Epilogue: Decline and Fall

What are we waiting for here in the square?

The barbarians will arrive today.

Why is there such paralysis in the Senate?
Why do the Senators just sit there and pass no laws?

Because the barbarians will arrive today.

What laws will the Senators vote for now?

The barbarians when they come will pass their own laws.

Why does our Emperor rise from his slumbers so early,
and sit by the widest gate in the city upon the throne,
in splendour, wearing the imperial crown?

Because the barbarians will arrive today.

And the Emperor is waiting to receive their leader.

He is ready to give him a parchment.

On which he has written so many titles and honours.

Why did our two consuls and praetors go out today
dressed in their red, embroidered togas;
why did they wear bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings with richly sparkling emeralds?

Why today do they clutch precious staffs
so exquisitely carved with silver and gold?

Because the barbarians will arrive today;

and such things impress the barbarians.

Why do the worthy orators not come as before
to deliver their speeches, to pronounce their speeches?

Because the barbarians will arrive today;

and speeches and rhetoric bore them.

Why this sudden concern and unease.
(Look how serious the faces have become!).
Why are the streets and the squares emptying so fast,
and everyone goes to their homes with such thoughtful faces?

Because night came and the barbarians did not arrive.

And some arrived from the border,

and told us barbarians no longer exist.

And now what will happen without the barbarians?
Even they were some kind of a solution.

– Konstantinos Kavafis, Waiting for the Barbarians

A regime of social decay

The haunting verses of Waiting for the Barbarians by the modern Greek writer Konstantinos Kavafis effectively capture the tortured soul and angst of a society that feels itself to be standing on the edge of an abyss. That feeling must have gripped the minds of many people in the final years of the Roman Empire. A similar feeling is now growing stronger by the day.

The question of the causes of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire falls outside the scope of the present work. The decline lasted centuries and was not an uninterrupted process. There were periods of recovery and even brilliance, but the general line was downwards.

A more detailed treatment will have to wait for another day, but without attempting to plumb the depths of this important subject, it will be worthwhile drawing a few threads together in the form of a brief epilogue, for two reasons.

First, the social and economic decay that fatally undermined the Empire was clearly rooted in the previous period, which forms the subject of the present work. Second, and more important, it holds very important lessons for the world in which we live today.

It often happens in history that outworn institutions can survive long after their reason to exist has disappeared. They drag out a miserable existence, like a decrepit old man who clings onto life, until they are swept away by a revolution.

The forms of the old Republic survived for a long time after its final ignominious collapse. But they were just that – hollow forms with no real content, empty husks that in the end could be blown away by the wind. The Senate was devoid of all real power and authority.

Augustus took care to observe the forms and ‘consult’ the Senate, and even contrived not to laugh out loud when doing so. Naturally, none of the senators ever dared to contradict his friendly advice. For some time later, the emperors continued this farce, but they soon got tired of it and openly regarded the Senate with contempt – if they regarded it at all. Caesar scandalised people by sending a Gaul into the Senate, but when the emperor Caligula planned to make his favourite horse a consul, everybody knew that this action expressed very well the real situation.

In the last period of the Empire, when, as a result of the decline of production, corruption and looting, the finances were in a lamentable state, wealthy Romans were regularly ‘promoted’ to the rank of senator in order to extract extra taxes from them. One such reluctant legislator was said by some Roman humorist to have been ‘banished into the Senate’.

The emperors

From the reign of Augustus onwards, control of the state was effectively handed over to a powerful clique of banditti. The rule of the emperors most closely resembles that of a mafia gang. Only instead of controlling, looting and terrorising a city or a local district, these gangsters dressed in imperial purple had an entire empire to plunder.

And what an empire! Rome was now the undisputed master of much of the known world. Its dominions stretched from the Pillars of Hercules on the shores of the Atlantic to the Persian border in the East.

History informs us that many of the emperors were either insane or very close to that condition. This should surprise no-one. In the celebrated phrase of Lord Acton, power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This remark is perfectly applicable to the Rome of the emperors.

What is madness, except the total inability to distinguish between reality and fantasy? And when every rational boundary of thought and conduct is removed, the inevitable result is insanity. That was undoubtedly the case with both Hitler and Stalin in the end. And it was certainly the case with Roman emperors from a very early period.

When a human mortal is given absolute power, and is surrounded by a gang of servile courtiers who constantly repeat that the emperor is all-wise, all-knowing and all-powerful, those boundaries are indeed abolished.

Since there was no external power over the imperial family – with the exception of the army, which always held a sharp sword suspended over the throne – the political life of the Empire was reduced to constant intrigue, divorce, murder and banishment within the royal family.

According to Tacitus, Augustus’ successor, Tiberius, “plunged into every wickedness and disgrace” before he was smothered in his own bed clothes at the behest of his heir, Caligula.^[1] Caligula himself was clearly insane. We have already mentioned that he planned to make his favourite horse consul, which accurately exposed the real state of affairs. Other exploits are too gruesome to relate. In the end he went too far and the Praetorian Guard decided to get rid of him. After just four years of chaos and mayhem, he was assassinated.

This established an effective mechanism for effecting a change of ruler in the later Roman Empire. It was the only one possible. His infamous nephew Nero was proclaimed emperor when he was only sixteen years old. Nero saw himself as a patron of taste, high culture and art. But at heart he was a pure lumpenproletarian, a mafioso and a sadist.

He commenced his career by murdering his half-brother, Britannicus. Then, with breathless speed, one by one, he killed all his relations. The culmination of his career came when, at the age of only twenty-two, he murdered his mother, Agrippina.

In order to justify this abominable crime, he accused Agrippina of plotting his assassination, and he held a public thanksgiving to celebrate the matricide. He went on to banish his wife Octavia on an island where he had her murdered. He then married the depraved Poppaeia, presenting her with Octavia’s head as a gift.

In 68 AD, after a turbulent thirteen-year reign, his luck finally ran out. Even the servile Roman Senate concluded that he had gone too far. Abandoned by the praetorians and declared a public enemy, Nero was forced to commit suicide, thus ending the Julio-Claudian dynasty.

It would be a tedious and quite pointless task to make a list of every one of the emperors who came to power, and lost it in just the same way. The army was the sole power in society, especially the Praetorian Guard, a privileged elite that was supposed to protect the ruling emperor and his family, but in reality was the supreme arbiter of power.

It was sufficient for the praetorians to get tired of the man in charge, for them to murder him and then raise some successor on their shields and proclaim him emperor. In 193 AD they went as far as to publicly auction the Empire to the highest bidder, having murdered the previous emperor days before. Even after the Praetorian Guard was dissolved by Constantine, this procedure was repeated many times by the legions in the final centuries of the Empire.

Over a period, the wealth of Rome was steadily exhausted by the corrupt rule of one mafioso after another. The treasury was emptied by the rising cost of purchasing the loyalty of the troops and maintaining a vast and unwieldy bureaucratic administration.

One layer upon another of parasites satisfied their gluttony, like a legion of fat and voracious leeches, on the body of the Empire. One ruinous foreign war followed another, to the point where the amounts extracted in loot no longer exceeded the costs of war. One ambitious emperor after another spent extravagant sums on monuments to their own glorification.

And the unemployed army of lumpenproletarians that swelled the population of Rome, had to be kept fed and amused for fear of serious disturbances. This was no easy task. It was the poet Juvenal who coined the notorious phrase, ‘Bread and Circuses’. But quite often, there was not enough bread to feed a city with a population of one million people, and there are at least nineteen food riots recorded in Rome – and many more that were not recorded.

Impasse

Uncontrolled inflation acted like a dreadful syphilis that corroded economic life at every level in the later stages of the Roman Empire, with the same devastating effects as the inflationary crisis today. Only, the inflation experienced under the Roman Empire was a thousand times worse.

Although it is impossible to offer definitive figures, a couple of examples from surviving records can illustrate the process. Papyri surviving from Roman Egypt tell us that the price of one artaba of grain had remained fairly stable at seven to eight drachma until the crisis at the end of the second century AD, at which point it more than doubled to between seventeen and eighteen drachma. By the end of the third century, an artaba of grain reached the astonishing price of 120,000 drachma: an increase of more than 666,000 per cent.^[2] In Italy, one Roman pound of gold was valued at 72,000 denarii in 301 AD. Nowadays, this is what one would call hyperinflation.

This, in turn, was directly related to the debasement of the currency. By such simple means, the state conjured vast amounts of money from thin air, as if by magic. But history shows that the end result of these black arts is to ‘magically’ raise prices and cause galloping inflation.

In the early years of the Empire, the most basic coin, the denarius, contained 4.5 grams of pure silver, that is to say, it was worth its weight in silver. But by the reign of Marcus Aurelius (161-180 AD), the silver content had dropped to about 75 per cent.

His son and heir, Commodus (180-192 AD) debased the denarius to about 70 per cent silver. And the next emperor, Septimius Severus (193-211 AD) debased the Roman denarius to about 50 per cent silver.

That seemed to work wonders. In twenty-four hours, the emperor had twice as much money as before and with the added currency, the government could pay for more soldiers and pay existing soldiers more. One might say that it was the Roman equivalent of quantitative easing. And the end result was more or less the same.

By the time the emperor Gallienus was able to reign as the sole emperor from 260-268 AD, the silver content was a mere 5 per cent. The coins were made of bronze with a thin layer of silver that soon wore off to reveal the inner debasement of the currency. That was a perfect analogy to the real state of the Empire itself.

Gallienus thought he could even pay the barbarian hordes not to cross the borders of the Empire. Unfortunately for him, the barbarians understood the principles of political economy better than the emperors. They demanded payment in real money – solid gold.

But in fact, this was just the surface manifestation of a far more fundamental problem. The ultimate cause of the decline of Rome is to be found, not in constitutional changes, religious revolutions, or the eccentricities of this or that emperor, but in the inability to develop the productive forces as a result of the impasse and internal contradictions of the slave economy. There were, of course, many other factors, but in the final analysis, they will be seen to derive from this first cause.

The Roman Empire was hugely dependent on forced labour. This was the real foundation on which Rome’s power, wealth and influence was built. A vast number of slaves were necessary to maintain the key elements of the Roman economy: including agriculture, mining and construction. In many cases, such as the mines, this signified a drawn-out death sentence.

But forced labour, by its very nature, is unproductive. We have already seen that slave labour is only profitable if it is employed in great numbers. Slaves could be literally worked to death and then simply replaced with new slaves.

But when five centuries of expansion finally came to an end in the reign of Hadrian, whose famous wall marked the northernmost boundary of the Empire, the supply of cheap slaves began to dwindle. The problem was only intensified by the Antonine plague, which is estimated to have killed 10 per cent of the population of the Empire between 165-180 AD.

By the third century AD, there was a severe labour shortage, which compelled large landowners increasingly to base themselves on the labour of tenant farmers instead of slaves. These coloni were technically free, but in practice, remained wholly dependent on their master. They were merely sharecroppers, paying landowners with a portion of their crops in exchange for use of their farmlands.

Reforms to the system of taxation introduced by Diocletian (284-305 AD) made it administratively more difficult for peasants to leave the land where they were counted in the census, because taxes were assessed on both the land and its inhabitants.

The coloni were bound to the soil by debts that were heritable. Eventually their freedom of movement was limited by law. Although the colonus could not lose his land as long as he paid the rent, he was forbidden to leave or change his occupation.

In 332 AD, the Christian emperor Constantine enacted a law that abolished whatever minor rights the coloni had, and tied them permanently to the land. Here we already see the embryo of mediaeval serfdom in Europe. Landlords were permitted to chain coloni suspected of planning to escape. Coloni were forbidden to transfer their property without the permission of the landlord.

Another significant factor in the decline of Rome was the monstrously oppressive nature of the state itself, with its bloated bureaucracy and army of predatory tax collectors who battened on the wealthy provinces like a swarm of bloated leeches and sucked them dry. This was slowly but surely undermining the whole system.

Corrupt officials treated the provinces as gold mines. The unfortunate provincials were the helpless victims of every sort of robbery and extortion. Roman governors dedicated themselves systematically to the task of enriching themselves and the swarms of greedy hangers-on that had accompanied them.

They acted with complete impunity. In the late Republic the poet Catullus expressed outrage at the selfishness of Memmius, who prevented his staff from plundering a poor province. Under the Empire any remaining scruples were abandoned. The Emperor Caracalla, who reigned from 198-217 AD, made all the inhabitants of the Empire Roman citizens, not to alleviate but to increase the taxes he could impose on them. Bankruptcy became chronic.

Poor Romans voluntarily became coloni on the estates of the great landowners, signing away their own freedom and that of their wives and children in perpetuity, in order to escape the clutches of the grasping tax collectors.

Zosimus, a late fifth century writer, moaned that “as a result of this exaction of taxes, city and countryside were full of laments and complaints, and all… sought the help of the barbarians.”^[3] And the burden fell with greatest force on the poorest layers of society. The position of the coloni steadily eroded. Marx wrote:

In the last years of the Roman Empire, the provincial decurions – not peasants but landowners – fled from their houses, abandoning their lands, even selling themselves into slavery, all in order to get rid of a property which was no longer anything more than an official pretext for extorting money from them, mercilessly and pitilessly.^[4]

Religion

A generalised sensation of angst is something we have in common with the period of the decline of the Roman Empire. For the great majority, life was, to cite the famous words of Hobbes, “poor, nasty, brutish and short”.^[5]

There was no longer any hope of salvation in this life. The only hope was for a better life after death. Death, indeed, might seem the better option, particularly if there was a prospect of paradise, which Christianity held out before them.

In periods like this, there is a general sense of malaise. The predominant mood is one of scepticism, and pessimism about the future. The old traditions, morality and religion, things that act as a powerful cement holding society together, lose their credibility.

The rich attempted to dispel their nihilistic moods by constant feasting and amusement at the Colosseum. But the dark foreboding that hung in the air of those times found its expression in the upper classes in philosophical trends. The general angst was reflected in philosophy in Scepticism and Stoicism.

But philosophy could only affect a layer of the educated classes. For the rest of society, the general mood found its expression in religion. The old gods did not seem to offer any hope or consolation to people who were increasingly losing all faith in the existing order.

In place of the old religion, people seek out new gods. In its period of decline, Rome was inundated with a plague of religious sects from the East. Christianity was only one of these, and although ultimately successful, it had to contend with numerous rivals, such as the cult of Mithras.

When people feel that the world in which they live is tottering, that they have lost all control over their existence and that their lives and destinies are determined by unseen forces, then mystical and irrational tendencies get the upper hand. People believe that the end of the world is nigh.

Nowhere was this feeling so clearly expressed than in the religion of Christianity, which loudly proclaimed the imminence of the end of the world and the Second Coming of Christ. The early Christians believed this fervently, but many others suspected it.

The world, the Christians said, was evil and sinful; it was necessary to turn one’s back on the world and all its works and look forward to another life after death. For very many people, crushed by the weight of a monstrously oppressive state, there was probably not much to choose from between the two.

Perhaps the best way to penetrate the mindset of those early Christians is to read what is undoubtedly the most authentic of their texts, the Book of Revelation, which predicts the end of the world as an immediate perspective.

In point of fact, what was coming to an end was not the world but only a particular form of society – slave society. The success of Christianity was rooted in the fact that it connected with this general mood.

The barbarians

The end of their world was approaching faster than anyone could have imagined. In 376 AD, there was a large-scale migration of a Germanic people known as the Goths across the Danube frontier into the territory of the Empire.

The initial contacts between the Romans and Goths were not necessarily of a violent character. There was considerable trade along the eastern frontier for centuries, which led to a progressive romanisation of those tribes living in close proximity to the Empire.

Many became mercenaries and served in the Roman legions. Alaric, the Gothic leader who was the first to enter Rome, was not only a former soldier of Rome but a Christian (albeit of the Arian kind).

But the Goths had been forcibly driven from their lands by a terrifying explosion. The cause was an even greater movement of the peoples far to the East, where the nomadic steppe dwellers known to us as the Huns and other tribes had been pushed back from the Great Wall of China.

They moved westward in an irresistible tide, sweeping all before them. When a mass of terrified refugees from two Gothic tribes, the Tervingi and the Greuthungi, sought to escape from the marauding Huns within the boundaries of the Roman Empire, the emperor Honorius, after some hesitation, allowed them to settle on the Balkan frontier.

That proved to be a costly mistake, although it is not clear that he could have stopped them in any case. A number of agreements were made, and promptly broken, leading to a war that cruelly exposed the inner rottenness of the Empire. First Greece, then Italy, were plundered and ravaged.

Finally, for the first time in six centuries, on 24 August 410 AD Rome was sacked by the Visigoths led by their king, Alaric. This was only the beginning. After the Visigoths, and Ostrogoths, came the Vandals, Alans, Lombards, Suevi, Alemanni, Burgundians, Franks, Thuringians, Frisians, Heruli, Gepidae, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Huns and Magyars. They crashed their way across the frontiers in successive waves. When the Vandals conquered the African provinces in the fifth century AD, Rome’s food supply was suddenly interrupted, dealing a mortal blow to the Western Empire.

Whole populations were massacred or enslaved. The cities were destroyed or abandoned. Priceless works of art were destroyed and melted down for their precious metals. The ruin of agriculture brought in its train the inevitable horrors of famine and epidemics.

St. Jerome graphically describes the results of this devastation when he writes:

… that, in those desert countries, nothing was left except the sky and the earth; that, after the destruction of the cities and the extirpation of the human race, the land was overgrown with thick forests and inextricable brambles; and that universal desolation, announced by the prophet Zephaniah, was accomplished in the scarcity of the beasts, the birds, and even of the fish.^[6]

These lines were written twenty years after the death of the emperor Valens, when the barbarian invasions started. They describe the state of affairs in Jerome’s native province, in present day Slovenia, where successive waves of invaders caused death and destruction on an unimaginable scale.

The vicious cycle of massacre, rape and pillage that continued, with greater or lesser intensity for several centuries, left behind a trail of devastation that inflicted upon Europe a terrible heritage of backwardness.

The immediate effect of the barbarian onslaught was to wipe out civilisation and throw European society into a dark night of economic and cultural backwardness. The development of the productive forces suffered a violent interruption. The cities were destroyed or abandoned as people fled to the land in search of food.

The barbarians sacked and destroyed many cities. But why did they do this? Why did they not simply occupy them? The answer is related to the backward stage of economic development of the invaders. The barbarians in general were hostile to the towns and their inhabitants (a psychology that is quite common among peasants in all periods). They were nomads and herders of cattle and sheep and saw no use for towns and cities, except for the purpose of plunder.

However, the decline of the cities was not caused by the depredations of the barbarians. Long before the violent eruption of the Goths and Huns there was a steady drift to the countryside where the basis was already being laid for the development of a different mode of production – feudalism. But it was a long time before anything like a restoration of equilibrium was restored.

The fall of the Roman Empire was accompanied by a long period of cultural stagnation in all Europe. With the exception of the water wheel and windmills, there were no real inventions for about over a thousand years. In other words, there was a complete eclipse of culture.

In this, the most appalling role was performed not by the barbarians, but by the Christians, who systematically destroyed every element of civilisation that did not coincide with their own religious fanaticism and prejudices. A particularly pernicious role was played by the Christian emperor, Theodosius I (ruled 379- 395 AD), who deliberately mobilised mobs of fanatical monks and lumpenproletarians in an orgy of destruction directed against pagan temples, statues and other works of art.

The sad ruins of Greece and Rome, which now bear mute witness to the wholesale destruction of what was once a glorious culture, testify to a crime far greater than anything the barbarian hordes ever perpetrated against the culture of humanity.

A descending line of civilisation

There are two possibilities before the human race today: socialism or barbarism. The fate of Rome stands as a stark warning in that respect. Under the Empire Rome entered into a prolonged period of decline that eventually led to a complete collapse and a regression to barbarism.

Recently, there has been a tendency on the part of some academics to rewrite history so as to present the barbarians in a more favourable light. This is not ‘more scientific’ or ‘more objective’ but simply childish.

It is the result of the pernicious influence of so-called postmodernism, which claims that history knows no laws, that one society is just as good as another, and that, since there is no such thing as progress, there can be no such thing as backwardness either.

These ladies and gentlemen, following the ‘Sacred Gospel of Political Correctness’, attempt to falsify the historical record by airbrushing out all unpleasantness.

This is roughly the equivalent of those popes who, while indulging themselves in all manner of drunken sexual orgies, ordered the paintings of Michelangelo to be altered, so that the private parts of the Almighty should be covered by a fig-leaf.

We are now asked to believe that the barbarians were really quite nice fellows who lacked any interest in warfare or rapine, that the Vikings were merely peace-loving traders who came to our shores like the Mormons who knock on our doors to offer us friendly advice on the subject of religion.

The fact that all the contemporary witnesses tell a very different story is of no interest to our postmodernist friends. After all, why let the facts spoil a good story?

Despite the ridiculous fairy stories of postmodernism, it is absolutely clear that there are definite periods in human history when society and culture has experienced great advances, and others characterised by stagnation and regression.

This was the case in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, in the period known (at least in the English language) as the Dark Ages. A single example will suffice to underline this point. A thousand years after the fall of the Empire, the only serviceable roads in Europe were Roman roads.

Does history repeat itself?

In many ways, the present state of capitalist society reminds one of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire that was so graphically depicted in the great work of Edward Gibbon. The same picture of degeneration with which he fills the pages of that book reminds us forcibly of our own times.

The yawning abyss that separates rich and poor – between obscene wealth in the hands of a few parasites and poverty, destitution and despair for the great majority of the human race – has never been greater. The level of alienation and degradation of human beings, the indifference to human suffering and obscene egotism and greed are elevated to supreme virtues.

The Roman state developed into a real monster – a power standing above society and alienating itself from it. But that state was only a child’s toy compared to the modern state that has been perfected by imperialism.

The Roman Empire was administered by a bureaucracy that numbered no more than 10,000 men, although beneath them was an army of tax collectors and other sub-exploiters. Today, in Britain alone the numbers involved in the state bureaucracy are at least half a million.

This is a far greater monster consisting of vast armies of bureaucrats, soldiers, police, secret police, prison wardens and judges who lord it over society and absorb unheard-of quantities of the wealth created by the working class.

The wars of Julius Caesar were bloody and destructive affairs. In his campaign in Gaul alone, he claimed to have killed a million people. Yet Caesar could have never imagined the destructive power of our modern armies, which killed at least 65 million men, women and children in the Second World War alone. Now, everywhere we look we see wars, crisis, death and destruction.

Have we advanced no further, then? Have the last 2,000 years of history served no purpose but to repeat the crimes of the past, but on a vastly greater scale? That is one possible interpretation of history, which was graphically expressed by the author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

But no, we Marxists do not share this pessimistic view. Despite all the crimes, violence, wars and cruelties inflicted on humanity, history nevertheless expresses itself as progress, in the deepest and most scientific sense of the word. The development of the productive forces, under slavery, under feudalism and finally under capitalism, has laid the material foundation for a new and qualitatively higher stage of human society – socialism.

The modern working class has nothing in common with the Roman proletariat. The latter produced nothing and, in effect, lived off the labour of the slaves. The modern working class creates all the wealth of society. Without their labour, not a wheel turns, not a telephone rings and not a light bulb shines.

The worker who has been educated in the Marxist method looks back on history and sees, not just a catalogue of crimes and errors, but the actual development of industry, agriculture, science and technique – the real material base upon which the reconstruction of society can at last be achieved.

The revolutionary workers and youth of today will derive fresh inspiration from the heroic struggle of the Gracchi and above all by that greatest of all the fighters of antiquity, Spartacus. And from a scientific understanding of the class struggles of the past, we draw the necessary lessons to prepare the ground for future victory.

Endnotes

[1] Tacitus, Annals, Book 6, p. 180.

[2] Rostovtzeff, The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, p. 54.

[3] Zosimus, New History, Quoted in Mazzarino, The End of the Ancient World, p. 65.

[4] Marx, ‘Drafts of the Letter to Vera Zasulich’, MECW, Vol. 24, p. 354.

[5] Hobbes, Leviathan, p. xix.

[6] Quoted in Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 3, p. 122.