Are We Rome?

A recent book by this title caused me to review the causes for the fall of the Roman Empire back when I was teaching western civ at the local community college. Normally I'm not much impressed by the "lessons of history" as they're often called. Usually such arguments are advanced by special pleaders, trying to justify their own present-day ideas. But we might be able to draw some thoughts about America in 2011 by looking deep into the human past.

The first great historian of the Roman period was the Englishman Edmund Gibbon, who concluded that Rome fell because of the ascendancy of Christianity. Gibbon argued that Christianity robbed the Romans of their aggressive fighting spirit, and made them less willing to exploit other people. People became more concerned with salvation than with imperial affairs. Many other nations that called themselves Christian have been guilty of terrible acts of violence and cruelty in the years since Rome fell, however. Gibbon's thesis seems to fall on that account if on no other.

In the fourth century the Romans lost a catastrophic (from their perspective) battle at a place called Adrianople. The emperor was killed and several legions were destroyed. In the aftermath of this defeat the Romans were no longer able to resist the invasions of numerous barbarian tribes into the hinterlands of the empire.

War is the chanciest of human endeavors, and loss of a single battle can decide the fate of nations. Just consider the French in May, 1940. Their nation was defeated in a matter of days by superior German strategy and tactics, as well as higher morale. France passed immediately out of the rank of great world powers.

Still, the Romans had lost battles and campaigns well before Adrianople. Three legions were annihilated in the Teutoborg forest 300 years earlier and the empire persisted, grew, flourished for most of the intervening period. Why had Adrianople been fatal, if indeed it was?

If military disasters cannot account for the end of the empire, what can? "Barbarians" as they were called began exerting pressure on the eastern part of the empire well before the time Adrianople was fought. One could argue that the Romans were incapable of meeting this challenge because their empire had always been a hollow shell. Imperial possessions were managed by the threat of repression more than by the actual presence of Roman troops. Local leaders were co-opted or coerced into doing the bidding of the Romans. King Herod in the Gospel stories is a case in point.

The Roman empire began at about the time the Christian era started, from which we date time to this day. If it only came apart 400 years later, that's a long time for them to get away with a kind of shell game. The "barbarian" theory seems to be only a partial explanation for what went wrong.

The Romans paid for their expansion by robbing their conquests and enslaving significant parts of the native populations they encountered. Rome worked on slave labor. One theory for Rome's fall is that the Romans became so dependent on slaves that they could do little for themselves. Slaves, who had no reason to preserve the system that kept them in bondage, nevertheless balanced the accounts, engineered the public works, tended the animals, raised the crops, and mined the metals that allowed the empire to go on. As the supply of slaves dried up when expansion ceased, the empire went into decline.

If you happen to like metaphors, the empire could be compared to a balloon which was blown up to the point of bursting, tied off, and left to deflate gradually.

Roman success could be attributed to their ability as innovators. As the Greeks were great artists and artisans, the Romans were marvelously adept engineers and organizers. The Roman roads are justly famous, the aqueducts carried sufficient water to the city for a population of a million people, their baths and sewers allowed a population that large to live in some measure of cleanliness and health. But it's difficult to maintain technological superiority for a prolonged period, and prosperity can pave the way for its own downfall if it breeds complacency or a kind of societal rigidity.

The Roman republic had been composed of two classes, the patricians and the plebians. Much of the history of the republic centers around the efforts of plebians to secure a measure of social and economic justice and the resistance of the patricians to any changes in a system that favored themselves. By the time of the empire, those class distinctions seem to have been blurred. What we would call "old money" still existed and the ancient families still guarded their supposed prerogatives, but the business of the empire was conducted by comparative upstarts often as not, and administration passed to a kind of meritocracy, sometimes even including former slaves.

You might think this would strengthen the imperial structure not weaken it, but (I suggest) divorcing the wealthy from responsibility for the empire freed them to engage in intemperate partisan politics and put their own interests before the public good. A second part of this developing argument is that the old families of Rome freed themselves from taxation - remember, the empire was funded by looting the provinces - widening the disparity between rich and poor and thereby alienating most Romans from their government.

Governmental instability increased after the reigns of the "Five Good Emperors" in the second century. In the next hundred years, emperors came and went much more rapidly. Assassination and coup d'etat became the normal way of throwing the old gang of thieves out of office. However, the empire had survived the Caesars of the first century, that line of psychotics stretching from Augustus to Nero. They might have continued indefinitely with what we'll jokingly call the Klingon theory of personnel management.

Modern conservatives point out that the Roman administration became very bloated as the years went by. Public employees became so numerous that the private creators of wealth were squashed beneath a multitude of bean counters and a welfare system that placated the poor and unemployed with spectacles and food handouts. Although it is clear that Rome contained a rather large class of the unemployed, and that successive emperors staged more and more elaborate games and ceremonies to amuse the people and prevent rioting, this also had been going on for hundreds of years by the time Rome fell. There does not seem to be an immediate connection between the Roman welfare state and their decline.

Roman emperors began to debase the coinage by the third century. As the amount of precious metal in coins declined, the inflation rate increased. Inflation feeds on itself in a kind of vicious circle. Everyone anticipates it will continue and postpones bringing goods to market, meaning that the amount of money available continuously exceeds the goods for sale, making the spiral continue. Part of the reason for debasing the currency was simply that the silver mines of Italy were being exhausted.

This brings us to the theory of environmental decay. Farmlands were overused and lost fertility, forests were destroyed, mines played out, and the empire could not cope with the dwindling pool of resources. The empire simply devoured itself.

Which of these causes was the one true agent of Rome's fall? Historians, who love to argue about almost anything or nothing, will espouse one or another of them until we ourselves go the way of the dodo. Today's question is: can we see parallels between what happened to the Romans and what we Americans are experiencing today or are likely to experience in our future?