Was the fall of Rome suicide or murder? Did the Germanic tribes walk over a corpse or did they contribute to its demise?

I.

Continuing for more than 200 years, from approximately 27 B.C. to A.D. 180, the Pax Romana was among the most stable, prosperous, and peaceful periods in history—certainly in the history of the ancient world. But even during that long moment of security and contentment signs of trouble had already begun to appear. By the third century, they had become acute.

During the Pax Romana dissidents emerged in Judea, Gaul, and Egypt. The Jews fought two terrible, although ultimately futile, wars to free themselves from Roman rule. Roman forces also crushed separatist movements in Gaul. To provide free bread to the Roman poor, Roman emperors exploited Egyptian farmers. Burden by high taxes, forced labor, and the requisition or confiscation of property, Egyptian peasants repeatedly sought to escape from agricultural labor. Roman authorities punished them, compelling them under threats of violence to return to the fields. The recurrent unrest in Judea, Gaul, and Egypt revealed that not all peoples welcomed the government of Rome, even when it brought stability, prosperity, and peace. Local allegiances and separatist tendencies persisted, raising questions about whether the Romans could absorb so many diverse peoples all of whom had their own political, cultural, and religious traditions. Were these peoples committed to the values of Roman civilization or would they withdraw their allegiance and revert to their native customs should imperial authority weaken?

In the centuries that followed, as Rome staggered under the weight of mounting economic, political, and military difficulties, the answer to that question became apparent. The peoples whom the Romans had incorporated into their Empire reasserted themselves. Increasingly, the masses, including the Romanized elite in the provinces, withdrew their support from Imperial Rome and tried to break away.

II.

A healthy state required commerce to serve as the economic foundation of political unity. In addition, agricultural production had to increase to feed the growing population and internal markets had to develop to stimulate industry. The Roman economy had serious defects. Communication and transportation were slow. Built to accommodate armies on the march, Roman roads were too narrow for large carts and in places were too steep for them to cross. Considering it unworthy of a gentleman to engage in business or commerce, many Roman aristocrats excelled at squandering their fortunes rather than investing in agricultural, commercial, or industrial development. Lacking capital investment, the economy stagnated.

Combined with the failure to engage in meaningful technological innovation, economic stagnation led to limited opportunities for employment. Development of the imperial economy slowed. The shortage of jobs and the lack of income left the masses with little purchasing power, which, of course, further inhibited the growth of commerce and industry. In the meantime, the government kept the price of grain artificially low. Many of the unemployed in Rome and throughout Italy lived on the free or cheap grain that the state distributed. This circumstance may have prevented food shortages but at the same time it lessened the demand for agricultural produce, which hurt farmers. Low prices discouraged farmers from expanding production and forced many to abandon the land altogether to seek other ways to make a living, a development that added to the burdens of an already strained urban labor market. As more farmers left the countryside, towns and cities became overwhelmed by an influx of poor who were seeking work. Urban migration created a serious labor shortage in agricultural districts. Those who continued to farm often struggled to gather the harvest.

Only a tiny segment of the Roman population ever reaped the full economic benefits of the Pax Romana. Big landowners and merchants wallowed in luxury. The rural and urban poor, by contrast, lived precarious and often miserable lives. They derived few of the economic, cultural, or political benefits that accompanied Roman citizenship. Mired in unrelenting poverty, they also had no voice in politics. The sophisticated culture of the Roman world, which most neither appreciated nor respected, virtually excluded them. To placate and silence the masses, the ruling elite offered them free or cheap grain and distracted them from their hardships with sensational entertainment such as the gladiatorial contests, the infamous bread and circuses. Yet, on occasion discontent still exploded into mob violence. An enormous material and cultural gap had opened between rich and poor, rural and urban. Rome and other Italian cities were, in reality, islands of wealth, luxury, and culture surrounded by seas of poverty, anguish, and barbarism.

III.

Perhaps the most ominous sign of a future crisis was the cultural and spiritual paralysis that had crept over the Roman world. A weary and sterile Hellenism underlay the Pax Romana. Society was in the throes of a transformation of ideas, values, and beliefs that signaled the approaching end of Greco-Roman civilization, which by the second century A.D. had lost its vitality. Mystical religious movements began to challenge and replace classical humanism. No longer considering reason to be a viable or satisfying guide to life, educated men and women subordinated the intellect to unregulated emotion. No longer finding purpose in everyday life, people increasingly placed their hope in life after death. The Roman world, in short, experienced a religious revolution. People sought a new vision of order, believing that meaning did not and could not arise from earthly life.

Despite its accomplishments, Greek rationalism had never fully subdued mysticism. Mystery, magic, and ecstasy never lost their hold on the popular imagination. As a consequence, throughout the Hellenistic world rationalism gradually receded and the irrational displayed a renewed vigor. The resurgence of the mystical revealed itself in the popularity of the supernatural and the occult, alchemy and astrology. Many became devotees of religious cults that promised individual salvation. They sought escape from the struggles of this world through a union with the divine. Fearing that much of life was beyond their control and that reason had failed them, people increasingly turned for help, relief, and deliverance to soothsayers, magicians, astrologers, and exorcists.

The mystery religions that proliferated throughout the Roman Empire shared a number of common elements. Whether they had originated in Babylon, Persia, Syria, Egypt, or Asia Minor, the mystery cults required converts to undergo rites of initiation and to take oaths of secrecy. Certain that their god would protect them in this world and ensure immortality in the next, the faithful prepared to commune with the divine by purifying themselves through baptism, sometimes using the blood of animals. The members of some cults fasted while the members of others ate a sacred meal together and then drank from a sacred vessel. Whatever practice the initiates followed, the purpose of their sacramental drama was to propel them to an experience of intense exaltation and ultimately to rebirth and everlasting life.

Of particular importance was the Cult of Mithras, which in time became the most popular rival to Christianity. Originating in Persia, Mithrism emphasized courage and camaraderie. It is no surprise, then, that Mithrism was prevalent among Roman soldiers. Mithras, whose birthday the Romans celebrated on December 25, had a mission to save humanity from evil. He demanded abject obedience from his followers, who had to adhere to a strict moral code. Mithras judged the souls of all men and women after death and promised eternal life to those who had remained faithful to him.

The immense popularity of the mystery religions demonstrates that many persons throughout the Roman world had lost faith in reason. Religion comforted the spirit. Men and women convinced themselves that the gods could provide what reason, natural law, philosophy, and civic virtue could not: a way to overcome the misfortunes, failures, and suffering of life. Religion also offered the hope of immortality, the sense of belonging to a community when so many felt isolated, alienated, and alone, an outlet to express intense emotion, and the cure for uncertainty and the anxiety that it produced. The rise and spread of the mystery cults was thus the antidote to feelings of dissatisfaction with the human condition that had revealed itself in every aspect of Roman society and life. The early Roman emperors had brought peace and stability to the ancient world, but for all their power they could not alleviate basic human feelings of boredom, loneliness, alienation, anxiety, and impotence. A spiritual malaise gradually descended on the Roman Empire. People found temporary amusement, but no meaning, in art, literature, and various forms of entertainment. Nothing, it seemed, could elevate the mind or inspire the spirit.

Roman philosophers also began to articulate ideas and to display attitudes that were markedly at odds with classical humanism. Most notable among these was the expression of indifference to, or pessimism about, society, politics, and the world. From trying to understand society, government, nature, the universe, and human relationships, philosophers now reached beyond earthly life in search of a higher reality. In Neo-Platonism these vague yearnings for transcendence cohered into a systematic philosophy that denied the efficacy of reason.

The most influential advocate of Neo-Platonism, Plotinus aspired to bring about the ecstatic union of the soul with the divine. His quest required the subordination of the philosophical to the mystical. Plato’s thought was both rational and otherworldly. Plato had insisted on the rational interpretation of human activity and had urged that life, private and public, be guided by reason. At the same time, Plato encouraged the soul to ascend to a higher reality: the realm of the Forms. Plotinus regarded human beings as rational creatures. He used rational arguments, for example, to explain his religious beliefs. But Plotinus was even more intrigued by the otherworldly aspects of Platonic thought.

Plotinus desired a union with the Good, which he argued was the source of all being. He believed that the intellect alone could not accomplish such a union. The rational mind could not understand, or even describe, the Good, which transcended mere knowledge. Joining with the Good, whom Plotinus sometimes called the One, required a mystical leap of faith, a purification of the soul so that it could return to its origins and its eternal home. For Plotinus, philosophy became a religious experience, a mystical contemplation of the ideal and the everlasting.

The thinkers who followed Plotinus believed that through magic the soul could unite with the divine. Compared to this experience, of what value was knowledge of this world or a concern for human affairs? For Plotinus and other Neo-Platonists, the world was a sea of tears from which individuals should long only to escape. Reality, they insisted, was not of this world but beyond it. The purpose of existence was not to comprehend the world, to realize human desires, to fulfill human potential, or to improve the human community. Rather, human beings ought to strive to forget this world and to commune with the divine.

Embracing spiritual intoxication, Neo-Platonism grew out of the despair of reason. This development marks a radical transformation in western thought and culture. In the West, philosophy was founded on reason and represented an effort to understand reality through the application of reason and the conduct of rational discourse. It could not admit of a reality that reason could neither understand nor explain. To exalt intuition, ecstasy, rapture, and mysticism at the expense of reason implied the death of philosophy as thinkers in the West had conceived it. With the rise of Neo-Platonism, ancient philosophy committed suicide. Thereafter religion took the place that philosophy had once occupied, and in western civilization a permanent tension emerged between the classical and the religious vision of the world.

By the Late Roman Empire, mystery religions had stupefied the masses while mystical philosophy beguiled the elite. These developments fundamentally transformed civilization in the West. Philosophy and reason became subordinate to religion and mysticism. People had raised their eyes to heaven. In the Roman world the pursuit of the divine gradually superseded all merely human enterprises.

IV.

When Marcus Aurelius died in 180 A.D., the Roman Empire was politically stable, economically prosperous, and militarily secure. During the third century, the ordered civilization of the Pax Romana began to crumble. There were numerous causes. The Empire plunged into military anarchy, was subject to the invasion of Germanic tribes, and burdened with economic turmoil. In addition, mystical religions, which undermined the rational foundations of Greco-Roman civilization, pervaded the Roman world. Finally, with the death of Marcus Aurelius, the Empire for the most part lacked effective political leadership.

The degeneration of the army was a principal reason for the crisis of the third century. An excellent fighting force, the army had long underlay Roman power. Soldiers were renowned for their discipline, organization, and loyalty. But by the third century, the Roman army suffered a marked deterioration. The loyalty of the troops to Rome became suspect. Soldiers preyed on civilians and made and unmade emperors. Fearful of being killed by their unruly troops or murdered by suspicious emperors, generals were compelled to seize power if only to protect themselves. Once in power, they had to buy the loyalty of the soldiers and guard against assassination by other generals who also sought power.

In the fifty years between 235 and 285, mutiny and civil war raged. Legion fought legion. During that period, there were twenty-six emperors; twenty-five died by violence. The once stalwart and nearly invincible Roman legions now neglected their duties. The army no longer defended the borders and, in addition, disrupted Roman political life. Ambitious generals with the support of their troops—however fleeting that support might have been—continuously imperiled the security and stability of imperial government. Perhaps one explanation for the change in attitude among the soldiers was the liberal granting of citizenship. In 212 A.D., the Senate extended Roman citizenship to virtually all free men. Previously, the army had drawn recruits from among provincials attracted to military service by the prospect of receiving citizenship. These recruits hoped to improve their circumstances and provide a better future for their families by serving Rome.

With citizenship no longer an inducement, recruits were more likely to come from among men who were poor, desperate, and violent. They joined the army primarily to get weapons in their hands with which they could threaten and extort civilians, generals, and emperors alike. These men knew little and cared less about the mission of Rome to civilize the world. When not preying on helpless civilians, they had not the slightest compunction about preying on one another.

Taking advantage of the military anarchy into which Rome had fallen, the Germanic tribes crossed the border to pillage and destroy. The Goths raided the coastal cities of Asia Minor and Greece. They went so far as to even attack and burn Athens. Other Germanic tribes penetrated Gaul, Spain, and northern Italy, engaging the Romans in a full-scale battle near Milan. At the same time that the German tribes were breaching the Roman frontier, a revitalized Persian Empire launched an offensive and, for a brief time, conquered Roman lands in the east. Some parts of the Empire, notably Gaul, tried to break away from Rome, asserting local patriotism over Roman universalism.

These events had severe economic repercussions. The Germans ransacked cities, destroyed farmland, and disrupted trade. To obtain money and supplies for the army, emperors increasingly resorted to confiscating the private property, such as animals, wood, and grain, of Roman citizens. They extracted forced labor to maintain roads and bridges, and devalued the currency by coining more money without also increasing the supply of precious metal to support its value. Inflation of the currency forced some to revert to a barter economy. Taken together, these measures ruined the economic prospects of middle-class property owners and caused many citizens to withdraw their loyalty from Rome.

 Repeated invasions, civil war, looting alike by German invaders and Roman soldiers, a debased currency, inflation, the excessive demands of the state, the disruption of transportation and commerce, and declining agricultural production that brought famine in its wake caused social upheaval as well as economic disaster. Compounding these problems was the return of an epidemic (likely smallpox, but possibly the bubonic plague), which ravaged North Africa and the Balkans during the middle of the third century. As a result of war, famine, and disease, the population of the Empire declined from approximately 70 million during the height of the Pax Romana to 50 million by the Late Roman Empire. The birth rate did not compensate for these losses.

Rome was trapped in a vicious cycle. The decline of the population affected the Empire in three important ways. First, while the size of the Roman population was falling, the costs of operating the Empire began to spiral out of control. This situation created an unsustainable burden for remaining taxpayers who were responsible for paying the bills. Second, the decline in population meant fewer workers to plant, tend, and harvest crops. The drop in agricultural production brought greater food shortages and more frequent famines, which contributed to a further decline in population. Third, the loss of population meant fewer men available for military service, which weakened the Roman army. This shortage of manpower prompted the Emperor Diocletian to recruit German mercenaries to fill out the depleted ranks. The Germans may have made brave soldiers. But they lacked discipline and, in any event, felt no enduring allegiance to the Roman state. The Roman army thus lost much of its will to fight and many of the tactical advantages that it had once enjoyed.

Driven to desperation by famine and disease, by the invasion of the Germans and the plundering of Roman soldiers, by recurrent civil wars, and by rising taxes and the government confiscation of property, many Roman citizens fled the cities, which themselves began to fall into decay. In the meantime, the peasants, who were also crushed by the demands of the state, abandoned their farms. Some sought refuge with the local landlord, but many more took to banditry. As a consequence of these developments, a large segment of the Roman people roamed the countryside, uprooted, destitute, and hopeless.

The urban elite became dissolute and apathetic, no longer taking an interest in public life. Aristocratic landlords took refuge in their fortified country estates and did nothing to help the Empire. Townspeople showed their disenchantment by avoiding public service, and especially by evading conscription. They did not organize to resist the Germanic invasions, since many now hated and feared the Roman state more than they did the Germans. Hounded and robbed by the state and threatened by the army, beleaguered citizens went so far as to regard the Germans as liberators. Salvianus of Marseilles, a fifth-century monk from Gaul, illustrated the discontent that prompted many to despise Rome:

The poor are being robbed, widows groan, orphans are trodden down, so that many, even persons of good health, who have enjoyed a liberal education, seek refuge with the enemy to escape death under the trials of general persecution. They seek among the barbarians the Roman mercy, since they cannot endure the barbarous mercilessness they find among the Romans. . . . So you find men passing over everywhere, now to the Goths. . . , or whatever other barbarians have established their power anywhere, . . . for they would rather live as free men, though in seeming captivity, than as captives in seeming liberty. Hence the name of Roman citizen, once not only much valued but dearly bought, is now voluntarily repudiated and shunned, and is thought not merely valueless, but even almost abhorrent.[1]

V.

The emperors Diocletian and Constantine tried to contain the forces of disintegration. Their efforts were heroic, but they faced an impossible task. At a time when agricultural production was steadily waning, they still had to feed the urban poor and an army of more than 500,000 troops, which was deployed throughout the Empire. They had to prevent further outbreaks of violence and mutiny in the ranks, drive the Germans back across the border, and secure the eastern frontier from Persian attacks. Their solution to all of these problems was to tighten the reins of government and to demand higher taxes and greater contributions of property from Roman citizens. In the process of carrying out these reforms, Diocletian and Constantine completed the transformation of Rome from an empire into a military dictatorship.

In so doing, they brought to a climax trends that had been developing for generations. Diocletian, for instance, acted the part of a despot, wearing elaborate robes and jewels and demanding that his subjects bow in his presence. More substantively, he revoked the traditional right of self-government from cities throughout the Empire. To increase the size of the army, he forced prisoners of war into service and hired German mercenaries. To ensure the production of food and goods, to say nothing of the regular collection of taxes, the Roman state forced unskilled workers and artisans alike to hold their jobs for life and to pass them onto their children when they died. Similarly, peasants became bound to the land that they cultivated. Both workers and peasants thus lost their freedom and became the serfs of Rome. If either workers or peasants tried to flee, Diocletian unleashed an army of government agents to hunt them down and return them to their jobs or to the land.

The state also forced city officials to remain in their positions. More often than not, doing so was a misfortune rather than an advantage. Officials had to make up out of their own finances the difference between the tax revenue that the state demanded and the actual amount collected. Crippling taxes required to pay for the bureaucracy and the military hampered commerce and industry. By oppressing urban dwellers with taxes and regulations, Diocletian and Constantine sapped the initiative of Roman citizens and shattered the vitality of city life, on which both Roman prosperity and Roman civilization had long depended. In the end, their demands prompted many residents simply to abandon cities, having come to regard the state as their oppressor and their enemy. During the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine, then, Rome came to be governed by a centralized, autocratic monarchy that regimented every aspect of Roman life. The individual citizen existed to serve the state.

Notwithstanding the evolution of such tyranny, nearly 200 years after Diocletian’s reign, the Roman historian Zosimus could extol his achievements, especially the protection from invasion that he had afforded:

By the foresight of Diocletian the frontiers were everywhere studded with cities and forts and towers, and the whole army stationed along them. It was thus impossible for the barbarians to break through, since at every point they encountered an opposing force strong enough to repel them.[2]

By imposing some order on the approaching chaos, Diocletian and Constantine had prevented the Empire from utterly collapsing. They had granted Rome a reprieve. Such a long period of relative stability and peace might have enabled the Romans to revitalize their military and their economy, but it was not to be. Adversity continued to haunt the Empire, and the disintegration resumed. By the late fourth century, the Romans had lost the ability to fortify their borders and to prevent invasion.

The Huns, a warlike Mongol people, swept out of central Asia and across the Russian steppes. They subdued the Ostrogoths, a Germanic tribe that had established itself in Ukraine. They forced the Visigoths, another Germanic tribe that had settled in what is now Romania, to seek refuge in the eastern part of the Roman Empire. Enraged at their mistreatment at the hands of Roman officials, the Visigoths took up arms against Rome. In 378, the Visigoths routed a Roman army at the Battle of Adrianople, killing or capturing two-thirds, or 67 percent, of the Roman force engaged in the fighting. Emperor Valens died in the battle, which was the worst defeat that Rome had suffered since the Battle of Cannae in 216 B.C. during the Second Punic War against Carthage. The Visigoths now occupied Roman territory and were there to stay. The Battle of Adrianople signified that the Romans could no longer secure their borders.

Attracted by the warmer Italian climate and the wealth of the Empire, other Germanic tribes now encroached on the Roman frontier with comparative impunity. Frightened enough by the arrival of the Huns to abandon their homelands, they sought fertile land to farm. At the end of 406, the Roman borders finally collapsed, and a variety of peoples, such as the Vandals, the Alans, and the Suebi, joined the Visigoths in overrunning the western-most provinces. In 408 and 409, the Visigoths, under the leadership of Alaric, besieged Rome itself, extorting a huge sum from the government and the inhabitants in return for permitting food to enter the city. St. Jerome lamented: “Who could believe that Rome, built upon the conquest of the whole world, would fall to the ground? that [sic] the mother herself would become the tomb of her peoples?”[3]

In 451, Attila the Hun, who had untied the Mongol tribes, led them into Gaul, where he suffered the only defeat of his military career at the hands of a coalition of Germans and remnants of the Roman army. Yet, by the time Attila died two years later, in 453, he had nearly transformed the whole of Europe into a province of the Mongolian Empire. His death did not save Rome or even grant a respite from its many tribulations. In 455, the Vandals pillaged Rome, while other regions fell under the control of various Germanic chieftains. In 476, German officers and soldiers who were in the employ of Rome overthrew Emperor Romulus and placed a fellow German, Odoacer, on the imperial throne. This action brought the Roman Empire in the west to an end.

Was the fall of Rome suicide or murder? Did the Germanic tribes walk over a corpse or did they contribute to its demise? Enfeebled by internal rot, the Roman Empire succumbed to the German invaders. Perhaps had Rome retained its vitality and strength, the Romans might have defeated the Germans or might at least have held them at bay, preventing their encroachment upon Roman territory. If Rome was not built in a day, neither did it disappear in a day. The fall of Rome was a process that took hundreds of years. It was not the result of a single event that occurred in the fifth century. Then, too, only the western portion of the Empire collapsed. The eastern half, which by the fifth century was wealthier and more populous than its western counterpart, was less afflicted by civil war and less exposed to invasion. It survived as the Byzantine Empire with its capital in Constantinople for almost another thousand years. But for all the wealth, power, and splendor it had once commanded, Rome itself was gone.

This essay was first published here in July 2022.

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Notes:

[1] Salvian, On the Government of God, trans. by Eva M. Sanford (New York, 1966), 141-42.

[2] Quoted in Stephen Williams, Diocletian and the Roman Recovery (New York, 1985), 101.

[3] Quoted in James Harvey Robinson, ed., Readings in European History (Boston, 1904), 24.

The featured image is “Caracalla and Geta” (1907) by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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