Never On Sunday

Finished with the “Rome and the Barbarians” lectures. Although the early lectures duplicated much of the basic Roman history you can get anywhere, the later lectures offered a lot of new (for me) details on the decline and eventual collapse of the empire.

Traditionally, the story of the decline and fall is one of internal decay, in which barbarian victories are a symptom, not a cause, of Rome’s decline. Rome’s collapse is blamed on decadence, which empties treasuries and treats military service as unattractive. Rome becomes so rich and spoiled that leaders can advance more readily by exploiting office and plundering their political rivals than by winning victories for Rome. And the barbarians, who could easily have been crushed by republican Roman might simply move in on the self-indulgent imperial Romans.

No doubt all of that is true, to some extent. Certainly Rome suffered increasingly from civil war and its own generals’ ambitions. Certainly, too, the idea of moral decay fits the Roman narrative of the time. That narrative is open to question when we consider the source: patrician scholars insistent that the plebs go out and start dying again to advance patrician glory still further, rather than enjoying their own rising status on the income from colonial conquests.

Professor Harl’s lectures add a lot of texture to this basic narrative of decadence and betrayal within, describing how the barbarians kept getting stronger as a direct product of Rome’s success and expansion. To some extent, this was the product of learning from defeat, but to a greater extent, it was a product of being taught to fight by the Romans themselves, who simply had to turn to their colonial subjects to fill out the ranks. Every time a barbarian people was conquered, Rome was obligated to defend them from the next barbarians down the road. There simply weren’t enough warm bodies in Latium to police it all. And, to a surprising extent, the old barbarians were happy to join in. The bararians wanted to be Romanized. Several of the most fearsome invasions began as some barbarian general seeking recognition for his service and elevation into the ruling body, rather than a desire to sack Rome.

This was the true tragedy of Rome’s fall. Students may not admire Rome. It was a brutal empire, however you measure its virtues, and as it transformed from republic to empire, it failed in its own most treasured principles, never mind the principles of 21st century democracies. But whatever its shortcomings, even the people who brought it down liked and admired Rome. Many institutions that contributed to its downfall grew out of expedients meant to preserve it against the current threat: the wholesale admission to citizenship of tribes inadequately assimilated to the culture, the debasement of the currency, the escalating abdication of civic legitimacy to religious legitimacy, the gradual passage of authority from patrician to Roman general to barbarian general to whoever could hold a patch of land or body of soldiers together while Rome, and later Constantinople, dealt with more urgent collapse elsewhere. Everyone could see events spiraling out of control but nobody knew how to stop it, or even how to stop themselves from contributing to the collapse.

That Roman history should be pregnant with lessons for US history is no coincidence; the founding fathers admired Rome and modeled our own government after it. If the past is prologue, then the disintegration of Rome in the hands of its most vocal patriots is a sad thing to ponder.