Why Did Rome Fall?
When it comes to the end of the Roman Empire three things are certain: death, taxes, and Goths. Were reports of its demise exaggerated?
‘Rome was always shapeshifting’
Lea Niccolai is Assistant Professor in Classics at the University of Cambridge
Imagine it is AD 476 and you have travelled to Constantinople to announce that the Roman Empire has just ended. You would be met with ridicule. The event conventionally marking the dissolution of Rome’s imperial institutions in the West – the deposition of Emperor Romulus ‘Augustulus’ at the hands of Odoacer, king of the Visigoths in 476 – was indeed the end of a story. To many contemporaries, however, that story already had little to do with Rome as a transregional power. Odoacer’s statement of loyalty to the Eastern emperor Zeno as his vassal king relied on the assumption that Rome (the empire) continued away from its place of origin. The fifth century sanctioned the idea that the Empire’s future no longer relied on its first capital.
What needs to be asked, then, is what caused Rome (the city) to lose its central role to the Empire’s eastern regions. Here we must remember that the Roman Empire never had a fixed formula to control its immense territories and resources. Rome was always an enormous shapeshifting laboratory of experiments in governance, administration, and interregional trade. Crucially, the military troubles punctuating the third century taught emperors to move away from the isolated centre of the Italian peninsula and closer to where things actually happened. New imperial capitals were established next to the critical frontiers of northern Europe and the eastern regions. When Constantine refounded the city of Byzantium in his name in 330, Mediterranean geopolitics were permanently altered. Constantinople reshaped political and economic routes, absorbing the Empire’s wealth and resources. Increasingly impoverished and depopulated, the West progressively lost its ability to retain stability and secure its frontiers. Its last imperial seat, Ravenna – a small port city on the Adriatic Sea – was arguably most valuable for the fact that it looked eastwards, towards Constantine’s city. We easily forget how the striking continuity of the Roman Empire was only made possible by its ability to constantly rethink and redraw its administrative structures, urban geography, and commercial networks. It is an irony – and an accident – of this story that, at some point, the city of Augustus should be pushed to the margins of its own world.
‘The Empire was an exercise in managed devolution’
Peter Heather is Chair of Medieval History at King’s College London
Covering a vast space in an era when most things moved at 20 miles a day, the Western Roman Empire could only be an exercise in managed devolution, in which local elites ran their own affairs. Two structures held centrifugal forces in check: a shared elite culture and the army. The army protected local elites from outside and internal threats but could also be deployed to suppress local separatism.
By AD 400 holding the structure together had become more difficult. The rise of Persia in the third century had necessitated a division of power between East and West in order to control troops both in the East and on the Rhine and Danube, leading to conflict between the two halves of the Empire. The successful extension of Roman identity to elites right across the Empire also meant that there were more political agendas at play within the system. But none of this was showing any signs of generating political fragmentation. GDP was at its absolute highest in the fourth century (compared to any other point in the Roman era) and all political conflict of the era focused on controlling the system in its entirety, not on breaking away from it, because Roman armies had been reorganised so that an overwhelming preponderance of forces was held at the imperial centre.
Which is where barbarians come in. The end result from two large surges of migration across Rome’s European frontiers (375-80; 405-10) was the existence by c.420 of two new confederations of unprecedented size: Visigoths in Aquitaine and Vandals/Alans in Spain. These directly undermined the critical fiscal-military axis which held the Empire together. Both initially defeated major imperial armies, and, further, disrupted the flow of provincial revenues which might have allowed their replacement by annexing and damaging portions of the Empire’s tax base. By 425 half of the West’s central field army had been destroyed, and a quarter of its provinces were no longer producing revenues. The bulk of the force at the centre had been broken and a vicious cycle set in motion. The Empire no longer had the power to prevent the existing confederations from slowly expanding their territories or new ones, such as Anglo-Saxons, Burgundians, and Franks, from moving onto Roman soil. This set the flow of revenues to the imperial centre, and hence its capacity to maintain effective forces, on a trajectory of terminal decline.
‘Stubbornness collapsed Rome’s authority’
Douglas Boin is Professor of History at Saint Louis University and author of Alaric the Goth: An Outsider’s History of the Fall of Rome (W.W. Norton)
Stars may move and crops may grow, the Roman poet Claudian wrote, but a moral fog clouds the world. The only predictable parts of life, for the most accomplished court poet of Italy in the fifth century AD, were corruption, a lack of accountability, and a collapse of the constitutional willpower needed to solve large-scale problems, such as the granting of citizenship for Rome’s newcomers. ‘Criminals are heroes,/Decent men, harassed.’
In an age shaped by the movements of people on the periphery of the Mediterranean – Vandals, Sueves, Alans, and the Goths of the Danube frontier – Claudian’s reflection stands out. In the last decades of the fourth century AD, many outsiders, Goths among them, fled their homes, crossed the Roman Empire’s borders, and sought security in Roman lands. Women and children settled in Roman villages. Young men served in the Roman army. Their presence caused legal headaches for the government and social conflict in Roman cities. ‘Clothes make the man, but this man’s make a beast’, it was said about anyone with a preference for pelts, furs, and un-toga-like trousers. Xenophobia and stereotyping were the Romans’ usual response to change. And by the fifth century, changes were destabilising every aspect of life. Christian emperors shut down pagan temples and mandated Christian beliefs. Goths were enslaved, slaughtered in the streets, and sacrificed on the battlefields. The last emperor to grant citizenship to outsiders, a status that protected people from arbitrary lawlessness, was Caracalla, who had died in AD 217. Generations of newcomers to Rome lived under unequal justice.
‘The loser of any hard-fought/contest will always be my hero’, a disgruntled Goth, Alaric, says in a poem written in the fifth century during deteriorating diplomatic conversations about legal protections for migrants. ‘A/Danube man never calls it quits.’ In AD 410 it was Alaric who led the attack on Rome, a wake-up call meant to express his frustration with the Roman government’s intransigence. ‘Taken! The city that seduced the world!’ Jerome of Bethlehem lamented. Within three generations, politicians found it more agreeable to forfeit Roman territory than devise a political solution to integrate outsiders. Stubbornness collapsed Rome’s authority, from within.
‘Romans did not see Rome as fallen’
Michele Renee Salzman is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Riverside
In response to the question of why Rome fell, in 1984 the German historian Alexander Demandt provided a list of 210 reasons in alphabetical order. Translated into English, it began with ‘the abolition of gods’ and ended with ‘vulgarization’. The list highlights the need to better measure causation and define what we mean by ‘the fall of Rome’. Even if we agree that it refers to the last centuries of the Western Empire, there remain different explanations, based on differing criteria. Perhaps the most common focuses on the ‘barbarian invasions’ of the fifth century; the ‘fall’ is understood to be the last year there was an emperor designated to rule in the West. But this approach fails to see the resourcefulness with which Romans confronted the political and military crises of the fifth and sixth centuries.
If we looked at the Western Empire as the Romans did, we would not see Rome as fallen. Through the middle of the sixth century, a competitive aristocratic civic culture persisted as senators, bishops, generals and, after 476, barbarian kings, used their resources to fuel the city’s resurgence. The resilience of these elites enabled Rome to maintain its focalising political influence by virtue of its senate, which continued to meet to discuss issues of common concern, to send embassies, to advise emperors and generals, and to govern the city and central Italy. In 476 it negotiated with the Eastern emperor Zeno to allow the general Odoacer to rule instead of a deposed emperor, Nepos.
The ‘fall of Rome’ should not be defined as the contraction of the population or land in the Western provinces, nor by the loss of an emperor in the West. Rather, it should be defined by the end of Rome’s civic and political institutions, such as the senate. Justinian’s gruelling 20-year Gothic War (535-54) did not signal the final fall; it was the reconstruction of Italy after the war that ended the patterns of civic life that had, for centuries, encouraged men and women to invest their money and lives in Rome. Justinian appointed military men and Easterners to high civic office in lieu of Western senators. He also turned to the bishops to take on civic roles, from overseeing the city’s grain supplies to choosing provincial governors. The last recorded meeting of the senate was in the Lateran Basilica in 603. This was the direct result of Justinian’s reform of government, a moment that is synonymous with the true and final fall of Rome.
