The Fall of the Roman Empire (11 page)

True, he still excluded them from the army; they had been excluded for a good many years. But the annual pair of consulships which still stood at the summit of their career was raised to loftier heights than in earlier Imperial times, since the office was now completely reserved for the Emperor's most prominent supporters, the close friends whom he described as his Companions. They did not have a great deal to do during their consular year. As Gibbon remarked, a consul of late Imperial times 'enjoyed the undisturbed contemplation of his own dignity'. But his mere tenure of the post ennobled for ever all the members of his whole line to come, and usually enriched them as well.

So, although Rome itself was no longer the centre of events, the city's leading residents regained a degree of personal influence that they had not possessed for four hundred years. Class consciousness was immense. Symmachus, himself a leading nobleman, remarked, 'good blood tells and never fails to recognize itself. Yet the aristocratic structure was not altogether closed at the base. The poet Ausonius, for example, won his way into its privileged ranks, and, while displaying a depressing servility towards men of superior pedigree, succeeding in gaining jobs for all his relations.

However, his fellow-author Claudian echoes the widespread indignation felt among Senators when a eunuch, Eutropius, became consul in the East; and Jerome writes of their fury whenever men of humble birth, or 'rustics', took away from them the consulships they felt ought to have been theirs. Moreover, most writers take it for granted that the lower classes will regard a consul and a Senator with immeasurable respect.

But the term 'Senator' had broadened its meaning since the early days of the Empire. For by this time such personages were by no means only the comparatively few individuals who actually sat in the Senate. Their meeting place during the later Western Empire, the Curia, is still standing beside the Roman Forum today. It could scarcely have held even the 600 members which the Senate had possessed at the time when the Empire began. And now there were as many as 2000 members, in addition to another 2000 belonging to its counterpart in Constantinople.

These 4000 Senators were divided into three groups according to property qualifications, each with its own grade of privileges. By the year 450, the two lower grades were excused from attending Senate meetings. Earlier, there had been a regulation that Western Senators must live in Rome. But this rule became obsolete and indeed had to be formally relaxed, since large numbers of Senators, including many belonging to the highest of the three grades in the hierarchy, preferred to live outside the capital and even outside Italy altogether, in the midst of their vast estates. Yet, scattered geographically though they were, these major aristocratic families enjoyed intimate connexions with one another, forming a closely interlocking, self-perpetuating pattern throughout the territories of the West, and dominating the landscape all around them.

Although the lower grades of Senators tended to sink downwards and join their inferiors in the general impoverishment of the times, the richest noblemen became a very great deal richer still. We hear of people whose leases earned them an annual income of four thousand pounds of gold, with the addition of all the revenue they derived from grain and wine and produce of other kinds. Such men may have been five times wealthier, on an average, than their counterparts in the early days of the Empire.

In Rome and Constantinople, Senators appointed to consulships were under a legal obligation to celebrate their appointment by paying for lavish public entertainments or games. Augustine preached critically against rich men who were prepared to ruin themselves in order to give displays. A certain Petronius Maximus, who subsequently became Emperor for a few weeks in 455, expended 4000 pounds of gold on such games. Symmachus, when his son attained office, spent 2000 pounds. Although classed by a contemporary as a man of only medium wealth, Symmachus possessed three houses at Rome and at least thirteen more in various parts of Italy, as well as others in Sicily and Africa.

One of the ascetic ladies in whom Jerome took an interest, Saint Melania the younger, owned estates in Italy, Africa, Spain, Sicily and Britain. Her Sicilian property was maintained out of the revenue of sixty farms, and cultivated by 400 slaves. At one juncture, she emancipated 8000 slaves by a single act. Nevertheless, she was a shrewd financier. In the words of her biographer, 'blessed are those who perceived, and sold their property before the coming of the barbarians'. And she and her family also perceived the sound sense of transferring the proceeds to the East in good time.

As the possessions of people like Symmachus and Melania reveal, anyone who wanted to make a fortune would do well to invest his or her money not in industry but in land. Christian moralists such as Ambrose and John Chrysostom attacked the wealthy figures who bought house after house and field after field, ejecting the former owners and absorbing entire hamlets into their own insatiable hands. As the poet Rutilius Namatianus sailed up past the Etruscan coast in 416, he saw these enormous properties along the shore.

We sailed north past Alsium, and Pyrgi

Was soon behind us. Today these are large estates;

At one time they were little villages.

Many of the great houses presiding over these lands were fortified like castles; this was the almost impregnable security to which so many destitute and displaced persons fled for shelter. The estates were whole little kingdoms in themselves, self-contained economic and social units full of farm-workers, slaves, artisans, guards, bailiffs, and hangers-on.

The mosaic of a certain Julius at Carthage shows one of these battlemented country palaces; and the families of Mauretanian chieftains such as Firmus and Gildo, who felt powerful enough to rise against the government in 373 and 397, lived on the same sort of scale.

Sidonius gives a description of another great chateau, the Gallic Burgus of Leontius at the confluence of the rivers Duranus (Dordogne) and Garumna (Garonne). Indeed, in Gaul there was a particularly massive concentration of powerful landowners, who lived more and more in the country and rarely came to Rome - a vigorous senatorial aristocracy of about a hundred families, who handed down their hereditary power and kept their own armed retainers.

Many a village near their homes still keeps their names today -Juilly (Julius), Vitry (Victor), Savigny (Sabinus), Lezigny (Licinius). So powerful were these Romano-Gallic lords that the Emperor Honorius, in time of crisis, virtually decentralized the control of the country into their hands. In 455, meeting at Arelate (Aries), they even proclaimed one of their own number, Avitus, as Emperor.

This act was a triumph of the Gallic nobles over the Roman aristocracy itself, though only a momentary one, since Avitus was deposed and died very soon afterwards. His son Ecdicius, however, was still wealthy enough to support 4000 starving poor in time of famine - a charity which by no means all his fellow landowners would have performed.

A glance at the clothing of one of these noblemen would have shown how times had changed. The plain white robes of earlier Roman dignitaries have gone. A fourth-century Senator wore a linen tunic
(camisia),
with a woollen robe
(dalmatica)
thrown over it. On top of the
dalmatica
was a stiff-hooded cloak, or a diaphanous mantle, floating lightly behind him. These clothes were brilliantly coloured with patterns, and further adorned by handkerchiefs and scarves. Women liked silk dresses, emblazoned with gold thread. Jerome offered many a malicious portrait of extravagantly bejewelled matrons, and Ammianus, too, deploys a whole battery of savage attacks upon the outrageous luxury of the rich. So, of course, does the radical Salvian.

No doubt opulent Romans and Gallo-Romans lived very grandly indeed. But Ammianus' picture is to some extent a deliberate literary echo of a traditional satirical theme; and in any case he was an Easterner who felt embittered because he had not quite made the social grade at Rome. In fact, there is no reason to suppose that Roman Senators were much more extravagant than they had been in earlier times. It is true that the Greek historian Olympiodorus declared that 'each of the great houses of Rome had in itself everything that a moderate-sized town would be likely to possess - a hippodrome, forums, temples, fountains and numerous baths'. But another writer of the day who was in a position to know, Macrobius, congratulates the men of his generation on being
less
luxurious in their personal style of living than their ancestors. In the eighteenth century, Montesquieu partially attributed Rome's collapse to the excessive luxury of the rich; and he has been followed by countless painters and filmmakers who depict orgiastic scenes with the puritanical implications that this was the sort of self-indulgence that brought the Empire down. But the same or greater luxury had existed for centuries, without any such lethal results.

Much more serious is another accusation that can be brought against these senatorial noblemen of later Rome. There is in the city', reported a visitor from the East, 'a Senate of wealthy men. . . . Every one of them is fit to hold high office.
But they prefer not to.
They stand aloof, preferring to enjoy their property at leisure.'

Like many people today, they felt that politics was a dirty business, which they preferred to avoid. And this, in the later 300s and earlier 400s, was how the rich betrayed the Empire and contributed to its fall. In Rome and the provinces alike, they failed to pull their weight in public life. Exempted from service as city councillors, they tended only to consider the interests of their estates, or the advancement of their own friends. Towards the very end of the Western Empire there was a change, because by then the landowners had become more powerful than the Emperor himself, and successfully invaded his councils. But many still remained apart even then, and oblivious of any wider claims upon their time.

Up to a point, this attitude was scarcely a novelty. For some degree of leisure and alienation from public events had long been regarded as essential for the well-rounded life a Roman gentleman should lead. Nevertheless the later Imperial aristocracy fiddled with noteworthy insouciance while Rome burned.

Salvian felt this deeply, and declared that the higher a man's status might be, the greater was his obligation, and the greater his guilt if he fell short. Sidonius, too, called his fellow Gallo-Romans to task for this failure, and wrote to one of them, a certain Syagrius, urging a more public-spirited attitude.

. . . Why guide the plough-handle, and yet forgo all ambition for the consul's robe? Do not bring a slur on the nobility by staying so constantly in the country.... I would not indeed say that a wise man should fail to concern himself with his private affairs, but he should act on the even principle of considering not only what he should
have
but what he should be.

Moreover, for a brief and gallant period, Sidonius practised what he preached. That was mainly during the years 471-5 when, as bishop of Arverna (Clermont-Ferrand), he helped Ecdicius in the local defence against the Visigoths - until the Imperial government let him down by making the territory over to them. During the remainder of his life, too, Sidonius made a few brief interventions in public affairs.

Nevertheless, the nine books of his literary letters, addressed to many friends and relations, remain a vivid advertisement for the very same ivory-towered seclusion he deplored to Syagrius. Ardent patriot though Sidonius felt himself to be, his letters perfectly depict an aristocracy which, although living under the very shadow of the Germans, was content to bask in the last feeble rays of the Imperial sun, largely indifferent to the encroaching darkness. At Rome, too, the ten books of epistles composed by Symmachus, two generations earlier, had revealed that the elegant metropolitan nobility of his time could scarcely spare a thought for public affairs, or worry about the menacing storm.

When the writer
On Matters of Warfare
suggested that provincial landowners living near areas threatened by German invasion should help to build up the Imperial defences, he may have been attempting a sardonic joke. As he must have known, there was no chance that this would happen. They were quite content with keeping the fortifications of their own palaces in good trim. In spite of frequent lip-service to the romantic concept of Eternal Rome, many noblemen were not prepared to lift a finger to save it. Indeed Orosius and Salvian accused a number of aristocrats of decamping to the barbarians, whom they even bribed, added Orosius, to escort them and carry their baggage.

It is true that, though they did not know it, these landowners, with their scribes and libraries and literary tastes, were playing a historic role in transmitting the culture of the past through and beyond the downfall of the Western Empire to future generations. But their escape from the practical tasks of patriotic service and defence was one of the reasons why the Empire fell at all.

One such landowner, the poet Ausonius, objecting strongly because his fellow-magnate Paulinus wanted to withdraw from his lands and become a churchman, could point to the chaos that would ensue if Paulinus' estates were broken up. It could equally have been argued, however, that the proprietors were centrifugal forces of destruction. Nor was that merely because of their passive failure to associate themselves with the Empire's needs. They also undermined the state in a very active fashion. For of all the obstacles to efficient and honest administration, they were the worst. They forcibly ejected collectors of taxes, harboured deserters and brigands, and repeatedly took the law into their own hands.

Symmachus declared it to be perfectly right that any provincial governor, when performing his duties as a judge, should favour nobles and gentry against the proletariat. They possessed their own private prisons: Theodosius i, receiving complaints about their arrogant behaviour, forbade them to maintain such establishments, but he spoke in vain. Ammianus told of local potentates whose 'private properties were enlarged by public disasters'. When the Germans broke into the Empire in 410, the selfish egotism of some of the landowners - especially a great lady named Proba - was reported to be making the appalling task of the government a good deal harder than it had been already.