the rise (Valentien III and all of his successors were either assasinated and deposed or just deposed, usually ruling as the mouthpiece for a German Master of the Horse. Ricimer and later Odoacer both did this)

Valentinian III and the "emperors" after him were as you said puppets for the Master of the Soldiers. The last civil war in the Western Roman empire was between Aetius and Boniface not over who would be Emperor but who would be master of soldiers.

[Fade the Butcher]

Valentinian III had Aetius killed, right?

[sainte-marthe]

I posted a brief note about a book whose title I can't remember before the first thread was lost. It was something similar to "The Fall of the Roman Empire Reappraised", or something close.

I'll keep looking, I read this 4 or so years back.

[Kodos]

Valentinian III had Aetius killed, right?

He was practically retarded, his mother had Aetius killed( in a meeting).

[sainte-marthe]

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0020285604/qid=1137450811/sr=1-8/ref=sr_1_8/102-0890762-9137722?s=books&v=glance&n=283155


http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0517524481/qid=1137451109/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-0890762-9137722?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

The author seems to have two books on the topic.

[Billy Score]

He was practically retarded, his mother had Aetius killed( in a meeting).
This doomed valentian of course, since his own bodyguards were sympathetic to Aetius.

And i disagree on the issue of the peasant soldier. The Spartans never were more than 10,000 strong in their nation and this is simply not enough to do what they did (become the main contender amongst the city states and dominate them several times). The helots fought often and the spartans themselves served as an elite force. There is no other way to find any reasoning for it. 200 spartans, no matter how well trained, used backwards and outdated tactics yet were still the masters of the pelopennesus. They undoubtedly had helot levies.

[Sulla the Dictator]

I'd dispute this. The idea of the peasant soldier was more or less done away with after the fall of the Empire when European society was divided into "Those who work, those who fight, and those who pray". "Peasant soldiers" only became popular again as wars intensified.

Another way the Renaissance restored Europe to more Roman character. :p

[Sulla the Dictator]

The republican concept of peasant soldiers was already over at the time of Marius. As wars extended further and further away from the metropolis and campaigns grew longer and there was a need for a more and more professional army so the conecpt of peasant soldiery died away and gave birth to the Roman Army most of us are used to see in movies and read in books.


Marius's reforms specifically allowed for the membership of the Head Count in the military, which at the time was atleast Roman.

For the rest of the Republic the military remains the vehicle of social mobility for the Roman poor.

[Fade the Butcher]

Another way the Renaissance restored Europe to more Roman character. :pA more Greek character. :)

[Ambrosio Spinola]

Marius's reforms specifically allowed for the membership of the Head Count in the military, which at the time was atleast Roman.

For the rest of the Republic the military remains the vehicle of social mobility for the Roman poor.

How does this contradict what I said? For me a peasant soldier is not a "poor" peasant joining the army but rather the early republic temporary armies where the troops would go back to their work after the Campaign.

[Fade the Butcher]

I just picked up Bryan Ward-Perkins The Fall of Rome: And The End of Civilization (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0192805649/ref=pd_bxgy_img_b/002-2310398-5291201?%5Fencoding=UTF8) (2005) and Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195159543/002-2310398-5291201?v=glance&n=283155) (2006) today. Both Ward-Perkins and Heather attribute the collapse of the Western Roman Empire to the barbarian invasions. Have you read these books, Sulla?

[Sulla the Dictator]

I just picked up Bryan Ward-Perkins The Fall of Rome: And The End of Civilization (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0192805649/ref=pd_bxgy_img_b/002-2310398-5291201?%5Fencoding=UTF8) (2005) and Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195159543/002-2310398-5291201?v=glance&n=283155) (2006) today. Both Ward-Perkins and Heather attribute the collapse of the Western Roman Empire to the barbarian invasions. Have you read these books, Sulla?

No, late Imperial and Byzantine Rome depress me. :p

Tell me how that first one is though.

[Ambrosio Spinola]

No, late Imperial and Byzantine Rome depress me. :p


Could not agree more. When I visualitze late Rome I can only see darkness, end of times, religious Chaos and as Arthur says at Excalibur (the movie) "I must ride with my knights to defend what was, and the dream of what could have been."

[Kodos]

A more Greek character. :)

The greeks weren't empiricists...

[Fade the Butcher]

The greeks weren't empiricists...The Romans were not really interested in science.

[Kodos]

The Romans were not really interested in science.

I think they stagnated because they were too much of a slave based economy... not so much due to any cultural factors( having central heating, plumbing, inventing concrete etc).

[Fade the Butcher]

I would attribute it to their practical attitude towards life. The Romans excelled in hands on activities, technology. They generally held theoretical knowledge in contempt, science. A good example of this is mathematics. There really was no Roman mathematics. The Roman deficiency in science was a retarding force upon Medieval Europe. Michael Mahoney explains,

"But the Roman themselves had had little interest in mathematics beyond its practical applications to business and surveying. Roman thinkers who wished to learn the theoretical mathematics of Euclid, Archimedes, or Apollonius did so in the same way they learned the philosophy of Plato or Aristotle -- in the original Greek from Greek teachers. But Greek theoretical mathematics received no reinforcement from native Roman intellectual traditions, with the result that those few Romans who learned the subject made no contributions to it. Greek habits of mathematical thought made little or no impact on Roman culture, and Greek mathematics remained in Greek down to the end of the Empire."

[Kodos]

I would attribute it to their practical attitude towards life. The Romans excelled in hands on activities, technology. They generally held theoretical knowledge in contempt, science. A good example of this is mathematics. There really was no Roman mathematics. The Roman deficiency in science was a retarding force upon Medieval Europe. Michael Mahoney explains,


True to some extent. Romans of a theoretical bent tended to be more interested in religion or the law...

[Sulla the Dictator]

Could not agree more. When I visualitze late Rome I can only see darkness, end of times, religious Chaos and as Arthur says at Excalibur (the movie) "I must ride with my knights to defend what was, and the dream of what could have been."

The worst of it is to see late Imperial and Byzantine creatures APING Rome. Its pathetic. Appeal starts to wane at about 100 AD, and deffinately ends by 250.

I'm a Republic man.

[A. Radek]

I think they stagnated because they were too much of a slave based economy... not so much due to any cultural factors( having central heating, plumbing, inventing concrete etc).

Slave based economies are a dead end, true. The Romans were practical, and had some excellent engineers, of course. They had Greeks and other peoples to worry over theoretical science for them; as politicians, they realized some advanced technologies that were geared to save labor were ultimately dangerous, as they already had many idle citizens on their hands and preferred keeping as many employed as they could as a practical political matter. It wouldn't do to invent so many machines, unemploying so many people, when they had plenty of cheap labor to keep busy and fed. Inventions and machinery had to wait for the middle ages and labor shortages to find a place in the economies of the West. They could have easily have developed steam engines and kicked off an industrial revolution, for instance.

[Fade the Butcher]

Heather argues in his book against those who would attribute the fall of the western Roman Empire to economic causes. He makes a very persuasive case that the 'barbarians' simply adapted to Roman military technology and tactics and overwhelmed the Empire.

[Kodos]

Heather argues in his book against those who would attribute the fall of the western Roman Empire to economic causes. He makes a very persuasive case that the 'barbarians' simply adapted to Roman military technology and tactics and overwhelmed the Empire.

The economic decline of the empire caused a decline in the quanity and quality of their military force though.

[Fade the Butcher]

The economic decline of the empire caused a decline in the quanity and quality of their military force though.I disagree. The reforms of the late third/early fourth century emperors were largely successful and the Persian threat was contained.

[Kodos]

I disagree. The reforms of the late third/early fourth century emperors were largely successful

Um the shift from static defense to defense in depth as created by Constantine encouraged barbarian raids as they knew the border regions would be poorly defended... in the East yes it was more successful.

[Felix the Cat]

Rome didn't fall in a day (http://www.arts.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2005/06/19/bohea19.xml&sSheet=/arts/2005/06/19/botop.html)

Peter Jones reviews and The Fall of the Roman Empire by Peter Heather and The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization by Bryan Ward-Perkins

In 1984 a German scholar worked out that 210 reasons had been advocated for the fall of the Roman empire in the West in the fifth century AD - from bureaucracy to deforestation, from moral decline to over-hot public baths, from female emancipation to gout. But they can't all be right and in his fine narrative history, combining story-telling with a vivid use of original sources, Peter Heather makes a strong case for one overriding explanation: the Huns.

Meanwhile, Bryan Ward-Perkins [The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, Oxford, £16.99, 256 pp] poses a different question: what were the implications of the end of the empire for your average provincial? Are we talking of a broadly seamless transition from centralised Roman control via local barbarian kingdoms to the medieval world, or something rather less comfortable?

Heather sets the scene in the early fourth century AD. The Roman army was still the most ruthlessly proficient in the world, and it had to be: frontiers needed guarding. To finance it, a vastly increased bureaucracy was in place. The provinces - stretching from Hadrian's Wall to Iraq, from the Rhine to the Atlas Mountains - were now thoroughly Romanised and demanding a say in imperial politics. A single emperor simply could not handle the workload. So in 295 Diocletian created a system of emperors and sub-emperors.

One important result of all this was that decisions were now taken in the great imperial palaces that sprang up all over the empire (Ravenna, Trier, Split, Constantinople, etc). The city of Rome was too far from the action. The Senate still met there, but was a shadow of its former self.

As for the barbarians (the northern Germanic tribes stretching from the Rhine to the Black Sea), they had nothing to offer Rome and after the destruction of Varus' legions in AD 9 were no longer thought worth taking on. They still raided from time to time, and Romans were not averse to doing deals (Germans made excellent soldiers). But the tribes were too disunited to pose a serious threat.

Edward Gibbon argued that this world was inherently unstable, doomed to collapse. Heather disagrees. Multiple emperors, admittedly, did cause sporadic and dangerous civil wars. But the problems generated by, for example, slow communications over massive distances, rigid economies and reactive bureaucracies were not new; tax increases to pay for the military did not lead to revolt, since provincials still saw benefits outweighing disadvantages; nor did Rome's Eastern (or "Byzantine") empire collapse - indeed, in the sixth century it fought back in the West under the emperor Justinian; and so on.

According to Heather, the collapse in the West was triggered in summer 376 by one event with huge ramifications: the sudden and quite unexpected irruption of a new and terrifying people into barbarian territory on Roman borders - the Huns. It was pressure from them that drove barbarians (Goths, Visigoths, Franks, Alans) into the Western empire over the next 60 years. The Romans were helpless to stop them.

The result was the establishment within the empire of barbarian kingdoms from Gaul to Spain, from Italy to North Africa. As its tax revenue dried up, Rome lost the capacity to raise troops to force these kingdoms back into the imperial fold. Stripped of the power to compel, it was thereby stripped of its authority. Local élites, so supportive of Rome when Rome could support them back, saw that their only option now was to collude with their new masters, whose forced migration had had the effect of forging them into cohesive barbarian "supergroups" capable of establishing permanent kingdoms that were to form the basis of modern Europe. In 476 the last Roman emperor, called (ironically) Romulus Augustulus ("little Augustus"), was quietly pensioned off by the barbarian Odoacer, and that was that.

Enter Ward-Perkins, laying about himself in fine, combative style. He agrees that many barbarians wanted not to destroy the empire but to settle securely within it; that the Romans were often happy to accommodate them (though some locals saw this as "selling out"); and that the new barbarian kingdoms frequently maintained the local Roman way of doing things - which had, after all, worked for hundreds of years.

Ward-Perkins's "but" is based on a mass of closely interpreted archaeological evidence. Setting his face firmly against scholarly fashion, which dictates that everything about "Europe" must be "positive" and that no cultures are allowed to be more sophisticated than others, he argues that the demise of Rome led to a collapse of general living standards from the 5th to the 7th centuries so severe that the result was effectively "the end of civilisation".

Because Rome's complex and highly developed economic, social, military and cultural infrastructure folded with the empire, a huge range of material goods, taken for granted across the whole Roman world by rich and poor alike, could no longer be produced, let alone delivered. No more fine pottery in massive quantities from far-off places for any who wanted it; little by way of coinage, or brick, tile and stone building (and what there was, like churches, much smaller than before); luxury goods only for the few, and these locally produced; agricultural productivity in decline; severely restricted levels of literacy (no more of those Pompeian walls covered in graffiti); insecurity the norm. Simplicity was the order of the day and the effects were felt from peasants to kings. It took centuries to get things back to where they had once been.

There is nothing mealy-mouthed about this hard-hitting and beautifully written assessment which, I am delighted to say, will cause a great deal of trouble. Between them, these two Oxford dons have created stimulating new beginnings to thinking about the end of the Roman empire in the West.

[A. Radek]

Yes, materialism does matter when trying to hold together a vast empire. When the Western bureacracy began to fail, the Emperor was already superfluous, while the organization in the East stayed stable and continued to function and maintain its armies. The West went out with barely a whimper, and degenerated into a collection of extortion and protection rackets run by local bandits.

[Fade the Butcher]

Um the shift from static defense to defense in depth as created by Constantine encouraged barbarian raids as they knew the border regions would be poorly defended... in the East yes it was more successful.

The barbarian raids in the West were actually intermittent. The Western frontier was more peaceful in the fourth century than it had been in earlier centuries.

[Fade the Butcher]

Heather's book is awesome. I highly recommend it.