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THE FALL OF ROME

[BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE, JUNE 1846]

THE Rise and Fall of the Roman empire is by far the most remarkable and memorable event which has occurred in the whole history of mankind. It is hard to say whether the former or the latter is most worthy of profound study and anxious examination. The former has hitherto most strongly attracted the attention of men, from the extraordinary spectacle it exhibited of human fortitude triumphing over every obstacle, and human perseverance at length attaining universal dominion. It was the spectacle most likely to rivet the attention of strenuous and growing nations-of men in that stage of existence when national ambition is strong and the patriotic passions ardent, and the selfish interests. have not yet become so powerful as to have generally extinguished the generous affections. But it may be doubted whether the events that occurred in the later stages of the Roman empire, are not fraught with more valuable and important information than those of its earlier annals. Less interesting to the soldier, less animating to the citizen, less heart-stirring to the student, they are more instructive to the philosopher, more pregnant with warning to the statesman. They contain the only instance yet exhibited among men of a nation sinking from no external shock, but from the mere influence of internal decay; and point alone, of all passages in the annals of the species, to the provision made by nature, in the passions and selfishness of men, against the possibility of long-continued and universal dominion.

To any one who attentively considers this all-important subject, two things must be apparent, of the very highest

The first is,

consequence in arriving at correct ideas on it. that the Roman empire did not sink under the external violence of the barbarians, but under the weakness and decline which had arisen in its own bosom. The second, that the causes hitherto assigned by historians and philosophers for this internal decay, are either vague generalities, having no definite meaning, and incapable of any practical application, or can be easily shown, even to the most superficial reader, not to have been the real causes of the phenomenon.

There can be no doubt that some of the irruptions of the barbarians particularly those of the Goths into Romelia, which led to the fatal battles of Thessalonica and Adrianople; and of Alaric into Italy, which terminated in the capture of the Eternal City-were very formidable inroads, and might, in the best days of the empire, have taxed its strength and required all its resolution to repel. But a little consideration must be sufficient to show that, formidable as these invasions were, they could without much difficulty have been withstood, if the empire had possessed the strength which it did in the days of the republic, or in the first two centuries of the Cæsars. The Cimbri and Teutones, whom Marius combated and destroyed on the Rhone and in the north of Italy, were at least as formidable a body of barbarians as those which four centuries afterwards overturned the Western Empire. The forces whom Cæsar conquered in Gaul, Trajan on the Danube, were to the full as powerful as those which carried the standards of the Goths and Vandals to Athens and Carthage. Etius, in the decline of the empire, and with the mingled Roman and barbarian force of Gaul alone-a mere fraction of the united strength of the empire-defeated Attila in the plenitude of his power, at the head of three hundred thousand men, on the field of Chalons.

Belisarius, with fifteen thousand men, recovered Africa from the Vandals; and there remains a most curious letter of his to the emperor at Constantinople, describing the deplorable want of soldiers which he experienced when he landed in Italy. "We are arrived," says he, "in Italy, destitute of all the necessary implements of war-men, horses, arms, and money. We have collected, with extreme difficulty, in our late circuit through Thrace, about four thousand

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recruits, naked, and unskilled in the use of weapons." Thirty thousand legionary soldiers did the same by Italy under Narses, and overthrew the whole power of the Goths. So high did the Roman soldiers still stand even in the estimation of their enemies, that Totila, the warlike monarch of that warlike people, strove to bribe them into his service

by offers of high pay. None had yet been approved equal

to these legionary soldiers in battle; and the manner in which, with infinitely inferior forces, they repelled the barbarians on all sides, decisively demonstrates this superiority. The vigour and ability of Heraclius so restored the empire, when wellnigh sinking under the might of its enemies, that for a century it was regarded with awe by the barbarous nations all round its immense frontier. The five provinces beyond the Euphrates were conquered by the Romans from the Parthians during the decline of the empire. Nothing is so remarkable, in the last three centuries of Roman history, as the small number of the forces which combated around the eagles, and the astonishing victories which, when led by ability, they gained over prodigious bodies of their enemies. The legions had dwindled into battalions, the battalions into cohorts. The four hundred and fifty thousand men who under Augustus guarded the frontiers of the empire, had sunk to one hundred and fifty thousand in the time of Justinian. + But this hundred and fifty thousand upheld the Eastern Empire for a thousand years. So feeble were the assaults of the barbarians, that for above two centuries of that time the single city of Constantinople, with the aid of the Greek fire, defended itself with scarce any territory from which to draw support. "The nine bands of Honorius," says Gibbon, "did not exceed the number of five thousand men; yet this inconsiderable force was sufficient to terminate a war which had threatened the power and safety of Constantine. Such were the feeble arms which decided the possession of the Western provinces, from the wall of Antoninus to the columns of Hercules." It was not the strength of its enemies, therefore, but the weakness of itself, which, after an existence in the West and East of two

*

PROCOPIUS, book iii., chap. 12. GIBBON, vol. iv. chap. 43, p. 126. Milman's

Edition.

+ GIBBON'S Rome, vol. iv. chap. 42, p. 71. Milman's Edition.

Ibid. chap. 30, p. 86, 47.

thousand years, at length extinguished the Roman empire. Gibbon tells us this expressly:" The theory of war," says he," was not more familiar to the camps of Cæsar and Trajan than to those of Justinian and Maurice. The science of tactics, the order, evolutions, stratagems of antiquity, were transcribed and studied in the books of the Greeks and Romans. Their magazines were plentifully stored with arms -in the construction and use of ships, engines, and fortifications, the barbarians admired the ingenuity of a people whom they had often vanquished in the field. But the solitude or degeneracy of the provinces could no longer supply a race of men to handle the weapons, to guard those walls, to navigate those ships, and to reduce the theory of war to bold and successful practice. Neither honour, nor patriotism, nor generous superstition, could animate the lifeless bodies of slaves and strangers, who had succeeded to the honour of the legions."*

What, then, were the causes of decay which proved fatal at length to this immense and enduring dominion? Philosophers in all ages have pondered on the causes; but those hitherto assigned do not seem adequate to explain the phenomenon. Not that the causes of weakness are baseless or imaginary; on the contrary, many of them were most real and substantial sources of evil. But what renders them inadequate to explain the fall of Rome is, that they had all existed, and were in full operation, at the time when the commonwealth and empire were at their highest point of elevation, and centuries before either exhibited any symptoms of lasting decay. For example, the ancient historians, from Sallust downwards, are loud in their denunciation of the corruption of public morals, and the selfish vices of the patrician classes of society, as being the chief source of the decay which was going forward; while the growth of the republic had been mainly owing to the extraordinary virtue and energy of a small number of individuals. But the very circumstance of these complaints having been made by

* GIBBON, vol. iv. chap. 46, p. 295. Milman's Edition.

+"Mihi multum legenti multum audienti quæ populus Romanus domi militiæque præclara facinora fecissent, forte lubuit attendere quæ res maxime tanta negotia sustinuit. At mihi multa agitanti constabat, paucorum civium egregiam virtutem cuncta patravisse: eoque factum ut divitias paupertas, multitudinem paucitas, superaret."-SALLUST, Bell. Cat., 32.

Sallust in the time of Augustus, and the fact of the empire of the West having existed for four hundred, that of the East for fourteen hundred years afterwards, affords decisive evidence that this cause cannot be considered as having been mainly instrumental in producing their fall. How is the unexampled grandeur and prosperity of the empire under Nero, Adrian, Trajan, and the two Antonines, whose united reigns extended over eighty years, to be explained, if the seeds of ruin two centuries before had been sown in the vices and corruption of the rich patricians? In truth, so far was general luxury or corruption from being the cause of the ruin of the empire, the cause of its fall was just the reverse. was the excessive poverty of its central provinces, and their inability to pay the taxes, which was the undoubted cause of the catastrophe. The nobles and patricians often were luxurious, but they were not a thousandth part of the nation. The people was miserably poor, and got more indigent daily, in the later stages of its decay.

It

Modern writers, to whom the philosophy of history for the first time in the annals of mankind has become known, and who were aware of the important influence of general causes on social prosperity, independent of the agency of individual men, have assigned a different set of causes more nearly approaching the truth. Montesquieu says, the decay of the Roman empire was the natural consequence of its extension. This sounds well, and looks like an aphorism: but if the matter be considered with attention, it will be found that it is vox et præterea nihil. Those who, with so much complacency, rest in the belief that the fall of the Roman empire was the natural result of its extension, forget that its greatest prosperity was coexistent with that very extension. It is impossible to hold that the decay of the empire was the consequence of its magnitude, when the glorious era of the Antonines, during which it numbered a hundred and twenty millions of inhabitants under its rule, and embraced nearly the whole known habitable globe within its dominion, immediately succeeded its greatest extension by the victories, unhappily to us so little known, of Trajan.

More recent writers, seeing that Montesquieu's aphorism was a vague proposition which meant nothing, have gone a

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