JAD_333

Gag order received.

Ray

Reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire
All left Rome open to outside invaders
adapted from History Alive material

There were many reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire. Each one intertwined with the next. Many even blame the introduction of Christianity for the decline. Christianity made many Roman citizens into pacifists, making it more difficult to defend against the barbarian attackers. Also money used to build churches could have been used to maintain the empire. Although some argue that Christianity may have provided some morals and values for a declining civilization and therefore may have actually prolonged the imperial era.

Decline in Morals and Values

Those morals and values that kept together the Roman legions and thus the empire could not be maintained towards the end of the empire. Crimes of violence made the streets of the larger cities unsafe. Even during PaxRomana there were 32,000 prostitutes in Rome. Emperors like Nero and Caligula became infamous for wasting money on lavish parties where guests ate and drank until they became ill. The most popular amusement was watching the gladiatorial combats in the Colosseum. These were attended by the poor, the rich, and frequently the emperor himself. As gladiators fought, vicious cries and curses were heard from the audience. One contest after another was staged in the course of a single day. Should the ground become too soaked with blood, it was covered over with a fresh layer of sand and the performance went on.

Public Health

There were many public health and environmental problems. Many of the wealthy had water brought to their homes through lead pipes. Previously the aqueducts had even purified the water but at the end lead pipes were thought to be preferable. The wealthy death rate was very high. The continuous interaction of people at the Colosseum, the blood and death probable spread disease. Those who lived on the streets in continuous contact allowed for an uninterrupted strain of disease much like the homeless in the poorer run shelters of today. Alcohol use increased as well adding to the incompetency of the general public.

Political Corruption

One of the most difficult problems was choosing a new emperor. Unlike Greece where transition may not have been smooth but was at least consistent, the Romans never created an effective system to determine how new emperors would be selected. The choice was always open to debate between the old emperor, the Senate, the Praetorian Guard (the emperor's's private army), and the army. Gradually, the Praetorian Guard gained complete authority to choose the new emperor, who rewarded the guard who then became more influential, perpetuating the cycle. Then in 186 A. D. the army strangled the new emperor, the practice began of selling the throne to the highest bidder. During the next 100 years, Rome had 37 different emperors - 25 of whom were removed from office by assassination. This contributed to the overall weaknesses of the empire.

Unemployment

During the latter years of the empire farming was done on large estates called latifundia that were owned by wealthy men who used slave labor. A farmer who had to pay workmen could not produce goods as cheaply. Many farmers could not compete with these low prices and lost or sold their farms. This not only undermined the citizen farmer who passed his values to his family, but also filled the cities with unemployed people. At one time, the emperor was importing grain to feed more than 100,000 people in Rome alone. These people were not only a burden but also had little to do but cause trouble and contribute to an ever increasing crime rate.

Inflation

The roman economy suffered from inflation (an increase in prices) beginning after the reign of Marcus Aurelius. Once the Romans stopped conquering new lands, the flow of gold into the Roman economy decreased. Yet much gold was being spent by the romans to pay for luxury items. This meant that there was less gold to use in coins. As the amount of gold used in coins decreased, the coins became less valuable. To make up for this loss in value, merchants raised the prices on the goods they sold. Many people stopped using coins and began to barter to get what they needed. Eventually, salaries had to be paid in food and clothing, and taxes were collected in fruits and vegetables.

Urban decay

Wealthy Romans lived in a domus, or house, with marble walls, floors with intricate colored tiles, and windows made of small panes of glass. Most Romans, however, were not rich, They lived in small smelly rooms in apartment houses with six or more stories called islands. Each island covered an entire block. At one time there were 44,000 apartment houses within the city walls of Rome. First-floor apartments were not occupied by the poor since these living quarters rented for about $00 a year. The more shaky wooden stairs a family had to climb, the cheaper the rent became. The upper apartments that the poor rented for $40 a year were hot, dirty, crowed, and dangerous. Anyone who could not pay the rent was forced to move out and live on the crime-infested streets. Because of this cities began to decay.

Inferior Technology

During the last 400 years of the empire, the scientific achievements of the Romans were limited almost entirely to engineering and the organization of public services. They built marvelous roads, bridges, and aqueducts. They established the first system of medicine for the benefit of the poor. But since the Romans relied so much on human and animal labor, they failed to invent many new machines or find new technology to produce goods more efficiently. They could not provide enough goods for their growing population. They were no longer conquering other civilizations and adapting their technology, they were actually losing territory they could not longer maintain with their legions.

Military Spending

Maintaining an army to defend the border of the Empire from barbarian attacks was a constant drain on the government. Military spending left few resources for other vital activities, such as providing public housing and maintaining quality roads and aqueducts. Frustrated Romans lost their desire to defend the Empire. The empire had to begin hiring soldiers recruited from the unemployed city mobs or worse from foreign counties. Such an army was not only unreliable, but very expensive. The emperors were forced to raise taxes frequently which in turn led again to increased inflation.

THE FINAL BLOWS

For years, the well-disciplined Roman army held the barbarians of Germany back. Then in the third century A. D. the Roman soldiers were pulled back from the Rhine-Danube frontier to fight civil war in Italy. This left the Roman border open to attack. Gradually Germanic hunters and herders from the north began to overtake Roman lands in Greece and Gaul (later France). Then in 476 A. D. the Germanic general Odacer or Odovacar overthrew the last of the Roman Emperors, Augustulus Romulus. From then on the western part of the Empire was ruled by Germanic chieftain. Roads and bridges were left in disrepair and fields left untilled. Pirates and bandits made travel unsafe. Cities could not be maintained without goods from the farms, trade and business began to disappear. And Rome was no more in the West.
Reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire

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"Some have learnt many Tricks of sly Evasion, Instead of Truth they use Equivocation, And eke it out with mental Reservation, Which is to good Men an Abomination."

I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to.

HAKUNA MATATA

ExNavyAmerican

I blame these things:

1. The plague that killed off most Romans.
2. Incompetent emperors.
3. Christianity (it had a pivotal role)
4. barbarians settling within the empire because of the Hun invasions.

More detail-

1. The Romans already were outnumbered by their subjects so that wasn't really the issue. The issue was that there were too few Romans to become emperor, to join the army, or to preserve their heritage. This is why that the Eastern Roman Empire became, in effect, a Greek state under Heraclius.

2. The incompetent emperors allowed things to happen that really shouldn't have happened. For example, under Vespasian the frontiers crumbled with the defeat of the Roman legion against Gothic knights at Adrianople. Emperors like Caligula, and Commodus were pedophiles, and lax emperors who did not care less about what was happening. Under them, the decline of power made headway that otherwise would have taken centuries.

3. Constantine gave Christians privelages. One such privelage was that they were allowed to travel the Imperial Road System for free. So, a massive increase of travellers wearing the roads down with no extra money to pay for it. It antagonized a lot of the old school, but at the same time it served as a force that kept the empire together for a little while.

4. Illegal immingration. Barbarians were allowed to settle within the empire by lax emperors, and when the Germanic tribes grew large enough, the Empire had grown weak enough to fall victim to hundreds of thousands of barbarians.

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"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever."
- Thomas Jefferson

Ray

Geographic Catalysts for Secularization in Western Europe

Worth a look through.


Also:

Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
One can say of Gibbon what Mark Twain said of whiskey: "Too much of anything is too much but too much whiskey is just right."

ExNavyAmerican

Peter Arnott in his book, "The Byzantines and their World" gave a description of the condition in Italy at the time of the Roman invasion in the 6th century under the emperor Justinian I. The roads were in good repair, the cities were in good condition, the Ostrogothic King was just, and the citizenry were contented enough to not welcome their cousins from the East back with open arms. What caused the ultimate decline of Italy after the fall was the constant fighting between the Byzantines, and the Goths; and later the Lombard invasions.

ExNavyAmerican

Couldn't agree more. Gibbons was a great writer, and I've read his work "The Decline and fall" twice through. His definitive, and detailed information about everything from the Antonines to the barbarian emperors really paint a clear picture of current events of that time.

brokensickle

As America gets more services there comes more poverty, as there comes more poverty there comes more anger, as there comes more anger there comes more services and more bureaucracy and more taxation, as there comes more taxation there comes less jobs, as there comes less jobs there comes more poverty, as there comes more poverty there comes more riots, as there comes more riots there comes more need for oppressive government, as there comes more oppressive government there comes more taxation..........It a wicked snowball, but a lack of personal responsibility is the Genesis of it and the left, at least here in America seems to thrive when people want something for nothing

It cost dearly when one doesn't stand on his own two feet, when his own two feet are strong enough to stand on.


IVAN

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"Evil opposes freedom and uses those who pervert it as pawns to destroy it."

Swift Sword

My classical education has been sadly neglected, but in my modest experience, it seems that Rome's critical domestic problems were pretty well formed with the conclusion of the Punic Wars.

This being the case, I would start looking for the cause of the decline in the circumstances surrounding the Third Punic war and its conclusion both foreign and domestic.

Kind of ironic, methinks: the seeds of the fall of the Empire were sown in the fall of the Republic.

William

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Pharoh was pimp but now he is dead. What are you going to do today?

xerxes

I think it is always like that, in case of Napoleon, the seeds of this downfall were sown in his victory at Austerlitz.

Though the Western historian like to split the Roman time into Republic era and Imperial era, I think they are one and the same. Empire was the republic. It is like the German consitution of the Wiemar Republic after the fall of Kaiser, which its first point was: "The Reich is now a republic"

Actually, i dont think so. Because, Diocleatian transfered the capital to East first, though not in Byzantuim. His reasoning was that Eternal Rome had become more the spiritual throne city, rather effective administrative centre. None of his four capitals - ruled by himself, Maximilian and the two other Caesars - were Rome. Bascially, the axis of power had shifted away from Rome toward East and North.
Sort of like how the axis of power had shifted away from Istanbul toward the Suez Canal during the Turkish-British-Russian intrigue era.

Yes .. though I dont think Constantin had any intention of splitting the empire, and again incase of Diocleatian it was merely for administrative purposes, that being said the Republic never actually officially seperated into parts (ref. Gibbson)

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If we contrast the rapid progress of this mischievous discovery of gunpowder with the slow and laborious advances of reason, science, and the arts of peace, a philosopher, according to his temper, will laugh or weep at the folly of mankind. - Edward Gibbon

Ironduke

The Romans of the 5th century likely saw Odovacar's takeover as business as usual, and didn't view 476 AD as some monumental date the people do nowadays. Non-Italians had served as Roman emperors since 235 AD.

The Romans and the "barbarians" weren't too unalike in the last century or so of the Roman Empire.

Citing cited sources from Wikipedia, Italians were less than 1% of the Roman army by Hadrian's reign, it was majority barbarian for over three centuries before its fall. Barbarians were allowed to settle inside Roman borders since the creation of the Empire.

Furthermore... the heyday of the Roman infantry was over by the 3rd century. From thereon, it was cavalry dominated and barbarian technology was a match for Roman.

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The Buck Stops Here

Kartajan

Romans lost their Genius for the Empire: Both meanings of the word "genius", archaic and contemporary, intended

Ironduke

I think the language was a bit superfluous, he could have afforded to been more concise. Then again he was writing for a different type of readership.

Bulgaroctonus

I agree with most of your other assertions, but the Antonine Plague did not play a decisive role in the empire's downfall. The worst thing it did was deprive the empire of Marcus Aurelius.

The period of military anarchy in the third century was most damaging to the empire. Furthermore, we are presented with a historiographical problem insofar as you will be hard pressed to detect what damage was due to the Antonine Plague after the immense wreckage of the period from 235-284. Our sources on the period are relatively sparse and it is almost impossible to pinpoint the population fluctuations associated with a plague when it is followed by a period of upheaval.

If anything, the plague of Justinian was the most responsible for the collapse of the Roman state and its transformation into the Byzantine Empire proper.

Bulgaroctonus

I admire your readership of Edward Gibbon, especially because I have not yet read his entire history. However, I must caution you that Gibbon's ideas about the fall of the empire need to be treated with caution. I believe that scholarship of J.B. Bury may be more apt. Gibbon will never be excelled as a narrative historian and his work is the greatest history bar none.

Nonetheless, his idea that Christianity sapped the strength of Rome is flawed. There is no evidence that Christian Roman soldiers or denizens did not fight has hard for the Empire as their pagan forbears on the basis of religion. That is, the supposed lack of fighting ethos, which Gibbon attributed to Christian apathy or preoccupation with the afterlife, was probably due more to the parasitism of the landed aristocracy in the later Empire and the perennial budgetary problems of the empire.

Gibbon's analysis of the Byzantine Empire is also gravely mistaken. He reconstructed the Eastern Empire's history as one long slide from defeat to defeat, presided over by effete and degenerate emperors. Due to better scholarship, we know realize that Byzantium was a vivacious culture and powerful empire. It deserves appreciation as its own case, not merely as a long appendix to the Roman Empire.

Bulgaroctonus

It was never the policy of Roman Rulers to allow any religion if that religion did pay respects to the emperor. The Romans dispensed great suffering on the Jews and Christians in the classical period. Nevertheless, the early Empire was much more religiously tolerant than the Empire of Theodosius.

The soldiers of the Empire were heterodox and were often the ones responsible for spreading the cult of Isis from Egypt, Manichaeism from Persia, or Mithraism from unknown locales. The idea of Sol Invictus can be applied to the idea that Caracalla started, Mithras, or El-Gabal, a rather strange invention of the Severans about which I know very little.

You will be hard pressed to cite examples where Christians were less motivated to preserve their Empire than their pagan forebears because of their religion. Like I wrote before, any slackening in the Roman will is probably not associated with Christian theology.

The new Christian administration provided a valuable anchoring point in resistance to the various centrifugal forces ripping the empire apart at the time. The papacy and Eastern patriarchates were the most stable institutions in the empire as it fell apart.

One can hardly imagine the Eastern Roman Empire existing without Christianity. Indeed, the Virgin Mary provided hope to the defenders of Constantinople and the Eastern Empire in many cases, most notably in the Avar and Persian siege in 626. Byzantine Rulers after Heraclius almost always had Christ on the reverse of their coins.

There was never a time when immigrants outnumbered local Romans during the Germanic invasions. By most accounts, the invading German armies were small compared to the conquered Roman population. For example, Gaul kept up a distinctly Roman culture for at least a century under Frankish dominion. The dominance of Roman culture is evinced by the fact that in most areas of Western Europe where Roman rule had been around for centuries, the invading Germans adopted a Romance tongue.

Slaves were not freed through any act of Christian kindness. The slaves disappeared as the difference between free peasants and slaves slowly lessened in the later empire. It appears that the fourth and fifth centuries were periods of economic hardship in which the independent agrarian class largely became serfs, dominated by Roman nobles with questionable allegiance to the central government.