Fall of Roman Empire

11 Key excerpts on "Fall of Roman Empire"

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  The Romans

  An Introduction

  • Abigail Graham, Antony Kamm(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  11   The fall of the Roman Empire and its legacy: ad 330-Present

  Some of the evidence (authors, events, historical figures and materials) discussed in this work are subjects of case studies on an accompanying webpage for this book. Look out for the companion website symbol.

  The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened to the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.

  (E. Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the 
Roman Empire (1776), chapter 38)

  The traditional ideologies and historical framework which the early emperors of Rome sought to institutionalize in the city’s monumental buildings became a liability in a new Christian world, where pagan traditions were not immediately reconciled with Christian values. That Rome retained her pagan values is attested not only in the number of Christian churches which remained outside the city walls until the 5th century, but also the pagan games and festivals, many of which continued through the 5th century ad (the final Lupercalia festival, for example, was recorded ca. ad 494), when Pope Gelasisus criticized a Roman senator for “streaking about” in the buff. The historian Ammianus Marcellinus, who lived in Rome in the 4th century and fought as a soldier, captures this fluctuating world, struggling at times to reconcile the prejudices of Christians and pagans alike. Although Ammianus’ manuscript only survives as a fragmented codex from ad 353–78, it reveals a flame of traditional Roman culture as it flickers into oblivion, or as Gibbon would suggest: collapses upon itself.

  The fall of Rome ad 330–476

  Constantine had intended that, upon his death, the rule of the Empire should devolve to a team of four: his three sons, Constantine II (ca. 316–40), Constantius II (317–61) and Constans (ca. 322–50), and his nephew Dalmatius. To form a tetrarchy on a dynastic principle was, however, more than the system could stand. Dalmatius was murdered, the brothers bickered, their armies fought and the Empire was in splinters once again. The failure of dynasty was a lesson Rome’s leaders would never learn, to her great peril.

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  Balance

  The Economics of Great Powers from Ancient Rome to Modern America

  • Glenn Hubbard, Tim Kane(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Simon & Schuster

    (Publisher)

  11

  EVIDENCE OF THE FALL

  There remains a popular theory that the emergence of Christianity during the later empire was a principal cause of Rome’s fall. This explanation was prominent in Edward Gibbon’s famous History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in 1776. Today, that theory has been largely debunked. “Most scholars have considered economic forces as critical,” wrote Nobel laureate Douglass North in Structure .

  One fashionable modern theory that grabs attention is this: Rome never fell. Forget searching for causes, these historians say. Rather, migratory pressures led to a gentle evolution of the culture. What’s so great about empire, anyway? Historian Bryan Ward-Perkins made a definitive case for the traditional, politically incorrect viewpoint in his 2005 book, The Fall of Rome:

  It is currently deeply unfashionable to state that anything like a “crisis” or a “decline” occurred at the end of the Roman Empire, let alone that “civilization” collapsed and a “dark age” ensued. The new orthodoxy is that the Roman world, in both East and West, was slowly, and essentially painlessly, “transformed” into a medieval form. However, there is an insuperable problem with this new view: it does not fit the mass of archaeological evidence now available, which shows a startling decline in the western standards of living during the fifth to seventh centuries. This was a change that affected everyone, from peasants to kings, even the bodies of the saints resting in their churches. It was no mere transformation—it was decline on a scale that can reasonably be described as “the end of a civilization.”

  Ward-Perkins effectively traces the loss of complexity to a collapse of the scale of Rome’s once vast, once frictionless, internal trade market. Without scale, specialization dried up. Whole towns died, and whole regions reverted to lower levels of development than they had been at before

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  From Plato to NATO

  The Idea of the West and Its Opponents

  • David Gress(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Free Press

    (Publisher)

  35 By the 1990s, Spengler’s prime case of cultural decline had been stood on its head. The Roman Empire, we were now told, fell neither to external attack nor to internal decay, but because its leading elites wanted transformation. The empire ended itself.

  Such a conclusion would truly subvert much of the use made of the Fall of Rome in the debate on the West in the last two centuries, particularly since Spengler, whose ominous comparison of the Fall of Rome to the future of the West of his day helped to create the pessimism of the interwar years and the resulting search for comfort in tradition.

  The Spenglerian account of the Fall of Rome was that it was inevitable, because civilizations were like organisms; they grew old and died. To Spengler, the Fall of Rome was an essential precondition of the West. The division of the Roman world into East and West was something that had to happen for the West to emerge as an entity in its own right, separate from ancient civilization. But those who saw the Fall of Rome in Spenglerian terms over-looked Spengler’s basic point about the ancient world, namely, that its inevitable decline began not in the third, fourth, or fifth century, but in the age of Julius Caesar and Augustus. The Roman Empire itself, the imperial structure of government, administration, and command, embodied decline, for by entering the imperial epoch ancient civilization surrendered its last shreds of vitality and creativity. The events of the fourth to sixth centuries—the rise of the church, oppressive bureaucracy, barbarian invasions, and the end of the western empire—were mere details of no significance whatever in the desert of stagnation that separated ancient civilization from the rise of the “Faustian” West, which Spengler dated to around A.D. 1000.

  Arnold Toynbee moved the beginning of the end of ancient civilization even further back, to the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 431 B.C. 36 The young Englishman explained this insight as a revelation that struck him in August 1914, when World War I was breaking out. He realized then, he later wrote, that the great war just beginning would mark a fateful change in the history of the West, the end of its creative period and the start of its Time of Troubles. In the next instant he understood, in an intuitive flash, that what he was seeing in 1914 was the equivalent of what had happened to ancient civilization in 431 B.C. The Peloponnesian War had marked the end of the Golden Age of Greece and the beginning of what Toynbee saw as a continuous Time of Troubles lasting until the Romans unified the Mediterranean world in the second and first centuries B.C. The Roman Empire was the universal empire, the final stage of ancient civilization, and the final destiny of all civilizations. Such an empire gave peace to a troubled world, but it was a stagnant and uncreative peace. The culture of a universal empire was eclectic, derivative, and ultimately fragile, as its various enemies grew in strength both inside and outside its borders and prepared the attacks that would bring it to an end. This belief became the cornerstone of Toynbee’s twelve-volume Study of History

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  The Modern Cultural Myth of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

  • Jonathan Theodore(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  what his theory of the decline and fall constitutes therefore warrants considerable attention.

  Before Gibbon, the chief emphasis in much Late Antique and Medieval historiography had been on the translatio imperii , the “transfer of rule,” or the passing on of the heart of civilization: from pagan to Christian Rome, and from pax Romana to Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire of the Middle Ages.

  35

  In this philosophy, Roman history and culture had changed, developed, even declined from its highs; but it did not necessarily collapse into oblivion and ruin. A variation on this idea for the Eastern Empire is found in the “Third Rome” myth: namely, that after the collapse of the Byzantine Empire, the Muscovite Tsars supposedly took over the mantle as the inheritors, not just of Orthodox Christianity, but of the entire East Roman tradition—a burden seamlessly passed on to the Russian Empire, the (formally atheist) Soviet Union and subsequently even to the Russian Federation.”

  36

  Gibbon, however, initiated a new phase in the moralizing, didactic interpretation of the Roman Empire and its fate. It is in his writing that the decline and fall myth emerges in its consolidated, coherent form—and one with a clearly comparative purpose. In the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire he wrote a prose epic, one in which the panorama of historical experience is viewed on a universal, yet highly subjective scale. The title of his work reflects the concerns of the time: it is less a work of “history” in the narrow or descriptive sense than a broad treatise on human nature, its triumphs and failings, and highly notable for how much it is indicative of contemporary concerns, rather than the remote past it describes.

  37

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  A History of the Later Roman Empire, AD 284-700

  • Stephen Mitchell, Geoffrey Greatrex(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  During the 630s the state proved unable to repel or neutralize the unexpected challenge of the Arabs, who came from an area of the empire that had previously been both metaphorically and literally marginal and had never previously posed a major threat. The arguments in this chapter suggest that the central cause of this collapse was not exhaustion caused by the twenty-year struggle with the rival empire of the Sasanians, but an acute demographic – and therefore economic – recession caused by the plague across the regions of Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Near East. By the beginning of the seventh century Rome could neither summon nor deploy the resources necessary for sustained military or diplomatic efforts against determined enemies. The implosion of the Roman state as a viable world power had been matched by internal cultural and social changes. Throughout late antiquity the empire had been transformed by the changing role and nature of Christianity within Roman society, and the symptoms of this, which have been extensively discussed and analyzed in modern scholarship, were especially apparent in the sixth and seventh centuries. They include the emergence of bishops as community leaders, who became dominant figures in secular as well as religious matters, 88 and the growing importance of Christian asceticism, which underpinned the influence of charismatic individual saints, 89 and even more importantly led to the creation of the monastic movement (see pp

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  Homo Economicus

  The (Lost) Prophet of Modern Times

  • Daniel Cohen, Susan Emanuel(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  3 The Decline of Empire Late Antiquity The last thirty years mark the swing from a world of restraint towards a world of excess. Yesterday, elites ‘veiled their suc-cesses with old-fashioned decencies’. Now they abandon the middle and working classes to their fates and no longer fear exhibiting their wealth. This rupture can be understood as the passage ‘from an age of equipoise to an age of ambition’. These phrases, which ring true as a way of understanding our era, are in fact used by the historian Peter Brown to characterize Late Antiquity and the beginnings of the slow ‘decline of the Roman Empire’. The transformations at work at that time indeed very much resemble those we are discuss-ing today. 1 The parallel gives an unsuspected depth to the current upheavals. Between the reign of Marcus Aurelius (121–180 CE), an emperor fully planted in the ancient world and its values, and that of Constantine (280–337 CE), who was going to open the doors to the Christianization of the world, the Roman Empire profoundly changed its nature. The idea of a general ‘crisis’ has been mentioned with regard to the third The Decline of Empire 35 century, when scholars talk of a ‘malaise’ of ancient civiliza-tion, ‘a rise in superstition’ or ‘the decline of rationalism’. According to Peter Brown, this malaise is not explained by material causes (economic decline or growing poverty). For him, it is the former model of parity among the elites, with constraints borrowed from the lost past of the ancient pagan city, that broke down. 2 This crisis corresponded to a collapse of the equilibrium in the political and social order. He cau-tions that the transition from the Age of Antonius to the Age of Constantine was not caused by catastrophic crumbling, but rather resulted from a shift from one dominant lifestyle and its forms of expression, to another one, the shift from an age of equilibrium to an age of ambition.

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  The Ruin of Roman Britain

  An Archaeological Perspective

  • James Gerrard(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  In c.600 the same region was a patchwork of polyglot communities, some smaller than a modern county, many of whom looked, not to the Mediterranean but the lands around the North Sea as their cultural, if not genetic, homeland (Bassett 1989; Yorke 1990). The structures of the Roman state – taxation, currency, literacy – were gone, urbanism was dead. Political, social and economic complexity had disappeared only to tentatively re-emerge in the seventh century and even then on nothing like the scale that had gone before. Archaeology and history are both rearward looking disciplines. Their practitioners have the benefit (usually) of knowing what happened and when and often convince themselves that they understand the linkages between events that would have eluded contemporaries. Hindsight is, of 73 74 Economic collapse course, perfect vision. The mistakes, errors and shrewd moves are always obvious after the fact but were rarely so clear-cut when decisions were being made. The danger for archaeologists and historians is that the gift of hindsight bestowed upon them becomes a set of blinkers blinding them to all but a teleological view of the past. In this scenario Britain’s situation in c.600 must be the product of an economic collapse, the cause of which was the fall of Rome. It is argued here that understanding the fall of Rome lies, not in taking two points in time and listing the similarities and differences between them, but in trying to grasp the complexities of the period and its social, economic and political changes. It is not enough to be able to describe two situations. They must be explained. What follows is an attempt to free the fifth century from the shackles of the teleology of Rome’s fall. The Roman economy In order to explore the collapse of the systems that the Romano-British economy comprised it is necessary to define the nature of those interlinked systems and their economics.

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  Western Civilization: A Global and Comparative Approach

  Volume I: To 1715

  • Kenneth L. Campbell(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Depopulation was another major social development contributing to the decline of the Roman Empire. From an estimated height between 70 million and 100 million people during the first half of the first century, the population of the Roman Empire may have sunk as low as 40 million by the early third century. This decline would help to explain Diocletian’s measures to fix social classes by forcing sons to practice the same occupations as their fathers. The influx of barbarians from outside the empire contributed to a gradual increase in the population during the fourth century. But—as important as the overall decline in population was—the shifting of the balance of population from west to east in the fourth century was equally significant. Constantine’s construction of the new capital of Constantinople in the east played the most important role here. The population of the new capital grew spectacularly—to perhaps as many as a million people by the sixth century—while Rome’s population continued to decline. In addition to the impact of disease and plague, citizens in the western half of the empire may have chosen to have fewer children in what were uncertain economic times. Though economic problems were hardly new to Roman citizens, this combination of factors definitely led to a population drop that exacerbated some of Rome’s other problems. With fewer citizens to man the Roman defensive armies, emperors turned increasingly to outside mercenaries from the very groups of people against whom they claimed to be defending the empire.

  Another major factor often cited in the decline of Rome, most famously by Gibbon, was the impact of Christianity on Roman political values. During the third century a number of Roman emperors did make an effort to reinforce the traditional worship of the Roman gods. Their concern would seem to indicate that devotion to these gods had started to wane. The cult of the emperor had definitely been eroded, particularly during the time of the “barracks emperors” from 235 to 280 in which every emperor came from the military and most suffered violent overthrows at the hands of their successors. Diocletian took steps to remedy the erosion of Roman religious values, just as he attempted to address the other problems that he inherited. His harsh persecution of Christians, however, was only one dimension of his religious initiative to restore traditional Roman worship. For he strove to eliminate other religious beliefs, such as those of the Manicheans, who believed in a dualistic universe involving a struggle between the forces of good and the forces of evil, and persecuted anyone who refused to worship the Roman gods.

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  Food Cultures in Medieval Europe

  • Antonella Campanini, Léa Ashe(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Peter Lang Group

    (Publisher)

  1. The Roman Empire falls (5 th -8 th centuries) Romans History conventionally locates the start of the Middle Ages with the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and, more specifically, with the year 476, when Romulus Augustulus, the last Roman emperor, gets deposed. We should start our journey, then, in the Roman foodscape during the first centuries after Christ. Naming a precise date of departure, however, turns out to be not merely complex but downright misleading. It might be useful, in our case, to consider that famous year 476 not as a point of departure but rather one of arrival. If we adopt a perspective from within the declining empire, we find ourselves in the final act of a tangled imperial drama, a story of ceaseless contacts among different cultures – exchanges, comminglings, acquisitions, and rebuffs. It isn’t that the invading barbarians undermine Rome: for centuries, Rome has done nothing but evolve and change. Indeed, times when the empire’s borders are not changing, when Rome neither grows nor shrinks, are rare. Between carefully orchestrated military affairs and more innocent extraterritorial wanderings, the situation is all but stable, and these many encounters with the other bring the widening gaze that so often accompanies such meetings. By 476, then, the cultural arrangement is already a composite one, irreducible ad unum. And on the alimentary plane, this situation turns out to be especially interesting. Not every Roman contact and conquest implies a change in foodways – not even a gradual one. For example, though Greek colonies sat for centuries in the southern Italian peninsula, these seem to have borne little impact on Roman food practices. Much more significant, on the other hand, were the changes that followed Rome’s conquests in Greece, Asia Minor, and the Near East from the late second century BC onward. These territorial expansions would coincide with the gradual

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  Roman Power

  A Thousand Years of Empire

  • W. V. Harris(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  9 Potter 2009. The long-term evolution of Roman power 4 Figure 1.1. Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, whose book Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (Amsterdam, 1734) was the first important historical analysis of the Roman Empire in modern times The long-term evolution of Roman power 5 of the vital Syrian provinces, it begins to make much more sense to see Byzantium not as an empire in any proper signification of the term but as one state among a number of others that covered western Eurasia and the Mediterranean. Antioch fell to the Muslims in 637, Jerusalem in the same year, Alexandria in 641 (but it was only in 698 that they destroyed Carthage), and before very long the Umayyad Caliphate was larger than the Roman Empire had ever been. By 636 the Roman Empire had few Latin-speaking subjects, but that is a secondary issue: the sixth- and seventh-century Byzantines believed that they were Romans and that their territory was Romanía (hence John the Lydian naturally started his On the Magistracies of the Roman People – his people, even though he was born in western Asia Minor – with Romulus), 10 and their continuous history entitled them to that belief. After the disas- trous events of 636–42, however, the question is whether the Byzantine Roman Empire was still powerful enough to be counted as an empire – and it did not fit that description again for more than 300 years, not in fact until the early eleventh century and the last years of the emperor Basil II. The years between 636 and the failures of the emperor Constans II (641–68) should be recognized as the real end of the Roman Empire. As to why serious Roman historians virtually never cover the entirety of Roman history, there are more and less obvious reasons. The most obvious is that it is very difficult. Almost everything changes, not only the sources and the material culture, but the principal language and the dominant religion.

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  Warfare in the Ancient World

  From the Bronze Age to the Fall of Rome

  • Stefan G. Chrissanthos(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  He would then march against the emperor, precipitating a civil war. In some cases, the challenger would be defeated and killed; in others, he would emerge victorious and take the now-vacant throne. However, once he became emperor, he had to make his men happy. If he could not find the necessary funds or if he tried to impose discipline, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 180 C.E.–476 C.E. 175 they would assassinate him and replace him with another officer. Even if he was able to fulfill his promises to his men, inevitably another army com- mander would decide that he wanted to be emperor, and the whole process would begin again. Between 235 and 270 C.E., there were 37 different emper- ors, only one of whom died of natural causes. At the same time, as the empire was disintegrating internally, it faced massive external pressures. First, in the east, a new Persian Empire emerged. Even though the Persians had been governed by outsiders for 500 years, first Greeks and then Parthians, the ancient glories of Persia had not been forgot- ten. In 224, a Persian noble named Ardeshir, who claimed descent from Cyrus the Great, overthrew the Parthian Empire (250 B.C.E.–224 C.E.). In its place rose a new Persian empire called the Sassanid Empire, named after Ardeshir’s grandfather, Sassan. Ardeshir then sought to recover the old Persian Empire by expanding west into provinces now controlled by Rome. War would con- tinue between these two powers off and on for the next four centuries. The Romans also had to face invasions from the north by German tribes, including the Franks, Suevi, Alemanni, Saxons, Goths, Vandals, Gepidae, Heruli, Burgundians, Lombards, and Marcomanni. Under these combined pressures, Rome experienced some difficult years. In 251, Decius became the first Roman emperor killed in battle while fighting against the Goths.

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