Re: Classical antiquity to the Middle Ages: Continuity or Discontinuity?

On Apr 3, 2:27 pm, "roger.pea...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
<roger.pea...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 3 Apr, 18:05, Larry Swain <gi...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

... the problem with approaches like Ward-Perkins is
that he so focuses on barbarian violence and rather ignores the a)
violence of the Romans themselves both toward the barbarians, and
towards their own subjects and that that had been going on for a couple
of centuries and b) that the Romans had failed increasingly over the 3rd
and 4th and 5th centuries to provide security from piracy and banditry,
and these certainly raped, pillaged, and affected things as much as
anything (and these were ROMANS IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE), enough that in
places like Aquitaine the Goths were welcomed by most Gallo-Romans
because they could and did provide protection without themselves merely
becoming robber barons.  

These are all very valid points.

Et tu, Roger?

If we look at Ammianus Marcellinus, we see just such a picture
emerging; of Roman society in melt-down, of the officials neglecting
their duty in order to pillage (sometimes under cover of special
levies) or refusing to do their duty to protect the provincials unless
paid to do so (the unhappy experience of the inhabitants of Leptis
Magna under Valentinian, at the hands of Count Romanus for instance).

Throughout that writer we see something of a pattern emerging.  If a
Roman army won a victory, it would tend to proclaim its general as
emperors, thereby sparking a civil war.  If it was defeated, of
course, the province was ravaged.  Either way, the empire lost out.
No society that gets itself into such a state has much prospect of
survival, against even the weakest foe.

The dominate was a time, economically, when most of us
would not choose to live. The officials were often between a
rock and a hard place, trying to exact taxes from impoverished
peasants in order to fulfill revenue quotas for the central
overnment, the cost of which the increase of bureaucracies
and armies made for an oppressive burden. And booty from
foreign conquest was ancient history by this time.

Further he misuses the evidence by claiming
that the evidence shows that the empire maintained its high economic
status so that the Roman economy was just as strong at 400 CE as at 50
CE.  But this is false, the Roman economy was weakened significantly by
the lack of expansion and the booty and slaves that conquest brought,
the economy was fixed by Diocletian and things became frozen and he
hugely increased the bureaucracy and the army, and raised taxes: the
Roman tax burden of the fourth century was immense: so much so that many
wealthy provinical families went bankrupt BEFORE THE BARBARIANS HAD EVEN
KNOCKED ON THE DOOR

This seems right to me also.  I seem to recall reading in the
introduction to the English translation of the Codex Theodosianus some
emperor asking plaintively why the economy no longer produced enough
wealth.

Notwithstanding the decline of urban centers in the West
and the increase in the proportion of agrarian to non-agrarian
subjects, there is much evidence for a type of prosperity on a
new model for late antiquity.

It could be suggested that it was not barbarian strength that
destroyed the Roman empire, so much as Roman weakness, and the
societal corruption that concentrated on fighting each other, and
betraying each other, rather than the barbarians.  (Such a view, of
course, then leads to the question of why the Eastern empire did not
suffer the same fate).

There is a passage in Sidonius Apollinaris where the emperor Majorian
is entertaining the Gallo-Roman nobility, in order to gain support.
The main impression that remains with me is of some noble being mainly
concerned with whether or not he could get a first consulship -- an
honour that would shortly cease to be of any meaning whatever --
rather than with keeping out the enemy.

I picked up Orosius yesterday, and I seem to recall a passage where an
emperor, "aware that he could do nothing against the barbarians" chose
instead to concentrate on attacking other Romans in a position of
power.

The continual civil strife played a big part. But you can't discount
the effect of the continuous influx by the millions of barbarian
peoples into the empire.

Not that these were necessarily the only factors in the Roman
collapse.

P.S.: I think it was you who said in another post (which I
can't locate at the moment) that the retention of slaves by
the elites helped to increase the number of unemployed free
citizens. That was true in the late republic and early empire,
when masses of dispossessed farmers migrated to Rome and
other metropolises. After the mid-third century, though, the
number of slaves in the empire was very low.

Christopher Ingham
.

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