The Fall of the Roman Empire (20 page)

In consequence, acts of insubordination and downright disloyalty by federate units rapidly multiplied. In 409, for example, they culpably failed to prevent other German tribes from crossing into Spain. Thirteen years later, they abandoned their Roman commander in that country in favour of his Vandal enemies once again their fellow-Germans. Subsequently, the federate forces got completely out of hand and proved a grievous peril, doing Rome a lot more harm than good.

The great experiment, therefore, had turned out to be a disaster. Instead of leading the way to a new form of unity it had created deadly disharmony within the very heart of the Empire. The mass recruitment of Germans was not delaying Rome's collapse after all. Instead, it was helping to bring the edifice down. But in itself it had been a sensible plan. The trouble was that the Romans were not ready for it.

It has been maintained that Rome fell because the purity of its race was polluted. The opposite is rather the case. Although much changed by racial intermixture in the course of the centuries, the Roman ethnic character had not necessarily changed for the worse. Indeed, it was a pity it was not changed more, by symbiosis with the Germans. Rather than deploring genetic pollution, it would be nearer the truth to maintain that Rome's downfall was accelerated by its total failure, once the Germans had been admitted within the Empire, to assimilate them by blending the two races.

Of course, economic and technological borrowings, at an everyday level, were made by both sides. On the German side, these were the result of their eagerness, at least at first, to take over whatever advantages they could. And, conversely, a considerable list of Rome's technical debts (for example the long, slashing German sword) made the writer
On Matters of Warfare
conclude that 'the barbarian nations are by no means accounted strangers to invention'. Yet official policy took no heed of such things, and vigorously reinforced the general Roman desire to segregate these immigrants.

It was bad enough when the local governors and commanders brutally exploited the Visigoths before the battle of Adrianople. But at least they were not acting on Imperial orders. However, such orders, designed to keep Romans and Germans apart, had already been forthcoming elsewhere by that time. For a law of Valentinian I and Valens in 370 deliberately failed to tolerate intermarriage between Roman citizens and German immigrants, insisting, on the contrary, that this must be avoided by the most stringent methods.

And similar vetos were even extended to superficial matters, such as clothing. Among Rome's borrowings from the barbarians were specific forms of dress. Noblemen, for example, liked to wear woollen shirts of a Danubian pattern, Saxon trousers, and cloaks from northern Gaul fastened at the shoulders by German filigree brooches.

But the Imperial authorities took a remarkably grave view of these fashions. In 397 the wearing of trousers inside the city of Rome was forbidden under threat of perpetual exile and confiscation of all property. Then followed three further edicts, and in 416 the wearing of barbarian furs and skins in the capital and its environs was likewise declared illegal, even for slaves.

If Aetius, the greatest leader of the age, had not been struck down in 454, even at that late date something might still have been saved, at least for a time, out of the wreckage of Roman-German relations. For he showed exceptional skill and tact in dealing with the Germans, as Gibbon's deserved tribute points out. 'The barbarians, who had seated themselves in the Western provinces, were insensibly taught to respect the faith and valour of the patrician Aetius. He soothed their passions, consulted their prejudices, balanced their interests, and checked their ambitions.' But Aetius was murdered by his own incapable monarch Valentinian in. And so the divisive process speeded up and entered upon its ruinous phase.

Roman estrangement from the Germans, on the official and unofficial planes alike, was considerably enhanced by differences of religion. For whereas the tribes which remained outside the Empire were pagans, those which settled within its borders became Christian. But they were of the Arian persuasion, and between this sect and the Catholics, who controlled the Roman government, the doctrinal differences, as indicated in Appendix 1, ran wide and deep.

The Germans had originally become Arians because the fourth-century missionary who first worked with them, Ulfilas, was an Arian. He did not live to see the final conversion of the Visigoths, but his work bore such abundant fruit that, during their settlement in the Balkans, they underwent mass conversion to the Arian faith. Subsequently this Arian brand of Christianity became the religion of every German nation, and every German general, within the Empire.

Although Arianism, as they interpreted it, was a somewhat arid and static affair, imposed on the rank and file from the top downwards, Germans found it much easier to understand than the Catholic form of Christianity, because the Arian doctrine that the Son must be younger than the Father, and therefore in a sense inferior, corresponded with the paternal structure of their society.

This religious difference, between the Arian Germans on the one hand and the Catholic church of the Western Empire on the other, only served to widen and deepen the already profound gulf between Germans and Romans.

There were, certainly, a few voices raised to remind people that the Germans were at least Christians, of a sort. According to Augustine and Orosius, that was why the capture of Rome by Alaric, an Arian like his compatriots, was conducted with due respect for church property. And Salvian added the lesson that the Germans, in spite of their regrettable heresy, still behaved better, on the whole, than Catholic Romans did. Yet these viewpoints were exceptional, and indeed deliberately paradoxical. Far and away the more common view was that friendship with the Germans, already a most unattractive idea, was made impossible by their Arianism. Indeed, this condemned them to eternal damnation.

These powerful racial and religious attitudes, diffused through every level of the population, inevitably led from time to time to outbreaks of violence against the Germans. Theodosius i, who not only allowed Visigoths to settle
en bloc
within the Empire but actually found their chieftains personally likeable, was at pains to keep these hostile demonstrations in check. Yet he was not always successful. When for example, in 390, the crowd at Thessalonica in northern Greece lynched the local military commander, Butheric (because he had imprisoned a favourite charioteer for homosexuality), it was largely because he was a German that he suffered this fate.

Five years later, Stilicho found it easy to arrange the assassination of his Eastern counterpart Rufinus because of Rufinus' pro-German connexions; and in 399 the Goths at Constantinople were systematically slaughtered by the local population. Next, in 408, Honorius found it quite easy to remove Stilicho – because Stilicho, too, was a German. Before his execution, the Roman troops - with the Emperor's approval - murdered the German chiefs in the Imperial entourage, and then, after Stilicho was dead, the families of barbarian federate soldiers throughout Italy were massacred as well.

The attacks upon the Empire by German invaders, and most of all Alaric's invasion, roused these anti-German feelings to fever heat. Moreover, it was inevitable that this hostility felt by the Romans, whether justified or merely founded on prejudice, should also be directed against the federate tribes and states already settled within the frontiers. Such feelings contributed largely to the events of the following years, during which the attitude of the German immigrant tribes, at first not too unfriendly to Rome, was replaced by a more and more aggressive drive towards virtual independence - culminating, under Gaiseric the Vandal in North Africa, in the attainment of a complete independence which was uncompromisingly and virulently hostile.

Gaiseric, who raised the Vandal monarchy to heights of authority unprecedented among the German nations, faced the Romans with a fearful problem. True, he firmly based his government on Roman models. Yet his powerful personality confronted all the old Roman hatreds and prejudices against the Germans with an even more relentless German retaliation against Rome. Although the Roman and Romano-African population of North Africa, which outnumbered his own Vandals by a hundred to one, was allowed to keep its existing legal privileges and its leading men were retained in administrative posts, their exclusion from any political influence was total.

Moreover, Gaiseric lost no time in making a concentrated attack on the great Romano-African landowners. He also extended his onslaught to include the Catholic clergy. Under the German regimes in Gaul and Spain, there had been, on the whole, surprisingly little friction between the Arian conquerors and the Catholic church. But now came a big change, when Gaiseric launched violent persecutions designed as a deliberate counterblast to the Catholic persecution of Arianism in other parts of the Western world.

Under a sixth century successor of Gaiseric, one of the Catholic bishops in North Africa, Victor of Vita, wrote most gloomily about the situation.

. . . You few who love the barbarians and are always singing their praises, condemning yourselves out of your own mouths, do but consider their name and reputation. Could any other name but that of barbarian, which signifies savagery, cruelty and terror, fit them so well? One may coddle them with kindness, woo them with assiduous service, all they think of is their envy of the Romans.

Their design is obvious - all the time they are trying to besmirch the glory and honour of the Roman name. Their desire is that no Romans shall survive. If they spare their subjects in one or another case, it is to exploit them as slaves.

While Gaiseric was at work, King Euric of the Visigoths was making his people in Gaul and Spain into another separate nation, once again much expanded and once again wholly independent; and he too displayed an equally intolerant hatred of the Catholics, subjecting them to vigorous oppression.

Euric also regulated the relations between his German and Gallo-Roman subjects by issuing, in 475, a new legal code, which was to exercise strong influence upon medieval law. Although he himself did not know Latin very well, his chancellor Leo was compared to Tacitus and Horace, and the Codex Euricianus was drawn up by Roman jurists and was heavily Romanized in character. Nevertheless, it totally rejected any amalgamation between the two main peoples in his realm, declaring them to be irremediably separate and distinct. The Code of Euric was published only one year before the Western Empire finally collapsed: and the segregation between the Germans and Romans which these laws enforced sums up excellently one reason why the collapse was inevitable - because the idea of a constructive union between the two races had failed.

To keep the Germans out of the Roman Empire had long since ceased to be within the bounds of possibility. But instead there had existed a unique, unrepeatable opportunity to create a working partnership between Romans and Germans. At one time, certain leading Germans had wanted it. But it was up to the Romans to transform this co-existence into a positively cooperative union. Because of their traditional, ingrained attitudes, the opportunity was tragically lost.

That is to say, ethnic disunity was a major cause of Rome's downfall. To retain in one's midst a substantial and disappointed racial minority, without taking effective steps either to integrate it or to treat it on psychologically equal terms, was to invite serious trouble; and the Romans failed to meet the challenge.

V

THE GROUPS THAT OPTED OUT

10

Drop-outs against Society

Furthermore, considerable sections of the population of the later Roman Empire decided to opt out altogether. In the first place, a large number of people, finding the social system intolerable, went underground and became its enemies. But a second movement consisted of numerous men and women who merely abandoned the company of their fellow human beings and divorced themselves from the community.

They became hermits or monks and nuns. But the monks and nuns of ancient times are in some ways less comparable to modern monks and nuns than to modern drop-outs, supporters of gurus, or others - not necessarily with any religious motivation - who abandon the conventional world and sometimes leave their houses for the streets or the mountains or deserts. For the numerous monastic recluses of the Roman Empire, too, often shook the dust of the social, financial and political system off their feet as completely as it they had never belonged to it at all. And so, as the final political and military reckoning rapidly approached, this substantial number of men and women was no longer available to contribute either to the actual defence of the Empire or to the revenue needed to pay for the defenders.

For two centuries past, ascetic withdrawal and solitary contemplation had increasingly become regarded as a desirable ideal. There are many traces of this viewpoint in the
Meditations
of the second-century Emperor Marcus Aurelius, although his Imperial

and military responsibilities totally denied him the possibility of putting it into practice himself. Such tendencies were also prominent among Manichaeans and other dualists, who detached the evil world entirely from the divine creation and tried to slough off the material dross in their daily existence.

Extreme puritanism likewise dominated important sections of the Christian community. They justified this attitude by the contempt for the human flesh and condition displayed by John the Baptist in his chosen way of living, reiterated by St Paul, and ascribed by the Gospels to Jesus himself, who was said to have departed to a solitary place and gone up into the mountain where he devoted himself to prayer.

Then, in the third century AD, the monastic movement originated, in the depths of the wastes of Egypt. Its origins are shrouded in legends, centring upon the figure of Paul the Hermit of Thebes in Upper Egypt. Jerome, who wrote his biography, declared him to be the first of the Christian hermits; but that distinction is more often attributed to the better documented St Antony. Abandoning his worldly property in about 270, Antony entered, fifteen years later, upon a life of total isolation, dwelling in an empty grave upon a desert hill-top. Many people flocked to follow his example and join him, and before long he began to organize them into groups, which resided in separate and scattered cells and came together only for common worship. Another Egyptian, Pachomius, brought his followers into a fully communal existence by establishing monasteries at nine Egyptian centres, comprising 7,000 monks and nuns. Then the monastic life spread to Palestine. Before long, it was ripe for extension to the West.