The Fall of the Roman Empire (18 page)

The German general Ricimer, who controlled the Western Empire for the next sixteen years, largely maintained himself during that precarious period by his diplomatic handling of the Eastern ruler Leo I. Yet it was all to no avail, because now that the old Western dynasty had ended with Valentinian III, the East felt even less enthusiastic than before about offering support.

Moreover, Leo I refused to recognize the last competent Emperor the West ever produced. This was Majorian (457-61) who, after vainly waiting eight months for the approval of Constantinople, occupied the throne at Ravenna without it, and hopefully struck a coin on which he and Leo were depicted together. Soon afterwards, however, Leo confirmed his predecessor's policy of refusing the West further help against the Vandals, with whom instead, despite Ricimer's efforts to persuade him to the contrary, he concluded peace in 462.

However, in spite of the obvious decay of the West, Leo did finally and belatedly make an attempt to save it from destruction. For when its throne once again became vacant in 457, he nominated one of his own men, Anthemius, to be its occupant, and Ricimer, placated by the promise of marriage to the new ruler's daughter, agreed. Anthemius, more plausibly than his predecessor, celebrated his relations with Leo on a Western coin, and the poet Sidonius, delivering a panegyric of Anthemius, declared that, since the princes of the West had failed, it was right for Rome now to seek its fortune through an Emperor from the East. 'Farewell, division of Empire!' he hopefully cried: with united counsels, even at this late date, everything might turn out well, and the foes of the Empire, particularly the Vandals in Africa, could be defeated after all.

But the Vandals were not defeated because, although the East now launched against them the most ambitious of its expeditions to date, the onslaught, like all its predecessors, proved a failure.

And then Ricimer, when his Emperor Anthemius described him as a mere savage, concluded that a more docile puppet than this 'Greekling' was necessary, and killed him - only soon to die himself, in 472.

Next followed two extremely short Western reigns. One of them the Eastern ruler Leo entirely ignored: and then he sent his own relative by marriage, Julius Nepos, to take over the Ravenna throne. But at this juncture Leo died. His successor Zeno (474-91) was too involved in his own grave internal troubles to shore up the West any longer, and reverted permanently to peace with the Vandals.

Nepos, failing to establish himself, retired to Dalmatia, and in 476 the Western Empire came to an end, when its last titular Emperor Romulus Augustulus was forced to abdicate by the local German army commander Odoacer. And now Zeno, while formally continuing to urge Nepos' claims, acquiesced, in practice, in Odoacer's position - as one of the German kings like Gaiseric the Vandal and Euric the Visigoth, ruling over former Imperial territories.

The Western Empire had ceased to exist. The East survived but, without the West, its survival was on an altogether inferior scale. The ancient.world of Rome had been cut to half its size: and one of the reasons for this great shrinkage of the historic classical culture, as Gibbon pointed out, was because its two former halves had lamentably failed to cooperate. The loser was the West, the weaker partner.

9

Race against Race

When the Germans entered the Empire, Rome was presented with an opportunity to assimilate them, and the opportunity was missed, with the gravest results. Instead of unity and partnership between the two peoples, there was acute friction, which contributed grievously to the break-up of the Roman world.

Already for a long time before that terminal century, many German tribesmen had been living inside the Imperial borders. From the very beginning of the Empire, one Roman ruler after another had imported them in large numbers, so that there should be less trouble-makers beyond the frontiers, and more soldiers and agricultural workers within. From the time of Constantine the Great onwards, entire regiments of the Imperial field force were made up of these Germans. Many of them obtained officer rank. Emperors were surrounded by German officers. Indeed a characteristic feature of the entire period is the German who became the Master of Soldiers or commander of the Imperial armies. For Emperors were often inclined to feel that they could rely on the loyalty of a foreigner.

On occasion, these men became the virtual controllers of the government. Such a potentate, for example, was Arbogast, under Gratian and Valentinian n; though his trustworthiness, as it turned out, could not be relied upon after all, since the mysterious death of Valentinian n in 392 was almost certainly this general's doing. But the most remarkable of all such German commanders and rulers behind the throne was Stilicho, who governed the Western Empire for the young Honorius.

So great was the veneration felt for the Imperial monarchy that even the most powerful German generals did not aspire to it themselves. Out of all the numerous military usurpers and would-be usurpers of the fourth and fifth centuries, only two quite exceptional figures, during the 350s, seem to have been Germans. Even towards the very end, the German Ricimer still preferred to rule behind the throne of docile Emperors rather than attempt, in the face of tradition, to reign himself.

Yet the internal balance of power between Romans and Germans in the Empire had already shifted irrevocably towards the Germans three-quarters of a century before Ricimer. The change became apparent when Valens let a host of Visigoths into the provinces. The most experienced statesman of [modern] Europe', it seemed to Gibbon in the eighteenth century, 'has never been summoned to consider the propriety or the danger of admitting or rejecting an innumerable multitude of barbarians, who are driven by despair and hunger to solicit a settlement on the territories of a civilized nation'. But that was Valens' problem, and he let them in; and the immigrants he had admitted overwhelmed him at Adrianople.

They stayed, and in 382 Theodosius 1 took the revolutionary step of allowing whole German tribes to reside in Imperial territory as separate, autonomous, allied or federate units, committed to serving in the Roman army, though under the command of their own chieftains. Thereafter the practice continued and increased, until such federates became a regular and widespread feature of the life of the Empire.

Early in the fifth century, when the Visigoths and Burgundians settled in Gaul, there were formal partitions of lands, in which the local Roman proprietors handed over a third of their arable territory to German immigrants. Later, the proportion rose to two-thirds, and included immovable possessions as well; woodland was perhaps divided half and half. The principle of these arrangements was derived from an old Roman formula for quartering soldiers on landowners. But now the quartering was permanent, and so was the transfer of property. The original system had been known as
hospitalitas,
and the name continued to be used, so that the proprietor and his partial German supplanter were somewhat euphemistically described as 'host' and 'guest'.

These arrangements formed an important part of the process by which the ancient world gradually developed the new national patterns characteristic of the Middle Ages. Yet the part played by the Visigothic and Burgundian settlers in this historic transformation is only apparent by hindsight. At the time when they were first setting up their homes on Imperial soil they felt no desire whatever to dismember Rome or spurn its institutions.

As archaeological evidence reveals, Germans hitherto outside the Empire but in contact with it - with the exception of savages such as the Angle, Saxon and Jute invaders of Britain - had already acquired a certain degree of Romanization themselves. Their nomadic days were over, and what they wanted was land to cultivate. Like their earlier compatriots who had been filtering through into the Empire for centuries, their strongest ambition was to establish themselves in one of the Imperial provinces, and obtain a share of its peaceful prosperity.

When they entered the provinces, therefore, the question of their seeking full independence from the Empire around them did not, in the first instance, arise. On the contrary, these German newcomers hoped to establish a form of co-existence. It was an extraordinary moment. There was a glimpse of a new order, in which Romans and Germans might settle down together as partners.

The Romans had not been able to keep the Germans out, and could not eject them now. Clearly the provincials could not be expected to like the land transfers. Nevertheless, Rome imperatively needed the services of the newcomers for the army, and as agricultural labourers as well. Moreover, the Germans, since they were a 'Third World' hankering after the benefits of Imperial civilization, were willing enough, in so far as they thought about the matter at all, to deal fairly with the Romans among whom they had settled. Indeed, they had little alternative, since the German element in the combined population was and remained relatively small. Perhaps there were not more than 100,000 Visigoths in their whole kingdom when it eventually extended from the Loire to Gibraltar. If so, they only amounted to about two per cent of the total inhabitants of the area.

The Visigoths turned against Rome in the end and put it to the sack. Yet their leader, Alaric, should not be remembered just as the captor of Rome. He had originally been something far more positive and remarkable, the man who, according to the sixth-century Gothic historian Jordanes, wanted a single German-Roman people. His son and successor Ataulf (410-15), who married Honorius' half-sister Placidia, formulated the same ideal in language which remains impressively relevant to our racial problems today. Orosius, writer of the
Histories against the Pagans,
was told by a citizen of Narbo (Narbonne) that Ataulf had spoken in these terms:

... To begin with, I ardently desired to efface the very name of the Romans and to transform the Roman Empire into a Gothic Empire. Romania, as it is commonly called, would have become Gothia; Ataulf would have replaced Caesar Augustus. But long experience taught me that the unruly barbarism of the Goths was incompatible with the laws.

Now, without laws there is no state. I therefore decided rather to aspire to the glory of restoring the fame of Rome in all its integrity, and of increasing it by means of the Gothic strength. I hope to go down to posterity as the restorer of Rome, since it is not possible I should be its supplanter.

That, then, was the exciting ideal which at least a few of the German leaders articulately pursued. The practical possibilities have been analysed by Joseph Vogt in his book
The Decline of Rome,
published in 1967:

. . . The Visigoths and Burgundians were 'billeted guests' in the Roman provinces and as such wholly dependent on what the institutions rooted in the land could provide. The numerical inferiority of the foreigners was itself a reason for reaching a considerable measure of accommodation with the native population. It was very difficult for these German minorities to withstand the pressure of Roman influence.

Moreover, the solidarity of the Germanic peoples was to some degree impaired by their own social organization. The Visigoths had an upper and lower stratum, each with its own law, while the Burgundians were divided into the three strata of nobility, medium-free and low-free.

Upon this shaky foundation the two peoples proceeded to

errect a state which comprehended both Germans and Romans, two elements which were required to live side by side and yet preserve their identity.

The most important binding ligament was the [German] monarch. To his Roman subjects he was made acceptable by the offices and honorific titles conferred by the Emperor or a fictitious kinship with the Imperial house. The Assembly of Germanic warriors was rarely consulted before important decisions, and the Germanic aristocracy had to content themselves with serving the king.

From the beginning, Romans had access to high positions in the central government, and in the royal household with which it was closely associated. The chancery retained its Roman stamp, the structure of the provincial government was left untouched and there was no interference in economic affairs. Latin was adopted as the administrative language, the tax system remained in being, and the coinage followed the imperial pattern.

But the vital question was this. How were the Romans going to respond to this unprecedented experiment in co-existence, in which they were required to share their provinces and their lands with another race in a novel sort of partnership?

On a lofty plane, there was no absence of reassuring general statements. Augustine, pointing out that we all share the bond of descent from Adam and Eve, duly echoed the ecumenism of Paul's
Epistle to the Galatians:
'There is no such thing as Jew and Greek, slave and freeman, male and female; for you are all one person in Christ Jesus.' Moreover, as in earlier centuries, there was still great stress on the universal, multi-racial unity of the Roman Empire. 'We may drink of the Rhine or the Orontes,' declared Claudian, 'we are all one people', and Rome's enduring service was to establish friendship among the nations:

She is the only one who has received The conquered in her arms and cherished all The human race under a common name, Treating them as her children, not her slaves. She called these subjects Roman citizens And linked far worlds with ties of loyalty.

And the Christian lyricist Prudentius wrote at length in the same universal spirit.

A common law made them equals and

bound them by a single name. . . .

We live in the most diverse countries,

like fellow-citizens of the same blood dwelling

within the single ramparts of their native city

and all united in an ancestral home.

By the same token another poet, Rutilius Namatianus, declared that Rome ruled because she
deserved
to rule - because she had wisely brought all men together beneath the rule of one law, to live without fetters.