The Fall of the Roman Empire (10 page)

For Valentinian I showed clearly, by other measures, that he felt a profound concern for the welfare of the humbler classes, to which he himself had belonged. In one edict he applies to their pursuits the high-flown phrase 'innocent and peaceful rusticity'. Another of his proclamations appeals specifically for social justice on the part of his own tax officials, demanding that special concessions to favoured persons should be eliminated - since such concessions operated at the cost of the ordinary inhabitants of the Empire.

Most important of all, during the years 368-70, Valentinian appointed officials described as Defenders of the People, or Defenders of the Community. These functionaries somewhat resembled the Ombudsmen of modern countries, whose duty it is to remedy the abuses suffered by individuals. But Valentinian's Defenders were explicitly designed to assist the underprivileged classes. In a letter to his praetorian prefect Petronius Probus he writes, 'we are taking a very necessary measure to ensure that the people shall have patrons to protect them against the iniquities of the powerful'.

In every town, therefore, the prefect was to appoint a Defender of the People, and the Emperor himself required to know personally the names of all the men who were selected for these posts. The appointees would have power to deal with every minor grievance themselves, and it was their duty to make justice more accessible to the poor in every way. Earlier Emperors had experimented on similar lines, but it was Valentinian I who elevated their experiments into a comprehensive scheme.

However, it was ominous that his first instruction on the subject had to go to Petronius Probus, who was a noted oppressor himself. And then, once Valentinian died, the institution of the Defenders was so thoroughly watered down that it ceased to retain very much value any longer. For Theodosius 1 transferred the task of selecting them to the city councillors - the very men responsible for the collection of the taxes.

Next, Honorius reallocated these appointments once again to a committee on which the landowners were fully represented. Valentinian's original aim had been to rescue the poor from the landlords' arbitrary power. But now the Defenders and magnates were bound together in an unholy alliance.

And so there had, for a time, been a serious, positive effort to improve the lot of the oppressed. But it had failed. The extent of its failure becomes apparent from the ancient literature. Most authors of the time, it is true, were pretty insensitive to the plight of the oppressed. Yet there were remarkable exceptions. One of them was John Chrysostom, bishop of Constantinople, who was profoundly conscious of the gulf between rich and poor. Although motivated by theological at least as much as by social considerations, he found the difference between the two ways of living so painful that the historian J. B. Bury, writing in 1923, declared him to be 'almost a socialist'.

As for Salvian of Massilia (Marseille), he has no programme other than moral regeneration. Nevertheless the sins for which he sees the world chastised by God are unerringly diagnosed as the sins of material oppression. The age he lived in, like the nineteenth century, was one in which poverty was almost regarded as infamous. Salvian loathed and detested that stigma. He is so profoundly radical that no class whatever finds favour with him except the destitute, whose fate he deplores with unrelieved gloom.

. . .Taxation, however harsh and brutal, would still be less severe and brutal, if all shared equally in the common lot. But the situation is made more shameful and disastrous by the fact that all do not bear the burden together. The tributes due from the rich are extorted from the poor, and the weaker bear the burdens of the stronger. The only reason why they do not bear the whole burden is that the exactions are greater than their resources. . . .

As the poor are the first to receive the burden, they are the last to obtain relief. For whenever, as happened lately, the ruling powers have thought best to take measures to help the bankrupt cities to lessen their taxes in some measure, at once we see the rich alone dividing with one another the remedy granted to all alike. Who then remembers the poor?. . . What more can I say? Only that the poor are not reckoned as taxpayers at all, except when the weight of taxation is being imposed on them. They are outside the number when the remedies are being distributed.

Under such circumstances can we think ourselves undeserving of God's severe punishment when we ourselves continually so punish the poor?

An expert rhetorician, Salvian paints the picture in the blackest colours he can find. But there is ample evidence that the situation was scarcely better than he reports. For example Sidonius, too, when he became bishop of Arverna (Clermont-Ferrand), was besieged by crowds of destitute petitioners who opened his eyes to the social distress of his age. And an obscure writer of Christmas sermons, Gaudentius, wrote that the peasants who had died of hunger, or had been forced to take refuge with the charity of the church, were so numerous that he felt too ashamed to disclose their number.

The consequence was that thousands of men despaired of making an honest living at all, and went underground to form travelling gangs of robbers and bandits. These guerilla groups, the equivalents of today's drop-out terrorists - likewise thrown up and thrown out by social systems they find unacceptable -were swollen not only by deserters from the army, but by hordes of destitute civilians as well. This had happened before, but now the problem assumed truly formidable dimensions.

Banditry on a considerable scale was reported from Italy, North Africa, Spain and the Danube. But it was in Gaul that the gravest disorders occurred. In the third century this had already been one of the worst trouble-spots, and now there were major outbreaks once again. These Gallic bands assumed, at some stage or other, the old name of Bacaudae or Bagaudae, meaning 'rebels'. This designation, like their whole quasi-military movement, may have had certain nationalist overtones. For this was an epoch when the decay of central control meant a revival of regional sub-cultures, particularly in countries such as Gaul where the people had still, in some areas, retained their own language.

And so Ammianus reports a serious Gallic upheaval in 369. Later, for a number of yeas between 401 and 406, gangs of marauders were active in the Alps. Next, during the decade that followed, armed men in Brittany turned out to be not so much the local defence-groups for which the Emperor Honorius was hoping, as brigands operating almost on the scale of a nationwide uprising, in which tenants and slaves rebelled in unison against their landlords.

In 435, a further large-scale Gallic disturbance of the same kind arose under a certain Tibatto, who once again appealed to the slaves, and held out against the Romans for two years. The 440s witnessed a serious revival of similar troubles, under the leadership of a physician named Eudoxius, who eventually fled to the Huns. In Spain too, not for the first time, disorders continued to break out, until a Visigothic army sent by Aetius finally crushed the militants in 454.

A curious verse play called
The Protester (Querolus),
which appears to be attributable to the early fifth century, tells how the Bagaudae formed rudimentary political structures, holding their own People's Courts, 'where capital sentences are posted up on an oak branch or marked on a man's bones'. Such was the disorder reigning over wide areas of the provinces that these desperate characters, runaways from government and landlords alike, had been forced, as best they could, to take matters into their own hands.

In vain the Imperial officials uttered their menaces. In the later years of the fourth century it was enacted that anyone giving aid or comfort to brigands would be flogged, or even burnt alive. The right of using arms against all such men was granted to every member of the public in self-defence: a law of 409 suggests that 'shepherd' and 'bandit' had virtually come to be regarded as synonymous terms.

Seven years later, however, owing to the 'overwhelming calamities of the times', it was decided to declare an amnesty, in the hope that more lenient policies, for a change, might bring these warlike gangs to reason. Yet none of these measures, whether stringent or conciliatory, availed to restore public order.

And can you wonder, asks Salvian? Unlike most of his contemporaries, he was extremely hostile to the measures taken by Aetius against the bandit gangs, whose flights from society and disorders he blames entirely upon the Roman rulers and their upper-class supporters. The brigandage, he admits, is universal, and no one is safe from it. But in his opinion the so-called brigands themselves are not in the least guilty. Once again, their actions are wholly due to the deeds of their wicked and bloodthirsty oppressors.

. . . The poor are being robbed, widows groan, orphans are trodden down, so that many, even persons of good birth who have enjoyed a liberal education, seek refuge with the enemy to escape death under the trials of the general persecution. They seek among the barbarians the Roman mercy, since they cannot endure the barbarous mercilessness they find among the Romans. . . .

We transform their misfortunes into crime, we brand them with a name that recalls their losses, with a name that we ourselves have contrived for their shame. We call those men rebels and utterly abandoned, whom we ourselves have forced into crime. For by what other cause were they made Bagaudae save by our unjust acts, the wicked decisions of the officials, the proscription and extortion of those who have turned the public exactions to the increase of their private fortunes and made the tax indictions their opportunity for plunder?

Like wild beasts, instead of governing those put under their power, the officials have devoured them, feeding not only on their belongings as ordinary brigands would do, but even on their torn flesh and their blood. Thus it has come to pass that men who were strangled and half killed by brutal exactions began to be really barbarians, since they were not permitted to be Romans. They were satisfied to become what they were not, since they were no longer allowed to be what they had been; and they were compelled to defend their lives as best they could, since they saw that they had already completely lost their liberty.

How does our present situation differ from theirs? Those who have not before joined the Bagaudae are now being compelled to join them. The overwhelming injuries poor men suffer compel them to wish to become Bagaudae, but their weakness prevents them. So they are like captives oppressed by the yoke of an enemy, enduring their torture of necessity, not of their own choice; in their hearts they long for freedom, while they suffer the extremes of slavery. Such is the case among almost all the lower classes.

Far distant, whole aeons past it seemed, was that earlier Imperial golden age when, as Ammianus believed, 'high and low alike with united ardour and in agreement had hastened to a noble death for their country, as if to some quiet and peaceful haven'. Those days were indeed gone and had been succeeded by a fundamental, self-destructive
lack
of any such united ardour. 'Men fight not as they fought in the brave days of old,' Macaulay makes an earlier Roman say in his poem
Horatius.
But equally serious, in these later days, was their failure to contribute the sums which were necessary if the army was to exist and fight at all.

This conflict between the authorities and the mass of the people was one of the principal causes of the downfall of the Empire. Karl Marx used this situation to illustrate his point that the classes have no common interests at all, their struggle against one another being essentially illimitable. But Marx also claimed that the specific reason why the Roman Empire fell was because its social pattern, founded on slavery, gave way to a feudal system, which broke down the Imperial structure. It would perhaps be more exact to say that one of the main reasons why the collapse occurred was because the 'free' population, which had to provide most of the Imperial revenue, was so severely ravaged by these tax demands that it could not pay up any longer and, in consequence, ceased to be free at all, so that scarcely a trace of any viable commonwealth survived; and the empty husk of a community which alone remained could no longer resist the invaders.

Such was the appalling disunity between the government and the vast bulk of its subjects: and indeed between the rich and the poor in general.

4

The Rich against the State

The last chapter discussed the tragic circumstances which set the Roman government on a course of direct conflict with the impoverished majority of its subjects. An equally unhappy outcome awaits a state, when its governmental authorities are in conflict with its upper class. This situation, too, arose violently in ancient Rome - despite all the privileges which that class possessed - and was another of the disunities which contributed to its collapse.

In the declining Roman Empire the topmost layer of the population mainly consisted of the men entitled to describe themselves as Senators. Under the earlier Emperors the Senate, that advisory council which formerly guided the decisions of the state, had already become a subordinate and somewhat pitiable body. Yet in these days of Imperial decay, there had been a change: and as far as the Senators were concerned it was a change for the better. For even if the Senate itself, as a body, still did not count for very much, its individual members were now more powerful than they had ever been before.

Those of them who habitually sat in the Senate-house at Rome did not see a great deal of the Emperor, who generally resided in Mediolanum (Milan), and later in Ravenna. The repercussions of his absence were partly unfavourable to senatorial authority -and partly favourable. The doctrine 'where Caesar is, there Rome is', and the fact that Rome itself was usually where he was not, might have seemed to reduce the Senate to little more than a city council; and this was sometimes rather how things looked. On the other hand the removal of Emperor and court to other cities gave the conscript Fathers, in some ways, a new degree of independence. Moreover, Constantine, whose conversion to Christianity made it essential to placate the pagan aristocracy, had increased the important posts available for Senators.