Essay

Short Essay Four: The Fall of the Roman Empire The question of what led to the decline of the Roman Empire is a complex subject which historians have debated for centuries. Edward Gibbon suggested in the late 1700’s that the moral fabric of the Roman citizenry was inferior to that of the victorious barbarian invaders. Joseph A. Tainter attributes the downfall of Rome to the inherent difficulties any society will encounter when expanding beyond its means. This idea seems especially unikely in the case of the Roman Empire which, in fact, remained vastly wealthy even in the time of its supposed decline. Thus, there are many conflicting arguments concerning the definition of the "fall" of Rome what exactly this “decline." Did Roman civilization cease to exist, the victim of superior enemies challenging its greatness? Did Rome simply "die" of old age, as a result of some historical law? Or did Roman civilization merely evolve past the empire, and become the sapling of what we now call modern civilization. It is this paper’s intention to prove the latter. The downfall of the Roman Empire was not a catastrophe, but a natural transition into a Christian civilization more capable of surviving in post-antiquity.
The primary sources collected in the ETEP module, of course, provide the best evidence to use in this regard. The evidence of Procopius, a historian writing in the 6th century, is a good place to begin. He documents the capture and sack of the city of Rome in A.D. 410 by the Visigothic (Germanic) king Alaric. According to Procopius, Alaric outsmarted the Romans and took the city by force, causing widespread destruction and devastation. From the evidence of Procopius, the reason for the "fall" of Rome was the incompetence of the Roman defenders (including the weak Roman emperor) and the cleverness and determination of the barbarian king, Alaric. While such conclusions are resonable, one must rememer that, even though the city of Rome itself was taken by the barbarians at this time, they soon deserted the city and moved on, finally settling mainly in Spain. The Roman army and the Roman administration of the provinces were essentially untouched by these events. This can be seen especially strongly in the poem by Rultuius Namatianus, a pagan poet and Roman patriot who, just a few years after the sack of A.D. 410 wrote as follows concerning Rome: "Hear, lovliest Queen of all the world, thy world,/O Rome, translated to the starry skies! / Hear mother of men and mother of the gods, / We through thy temples, dwell not far from heaven, / We sing thee, and shall sing, as long as Fate allows, shall we sing ...." These are hardly the words of someone who has "given up" on Rome. Indeed, in Rutulius' view, Rome will survive "as long as Fate allows."
Many modern scholars think that Salvian, a Christian priest in the western part of the empire, demonstrates how corrupt the Romans had become and how the barbarians were superiod to their former masters. Indeed, Salvian paints a picture in which the barbarians are superior to their Christian former masters. They (the Romans) have, in his view, become corrupt and greedy, unkind to each other and ready for unreasonable violence at any moment -- while the Germanic peoples (the barbarians) were more civilized, to the point that many Romans had fled Roman territory to seek shelter from the Germans. One must remember, however, that Salvian was a moralist preacher, speaking to the Roman Christians in hopes of making them live more moral lives. He had probably never visited the Germanic people and seemed, in fact, not to know too much about them. Rather, he is using his comparison between Romans and barbarians, not as historical evidence but as a means to promote Christian reform among the people within the empire. In other words, his evidence on the nature of Roman and German society should be taken with at least a grain of salt. The same sort of thing can be said about Priscus' portrait of Attila the Hun--supposedly the fiercest of the barbarian leaders. Priscus pictures the Hunnic king as civilized and modest, a perfect host, fair and reasonable in every way. To be sure, Attila may have been more civilized than he is normally seen, but the point is that this information actually tells us very little about the reasons for the supposed collapse of the Roman Empire.
Indeed, the probable reason for what our primary sources show us is that the Roman Empire did not actually fall -- as a military or a cultural institution. Rather, as Peter Brown and other of the secondary sources say, it simply slowly changed, as all societies do over hundreds of years, and the Roman Empire developed into a society that eventually took on new and different characteristics.
The transformation of Rome began with the emergence and eventual rise of Christianity. Since the formation of the first Roman state, Greek models served as the corner stone for almost all major aspects which define Rome as a civilization. Roman thought, literature, art and architecture all find their roots in Hellenistic and Classical Greece. The decline in popular belief in Greco-Roman deities and the simultaneous spread of Christianity altered the structure of society Rome. Devotion to the tenants of personal liberty and the welfare of the state gave way to the Christian morals of good will and personal salvation. People went from merely attempting to improve economic status to seeking to be “good people”. Architecture can also be seen transforming after the rise of Christianity. The columned palaces, temples, and other edifices of Greek origin come to be replaced by the church designs, which continued classical architectural traditions that were transformed to a new use. Thius can also be seen in the mausolea such as those at Ravenna, which were both innovating but retained the traditions of earlier centuries. Roman painting, mosics, and metalwork after the rise of Christianity also began to deviate from the art of earlier times, incorportating traditions from the so-called barbarians of this time, but even there the principles introduced in classical Greece and Rome contiued to exist.
Rome was not the only social structure of late antiquity where one found Christianity. In fact, many of the so-called barbarian tribes were Christian as well. With Christianity as a driving belief system behind both societies, the eventual merging of the Roman civilization and the previously nomadic tribes was necessary for Christianity to continue growing. It is not coincidence that Roman decline and Christian growth began to accelerate as an Islamic civilization was rising in to the east, challenging not only Rome, but Rome's old foe, Persia. As Peter Brown states, this new Islamic-Persian state was “an efficient and aggressive empire, whose ruling classes were notably unreceptive to western influence” (Brown 231). In a broader scope, the events of late antiquity: the merging of Rome and "barbarians" into a Christian civilization, and the formation of an Islamic civilization in the bordering Near East, is the birthplace of the modern cultural wall between East and West that still survives today.
This blending of Roman society and that of the barbarian Christian tribes was evident even before the fall of Rome. As early as the fourth century, Romans were already abandoning the old Roman togas for the garb of the barbarian invaders. Art in this time also began to deviate from the Greek norm. As seen in the diptych of General Stilicho, Roman sculpture started to abandon the three-dimensional statues that were the hallmark of Greco-Roman art for centuries. Mosaics such as the one representing the front of the palace of Theodoric in Ravenna, and numerous diptychs mark a shift to a two-dimensional style which can easily already be seen in barbarian art of the time. The Visgothic eagle earrings are a good example of a flatter representational art not along the Greek lines.
Cultural and social blending was but an effect of the greater change caused by the transformation of Roman civilization. In order for Christianity to continue growth its growth from mystic religion to dominant culture of the West, Rome and the barbarians surrounding her had to be integrated into a single society. Rome alone was incapable of this task, as evident in the extreme difficulty Claudius had in taking Britain; a conquest Joseph Tainter describes as ones that “never paid for themselves” (Tainter 229). With Rome as an incapable host for spreading Christianity, the Empire itself was no longer fit to carry forth its own driving ideology. In turn, as seen on the map of barbarian movements, numerous barbarian tribes took control of Italy, and much of western Europe, each integrating former Roman citizens and culture into their own, and transforming the West into a stronger vehicle for the tenants of Christianity. The apparent end of the Roman Empire was not really an end, but a continuation of the Christian society which Rome had transformed after the reign of Constantine. The civilization that emerged, though not under the control of the Roman state, was governed by a merging of barbarian and Roman culture much in the same way Greek and Etruscan blended to form Rome centuries before. This new Christian West carried the tenants of the faith into the Middle Ages, and helped to form the roots of modern Western Civilization.