Oxford historian Peter Heather has reexamined the fall of Rome. His 2006 book, The Fall of the Roman Empire, holds many lessons for today.

The end of the Roman Empire in the West came, as is well known, in the year 476 A.D. By that time, the Empire itself was nearly 500 years old, but the government of Rome was far older. Rome itself had been founded, mythically by Romulus and Remus, in 753 B.C., and archaeological information confirms that some occupancy of the area did in fact begin at about that time. The justly famous Roman Republic, the forerunner of the Empire, was itself founded in 510 B.C. when the last king, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus was overthrown by Junius Brutus. From that point until the Empire replaced the Republic, two Consuls, each elected to office for a one-year term would rule Rome. Altogether, then, Rome was a dominant power on the world stage for more than 1,000 years. Its collapse in 476 was an historical change of colossal proportions.

Despite the fact that the Empire had ruled Europe and Africa for so long and had wielded, even almost to its dying breath, more military might that any other nation to that point, the end was anticlimactic. Because the state in 476 was suffering from lack of revenue, it could no longer pay the salaries of the soldiers serving in the still mighty Italian army. Odoacer, a barbarian soldier serving in the army, then convinced his fellow soldiers that, should they agree to follow him, he would arrange to have land redistributed amongst them in lieu of their expected salaries.

The soldiers agreed to follow Odoacer and the barbarian leader submitted his proposal. The plan was fiercely opposed by the Roman leader Orestes, the power behind the thrown and father of Emperor Romulus Augustulus. But with Odoacer controlling the army, Orestes had no real chance of thwarting the barbarian’s plan and the barbarian leader captured and executed the Roman near Placentia on August 28 of the fateful year. Paul, Orestes’ brother, was captured and killed in Ravenna a few days later. The impotent emperor and the Roman Senate stood alone, naked against the barbarian power.

In such circumstances, there was no longer any hope and the Emperor resigned. The Senate, for its part, dissolved the Empire in the West. In a letter to the Eastern Roman Emperor, Zeno, the Senate unanimously “disclaim[ed] the necessity, or even the wish, of continuing any longer the Imperial succession in Italy…. The republic might safely confide in the civil and military virtues of Odoacer; and they humbly request, that the emperor would invest him with the title of Patrician, and the administration of the diocese of Italy.”

This event, the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, has been the ground for much historical speculation. How could it come to pass that this powerful, long-lasting Empire finally be laid so low? How could it succumb, at long last, to a barbarian usurper at the head of an Italian army composed largely of other barbarians? The most prominent of all the historians of Rome, Edward Gibbon, in his magisterial treatise entitled The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, concluded that, in the main, Christianity was responsible. This new religion, Gibbon argued, caused Roman leaders to drop out of the public eye in favor of contemplative religious pursuits, caused the Empire to concern itself overly much with the distractions of doctrinal disputes, and, most telling, undermined the martial spirit of the Romans with a turn-the-other-cheek mentality. After Gibbon others, for a time, pointed to barbarians as a contributing factor, and, more recently, historians have pointed to economic factors, arguing that aggressive taxation destroyed the Empire’s economy, and finally the Empire itself. But what really happened? The answer, according to Oxford historian Peter Heather, is that unchecked immigration and invasion led to the gradual dismantling of the empire. Heather tells the story of this massive and crippling wave of hostile immigration in his new book, The Fall of the Roman Empire. For modern Americans grappling with issues of empire abroad and facing the beginning elements of unchecked immigration themselves, the book is fascinating, if somewhat disquieting reading.

The Power of the Empire
In the late 4th century, the power of the Roman Empire, whether in the East or West, was unchallenged. This was the culmination of the age of the Pax Romana when no other power dared challenge the might of Rome and Constantinople. As a result of the external peace, internally the citizens or the state were able to carry on their daily lives in comparative peace and quiet. Some historians have argued, though, that this was actually a time when agriculture in important areas of the Empire, especially in Italy, was failing. To make this claim they point to the fact that tremendous amounts of agricultural produce were brought to Rome from the Empire’s North African provinces, rather than grown locally. Moreover, it is historical orthodoxy to hold that the later Empire overtaxed its landowning class causing a flight from the land that resulted in the infamous Agri Deserti, the phenomenon of the “deserted lands.”

This phenomenon no doubt did occur in some areas. Ancient texts make reference to it and historians were quick, too quick it seems, to assume this applied to the Empire as a whole. Heather cites archaeological evidence to the contrary. Some areas, he points out, experienced rapid and intense agricultural and rural growth. In Roman North Africa, Greece, the Near East and elsewhere, agriculture flourished. In these areas, Heather writes, “the fourth and fifth centuries have emerged as a period of maximum rural development – not minimum, as the orthodoxy would have led us to expect.”

The economy of the Roman Empire was grounded in agriculture and the power of the state, militarily, was a reflection of this economy. If the agricultural sector was strong, the state’s coffers would be full, and the military, largely the only full-scale service provided by the Roman State, would be correspondingly strong. In fact, the military of the Roman Empire in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, just when it should have been on the decline according to orthodox historical interpretation, was near its zenith. Heather points out that at the beginning of the 4th century, at the end of the reign of the Emperor Diocletian, Roman military strength was “389,704 plus 45,562 in the fleets, making a total of 435,266 men.” Heather admits that this is the best estimate that exists but that it is still problematic. Others, he notes, put the figure near 300,000. But that is still a remarkably large force, and it continued to expand into the late 4th century. Even with this lowest estimate, Heather notes, “between the early third and mid-fourth centuries the 300,000 strong Roman army increased in size by at least one-third, and quite possibly by substantially more.” Moreover, this was a highly trained professional army. It was well disciplined, highly organized, and supported by sophisticated logistics. The Romans could fight a two-front war at this time and did so, fighting a reinvigorated Persia in the East while facing threats from Goths and others in the West. This is not the picture of a faltering empire.

Invasion
Clearly, Gibbon’s thesis that Christianity caused the Empire to become soft militarily is not true. The Roman military, far from being weak and yielding, was larger, stronger, and more capable than ever. Moreover, the Empire had the economic wherewithal to support this massive military establishment, a fact that destroys the hypothesis that the late Empire faced an agricultural shortage. So what brought down this colossus?

The beginning of the end came with an amnesty for a horde of immigrants. Faced with pressure from marauding Huns in the East, powerful tribes of Germanic Goths fell back to the Carpathian Mountains to mount a defense under their leaders Alatheus and Saphrax. There they met with another Gothic force led by Athanaric. The joint effort failed and, in 375-376 A.D., under pressure from Hun attacks, two large tribes of Goths, the Tervingi and the Greuthungi moved further west, to the banks of the Danube River where they sought asylum and safety inside the Roman Empire. In a sense, their timing was perfect. The Romans were deeply embroiled in the East with a resurgent Persian empire under the Sassanian leader Shapur, the Persian King of Kings. The Balkans were, therefore, a bit short on manpower. Under the circumstances, the Emperor Valens was forced to admit the Gothic horde. All went well until food supplies ran short and tempers flared. There was an attack on the Emperor at a banquet and soon there was war. The Gothic War raged for six years, and Heather gives a running account of all the disasters that befell the Romans at the time.

From the Gothic War until the fall of the Roman Empire continuous pressure from the Huns would force other barbarians to move en masse across the Western Empire. Throughout the book Heather examines the Empire’s continuing attempts to repel or at least contain the onslaught. More often than not, they were successful in battle, but each success (and sometimes spectacular failure) sapped the strength of the giant. The tale reads like Tolkien, with the Hobbits and Elves and other inhabitants of Middle Earth besieged by an unending flow of rampaging Orcs. But this is not fiction, and in real life the barbarians would win. Soon Gaul was overrun, and Spain, too. The real blow came when Goths under Geiseric crossed into North Africa and took over the Roman provinces there. Loss of these provinces would mean loss of the West, and the combined forces of all the Empire were sent to recover the area. Just before making landfall near Carthage, the Roman fleet was trapped and destroyed by a Gothic fleet. All hope of recovering Africa and saving the West was lost. As a measure of the immensity of this loss, Heather notes that Eastern Empire expended the staggering sum of 103,000 pounds of gold to pay for the armada that would rescue North Africa. This is both a measure of the Empire’s vast wealth and power and of the scale of the disaster that occurred when the mighty Roman fleet and its army were destroyed.

Lessons of the Fall
There are two major lessons to be learned from the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, and these are made apparent in Heather’s book. First and foremost is the danger of uncontrolled hostile immigration. That the Empire could absorb large groups of immigrants is beyond doubt. It could and did do so over several centuries. But even the Roman Empire, with its vast territory and unprecedented wealth had a limit to the number of people it could absorb and Romanize. Eventually, the immigrants grew more powerful than the existing Roman authority and, maintaining to some degree their independence of spirit and character, were unwilling to relinquish their own culture and adopt the Roman. Vast blocs of once Roman territory eventually became foreign and even the pre-existing Roman population, eventually out-numbered, had to make peace with the newcomers. This is a stark lesson for America. The United States faces its own immigration dilemma with very large numbers of immigrants moving in but resisting Americanization. Our modern situation at the Rio Grande is not so different from the Roman situation at the Danube circa 376 A.D.

Also important is Heather’s reevaluation of the role of Christianity. Since Gibbon wrote his great masterpiece, it has been the norm to see in the fall of the Empire the supposedly pernicious role of the new Christian religion. Heather’s book, taken as a whole, is a marvelous corrective for this mistaken position. There can be no doubt, after reading Heather, that the West, at the height of its power, succumbed purely to successive waves of hostile immigrants. Heather also makes the point that if Christianity were to blame, then why did the Empire in the East, based at Constantinople, continue for so long. After all, the Eastern Empire was just as Christian as the West, and was even closer to the scene of the many early doctrinal controversies. And yet the sun did not set on the Eastern Empire of the Romans until 1453. Obviously, the fall of Rome cannot be pinned on Christianity. Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire builds an airtight case that the fall of Rome was solely the consequence of unhindered barbarian immigration. This is a lesson that all Americans should learn as the nation faces its journey into an uncertain 21st century.

Comments  

 

0 #1 yolanda 2010-02-04 16:25

Quote

 

Refresh comments list
RSS feed for comments to this post.

Add comment