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The Emperor Left Town
Weak leaders, failed military campaigns and a few lessons for imperialists.
By PETER STOTHARD
The fall of the Roman Empire has never been a cheerful subject for those with empires of their own. Imperialists who in later centuries wished to dominate large areas of the globe argued sometimes that the first millennium was irrelevant to their times, sometimes that the collapse of the greatest ancient power came from causes wholly absent in their modern empires and sometimes that the Roman fall did offer parallels -- but only for the imperialist regimes of other people. That an imperial machine as massive as Rome's might, for no clear reasons, cease to function has long brought varying degrees of disquiet and does so still today.
Weak leaders, failed military campaigns and a few lessons for imperialists.
By PETER STOTHARD
The fall of the Roman Empire has never been a cheerful subject for those with empires of their own. Imperialists who in later centuries wished to dominate large areas of the globe argued sometimes that the first millennium was irrelevant to their times, sometimes that the collapse of the greatest ancient power came from causes wholly absent in their modern empires and sometimes that the Roman fall did offer parallels -- but only for the imperialist regimes of other people. That an imperial machine as massive as Rome's might, for no clear reasons, cease to function has long brought varying degrees of disquiet and does so still today.
Adrian Goldsworthy's "How Rome Fell" begins and ends with reflections on Edward Gibbon, whose classic work of the 1770s and 1780s, "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," set a standard for all successors. Mr. Goldsworthy sees Gibbon as instinctively relating imperial Rome to imperial London and growing ever more pessimistic as the years swept by. When the first volume of "The Decline and Fall" appeared in 1776, the prospect of Britain keeping its American colonies seemed bright. By the time of the second and third volumes, in 1781, Britain's trans-Atlantic empire was trundling shakily toward Yorktown. In 1788, Americans were able to read the final three volumes in a new country. The tone of the great British historian, Mr. Goldsworthy says, took a noticeable change during this time.
His own tone toward Britain -- Mr. Goldsworthy is himself British -- moves equally toward depression. He notes that, like the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries, his country has had a growing share of incompetence, corruption and blatant deceitfulness. It, too, has seen the number and the power of military bureaucrats rise while the number of soldiers has fallen. This sort of comparison, seemingly inevitable for its subject, emerges from various passages in "How Rome Fell" but does intrude directly upon Mr. Goldsworthy's story. Like Gibbon himself, whose sense of living with two declining empires comes less from his history than from his letters, Mr. Goldsworthy is eager to give primacy to his narrative. He covers a shorter time period than Gibbon but tells us clearly and well -- and without attempts at literary majesty -- about the series of events that brought Rome's western empire to a state of collapse.
There were mad, bad emperors, of course, campaigns lost against Persians, Germans and Gauls, and the imposition of Christianity in extreme and intolerant forms. There was the Persian capture and life-imprisonment of Emperor Valerian in 260. Those looking for decisive battles often choose Adrianople in 378, when the Goths killed Emperor Valens and some 10,000 of his men on what is now the Greco-Turkish border. The fifth-century emperors, a succession of generals, children and chancers, showed flexibility but little foresight.
Although Britain's decline is much on Mr. Goldsworthy'smind, the U.S. is the main focus of his practical historiography. Predominantly a military historian, he has enjoyed the attention of Washington policy makers eager to learn about the similarities between then and now -- overstretched forces, domestic greed, declining shared values, determined foreign foes. It is "an odd sensation," he says, "for an historian to talk to an audience that is actually listening to what you are saying." In universities it is more common for the members of a seminar to be thinking about their own contribution in reply. Americans, he discovers, are also more likely to have taken a general classics course and to have some knowledge, at least in outline, of the time between Julius Caesar and the beginning of the Middle Ages.
How exactly did the Roman Empire fall? One sure answer is "slowly." It did not collapse like the 20th- century empires of Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union. Another answer is "violently." It was long a useful orthodoxy for the founders of the European Union that their continent had developed inevitably, almost gently, from a Roman Empire to the first Franco-German axis. But some excellent books for general readers in the past few years, notably Brian Ward- Perkins's "The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization" (2005), have shown how devastating was the economic and human cost paid between 450 and 900. It is still unfashionable to speak of the Dark Ages (there was continuing cultural life), but these were certainly the Poor Ages, in which protection for the weak and vulnerable, from roaming killers and even from the weather, was much more precarious than it had been under Roman rule.
When did the fall begin? Mr. Goldsworthy gives a vivid account of one the periods most often cited, the four years following 192 A.D., when Rome tottered under the weight of its responsibilities and the weakness of its leaders. He focuses on the murders of Commodus (the first emperor to be born the natural heir to a reigning father) and then of his chaotic successors, Pertinax (whose father was a freed slave) and Julianus (who bought the office at auction). After them came the African, Septimius Severus, who has attracted recent attention as Rome's "first black emperor," although Mr. Goldsworthy follows the line that he may have been merely a bit dark-skinned. Anyway, he is judged to have shown no thinking that was different from that of his benighted predecessors.
While Severus gains the Goldsworthy status of "a good emperor" who, unusually for his time, died a natural death, his heirs took on the mantles of mania and madness. Frightened emperors felt increasingly insecure in Rome: The need for them to be on permanent military maneuvers matched their personal preference to be out of town. The power and idea of Rome moved east -- where Gibbon followed it. The year 476, when the diminutively named Romulus Augustulus was deposed, became a conventional date for later writers of Rome's power ending in the West. But few probably noticed much difference at the time. Gibbon finished his task in surprise that the Roman Empire had lasted so long. Mr. Goldsworthy concludes that empires are no more immune from human stupidity than anything else.
Mr. Stothard is editor of The Times Literary Supplement.
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