The New Criterion

Empires have been a hot scholarly commodity of late. The collapse of the Soviet Union left the United States in a position of global military, economic, and cultural dominance similar to that possessed by England from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, and in antiquity by Rome for half a millennium. Even before the terrorist attacks on September 11 compelled the United States to increase its global presence even further, friends and foes alike were fretting over the existence of what a French Foreign Affairs minister called a hyperpuissance, a “hyperpower” certain to overreach and meet the fate of other arrogant imperial powers, an estimation typically delivered with a heavy dose of proleptic schadenfreude.

Given this topicality, the last several years have seen numerous volumes on the British and Roman empires and how their histories and fates can illuminate America’s global dominance. The subtitle of Adrian Goldsworthy’s How Rome Fell, “Death of a Superpower,” suggests another entry in this flourishing sub-genre. Goldsworthy is an ancient historian with an emphasis on military history, and he has written several books on the Roman empire and army, including the well-received Caesar: The Life of a Colossus. Despite, however, the promise of lessons for the present hinted at by the subtitle, the greater value of How Rome Fell comes from its being a reliable, reader-friendly survey of Rome’s decline and fall, “one of the great mysteries of history,” as Goldsworthy styles it. That is achievement enough, given the complexity, chronological reach, and numerous sources one must master to understand the collapse of what Edward Gibbon called the “stupendous fabric” of Rome.

Goldsworthy first offers a brisk survey of the various theories—over two hundred, by one scholar’s count—attempting to explain the reasons for Rome’s collapse. The ancients saw moral decline as the key to Rome’s fall, whether they were pagans blaming Christians or Christians like St. Augustine blaming idolatrous pagans. Like the ancients, Gibbon looked to a moral decline abetted by a Christianity that weakened the ideals of public service: as Goldsworthy summarizes, “The Romans failed in the end because they no longer deserved to succeed.” After Gibbon, modern scholars variously concentrated on uncontrolled immigration, or “social problems and class tension” worsened by economic problems such as an “over-taxed peasantry being squeezed to pay for the spiraling costs of maintaining the army.” Usually reflecting the concerns of the historian and his time, other proposed factors have included climate change and demographic decline. Still other historians dismiss the very idea of “decline” and focus instead on continuity, concentrating more on society, culture, religion, government, and law than on arms and men. For them, “decline” has given way to “transformation.”

Goldsworthy, in contrast, surveys the larger canvas of Rome and its decline, including the early empire as well as the later stages that interest most modern scholars. Like Gibbon, he begins with the “golden age” of the Roman Empire, the reign of Marcus Aurelius in the second century A.D., but, unlike Gibbon, who carried his story up to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Goldsworthy stops in the sixth century with the reign of Justinian. Along the way, he discusses the history, politics, culture, wars, and the great men and women of this half a millennium, also examining external and internal problems with which Rome had to deal.

One of the most troubling issues was succession. The death of Aurelius returned Rome to the chaos of the early empire with its collection of imperial psychopaths and incompetents. His son Commodus’s character was as vicious as Nero’s, more interested in playing gladiator than in running the empire. This task fell to “court favourites,” some “capable, others utterly corrupt and many somewhere in between”—all were eventually executed. The result was disorder, paranoia, intrigue, and conspiracy, which distracted the emperor from tending to the complex business of a far-flung empire beset by enemies. Thus Rome passed, in the words of the historian Dio, “from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust” at the death of Aurelius, and a pattern was set for the next five centuries.

Other problems followed the chaotic process of succession. Warmongering was a good way for emperors, particularly insecure ones, to acquire prestige and win the favor of the army. Dependence on the army, however, created in its turn numerous sources of conflict and disorder, as well as new claimants to the purple. The great scale of the empire meant that emperors had to delegate military power, but the success that often followed a governor’s or commander’s campaign became a spur to usurpation. Hence the constant civil wars between the various pretenders and the paranoia and violence that haunted emperors, who were trapped in “a vicious circle, as each new assassination or rebellion by a usurper, no matter how quickly it collapsed, made a renewal of civil war more likely.” This “vicious circle” persisted through the late empire’s history, albeit broken, at times, by exceptional leaders like Diocletian or Constantine.

Another constant problem was the presence of “barbarians” on the empire’s borders. In the east, a resurgent Persian empire intermittently nibbled at Rome’s border provinces. To the northwest, various Germanic tribes incessantly raided Roman territory. Neither enemy threatened Rome’s existence at first, but the frequency of their incursions meant they had to be dealt with, further solidifying the need for large armies that fed dynastic struggles. Eventually, the intensity of such raiding increased and finally led to the large-scale invasions of the fifth century, which culminated in the sack of Rome by Alaric’s Goths in 410.

At the mundane level, life in Rome after the sack went on much as before. As Goldsworthy notes, overthrowing the empire was not the ambition of the Goths, who were too few for such a task. What an Alaric wanted was “to win rank, position, and as much security as possible within the Roman system.” He also realized “that Roman laws were necessary to run a peaceful state.” In short, Alaric did not want to destroy Rome but to exploit its higher civilization. Despite the continuity of business as usual, however, Rome’s sack had enormous symbolic power and psychological impact, simply because “the imperial government had been incapable of preventing the sack happening in the first place.” Along with the many semi-independent tribal communities allowed to settle within the western provinces, this loss of prestige and the exposure of the emperor’s inability to deal definitively with the barbarian incursions hastened the western emperor’s loss of power.

The remarkable reign of Justinian in the sixth century, which saw a brief recovery of the western provinces that had been taken over by migrant Germanic tribes, was, in the end, merely the final act of Rome’s imperial dominance. Corruption in the imperial bureaucracy and in the army, constant conflict with Persia, and a devastating plague spelled the end of the dream “to take back the lost Roman territories in the west and recreate the grandeur of the old, united empire.” The western empire was on its way to becoming the kingdoms of Medieval Christendom, while in the east a merchant named Muhammad would create a faith whose adherents would destroy Persia and absorb much of the Byzantine empire.

So why did Rome, the colossus dominating the Mediterranean both east and west, eventually collapse? The causes mentioned earlier, such as economic and demographic decline, suffer from a lack of evidence. But much evidence does exist to suggest that endemic civil wars caused by the difficulty of legitimate succession, along with the marginalization of the senatorial class of soldiers and administrators who had helped run the early empire, fatally weakened the empire in the West, thus inviting further encroachment by external enemies:

Each civil war cost the empire. Anything gained by the winning side inevitably had to be taken from other Romans and a prolonged campaign was likely to involve widespread destruction within the provinces where fighting occurred.

In addition, this chronic disorder put a high premium on personal survival rather than on service to the state or the ideal of “what Rome was for.” The government “became first and foremost about keeping the emperor in power—and at lower levels, about the individual advantage of bureaucrats and officers.”

Goldsworthy is cautious about what Rome’s decline and fall can mean for contemporary America. The differences he notes, particularly the absence of any problems with the transference of power in modern America, justify such prudence. Yet Rome’s fate does offer some suggestive observations. The creation of a “short-sighted and selfish culture,” along with large, ever-expanding bureaucratic institutions, can lead to an emphasis on personal success and wellbeing rather than on what is good for the state as a whole, a good arising from the knowledge of and belief in what the legitimate purpose of a state is. Despite these caveats, Goldsworthy ends his masterful survey with two cheers for America: “Nothing suggests that the United States must inevitably decline and cease to be a superpower in the near future. We ought to be glad of that, since none of the likely alternatives to this situation are very appealing. This certainly does not mean that America can afford to be complacent.”