Rome didn't fall in a day

In 1984 a German scholar worked out that 210 reasons had been advocated for the fall of the Roman empire. Peter Jones enjoys a "fine narrative history" that concentrates on just one.

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.

Rome did fall in a day. It was the day Caesar crossed the Rubicon with his army. From that point on it became a dictatorship. The dictatorship led to such flagrant public spending that the Empire could no longer afford the tax burdens. You actually had people placing themselves into slavery just to escape from the crushing taxes of the day.

It happens again and again to Empire after Empire but the typical historian is blind to it because most of them like governments which tax and spend allot.

it took Rome longer to fall than the USA has been around

I can pinpoint the day of our fall: it is when the income tax amendment was passed. From that day forward the government had the authority to take 100% of the goods. There was no limit placed on it. It's been a long bumpy ride ride on the way to 100% but unless it is limited someday by a counter amendment ( like perhaps a balanced budget amendment) this country too will come to an end.

I disagree, it has been incremental. We have lower taxation of income today than at anytime since 1942, with the exception of 1986-93.

Your point is well taken
Another was the Great Depression and the New Deal. But we were still strong until about 1965.

But what is really destroying American isnt economic leftism, but cultural leftism. The USA today is more economically right wing than it has been since before WW2.

In Canada they are today the furthest to the right on economic issues they have ever been in their history. But on cultural issues they are Marxists who hate themselves and all of western civ.

What is destroying is cultural relativism, destruction of the family, normailzation of perversion, illegal immigration. none of which were supported by the old left pre-1965

It is not the Old Left that is a threat to Amerca, they really dont exist anymore. It is the New Left who are cultural Marxists

I disagree, it has been incremental. We have lower taxation of income today than at anytime since 1942, with the exception of 1986-93.

As I said, a bumpy ride, one that goes up and down, but given the unlimited access to our pockets the government has built into the constitution itself the rest of the constitution is naturally crumbling aside to accommodate it. Here is a document originally designed to limit government power that has been given free reign to take it all. This long string of horrible decisions from the Supreme Court, from the huge expansion of the commerce clause to its latest land grab spring from that common fountainhead. The Income tax amendment is a contraction to everything which was in the constitution beforehand and that contradiction is slowly going away as government naturally moves to take the power it now has a tap on

The culture , the schools , liberals, you name it, they are not the ultimate cause but merely the symptoms of the disease. The disease is unchecked state power and right now there is nothing to stop it, only to slow it down occasionally. It's like cancer really. If the body has no means to stop it, you die.

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