Isegoria

David Frum notes that over the past three years, three excellent books have been published on the end of the Roman Empire — and by coincidence they came out in the order in which they should be read.

The first, The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization, by Bryan Ward-Perkins, emphasizes that Rome did in fact fall:

Fossils of cattle bones show that livestock withered in size between the peak of the Roman empire in 200 CE and the early medieval period. Not until the 1300s would cattle recover their Roman heft.The ice of the Greenland glaciers preserves frozen air from different historical periods. Air from the first and second centuries of the Common Era contains byproducts of smelting and other industrial activity. Such activity then disappears from the air for 17 centuries, not to reappear until the Industrial Revolution.

Even very ordinary Roman houses and buildings were roofed with tile. With the fall of Rome, tile manufacture ceases – and for the next thousand years, rulers and prelates were roofed by timber, everybody else by insect-infested thatch. The Romans made pottery by the tens of millions of units; to this day, one of Rome’s hills is a garbage dump filled with the broken shards of an estimated 50 million pots. Trade and manufacturing slows after 200, vanishes after 400. The dwindled population of Europe has to make do with crude, misshapen local handiwork. Coins and ironwork vanish. Not until the Victorian era did Europe recover Roman plumbing and road-building skills. Not until the 20th century did human beings improve on Roman concrete.

From the point of view of every aspect of material culture that can be measured and recorded, the overthrow of the Roman empire was a catastrophe that annihilated a millennium of material progress. North of the Alps especially, Europe in CE 700 looked much more like the Europe of 1500 years before than like the Europe of 500 years before.

The second book, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, by Peter Heather, emphasizes barbarian invasion:

Rome’s ferocious aggressiveness and radical untrustworthiness forced its barbarian neighbors to organize in self-defense. The non-urban and fragmented culture of 3rd century Germany evolves into larger-unit societies. Villages grew into towns, clans into tribes, tribes into something close to nations. The barbarians gained military effectiveness and hurled themselves upon the aggressor and enslaver. The balance abruptly tilted against Rome — very abruptly.Heather strongly argues against the idea of a “decline” of the Roman empire. After the civil wars and upheavals of the period 235-280, the empire had re-established itself more grimly powerful and centralized than ever. The army and bureaucracy grew, taxation became heavier, agriculturalists were enserfed, but Roman authority continued supreme. It might have continued supreme for much longer still, but for the accident of contingent events. The newly organized barbarian confederacies attacked with unprecedented ferocity in the years after 405 and gained a series of grand victories. Then came catastrophe for Rome: one of the barbarian confederacies, the Vandals, penetrated the previously untouched province of Spain, improvised a navy and invaded North Africa.

Since its seizure by Rome 550 years before, North Africa had been one of the most secure and prosperous of all the imperial domains. Its grandest estates were owned outright by the emperor and its huge agricultural surplus supported the cost of the imperial armies — armies that a low-productivity pre-modern society could only sustain through the ruthless exploitation of slave labor. The loss of North Africa in the 430s wrecked the finances of the western Roman empire, extinguishing the empire’s power to sustain its military forces. Desperate attempts to regain the province were easily repulsed — and the western Roman state collapsed, victim of a shattering military defeat.

The latest book, How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower, by Adrian Goldsworthy, emphasizes the how:

It was not the barbarians who brought down Rome, argues Goldsworthy. It was the Romans themselves — the instability of their state and its tendency to erupt into civil wars. It was civil war that had felled the old Roman republic — destroying its institutions in an accelerating cycle of internecine violence from the 80s BCE onward and enhancing the appeal of one-man rule. The same internecine violence erupted as one-man rule faltered after 235. The Roman armies destroyed each other in the struggle for power, exposing the Roman state as a tempting victim to the enemies against whom the armies were supposed to defend.

Analogies ought to be used to elucidate and explain, David Frum says, but the analogy between the United States and Rome is all too often used to scold, not to enlighten:

“History never repeats itself,” the Yale medievalist Roberto Lopez used to warn his students. “It only appears to do so, to those who do not pay attention to the details.” Most comparisons of the United States and imperial Rome operate in exactly the low-detail environment Lopez described. Rome was a republic; America is a republic. Rome had gladiators; America has football. Rome had barbarian invaders; America has illegal immigrants. Rome fell; so America must fall. What else does one need to know?Quite a lot, actually.

Frum reviews Madden’s Empires of Trust — “How Rome Built — and America Is Building — a New World”:

Empires, Madden notes, have been a common phenomenon in human history. An enterprising warlord puts together an effective military force, attacks his neighbors, and collects tribute from them. These empires look mighty while they last, but they seldom last long. They exist to exploit. They command no loyalty. Eventually they meet defeat, their military ceases to awe, and they collapse. The story is the same from the Assyrians to the Nazis.As against these Ozymandian episodes, the Romans extended their dominance over a vast realm of time and space. From the middle of the 2nd century B.C.E. to the end of the 4th century C.E., a span of almost a half-millennium, they held a practical monopoly of organized force over all the world they knew. How did they do it?

One familiar answer emphasizes Roman ruthlessness. Defy the Romans, and you would end up like the Carthaginians: your men slaughtered, your women and children sold into slavery, your city burned, the ground plowed with salt.

Madden invites us to consider another answer. As the Romans saw it, he writes, they led an alliance and association of independent Italian city-states, with Rome merely first among equals. This alliance had grown up in response not to the Roman lust for power or slave labor but to genuine security needs.

A small village on a plain of many small villages, Rome had waged war to eliminate threatening enemies. The great trauma of 390 B.C.E., when the town was sacked by marauding Celts, had forced Rome’s leaders to think hard about military organization and generalship. They designed new military forms that won battles more consistently than did the forces of their neighbors.

But the early Romans, like the early Americans, were a deeply isolationist people. Absorbed in their own complex political institutions and intensely local religion, they had no interest in governing their neighbors after defeating them. Instead, they made allies of them. The Romans would swear to protect their new allies; in return, the new allies would pledge to furnish troops when called upon.

The ancient Latins took oaths very seriously, and the Romans rapidly gained a reputation as extremely reliable allies. Writing 200 years later, the authors of the Book of Maccabees paid tribute to this Roman trait: “With their friends and those who have relied upon them, they kept friendship.”

The problem was that this very reliability continually created new security challenges. Having conquered their neighbors in order to secure their own horizon, the Romans now found themselves committed to protect their new friends against threats. New commitments drew them into new wars, led them to defeat new enemies, swear these new enemies into the alliance, only to find themselves with yet a further concentric ring of enemies.

The logic of this system eventually led the Romans to unite the entire Italian peninsula under their leadership, a task effectively complete by about 300 B.C.E. Yet this united Italy was a land of many governments, each sovereign, each with its own institutions, each with its own army.

Madden argues that Italy in the 200’s B.C.E. looked a good deal like NATO after 1950. One ally was clearly the strongest and most influential. But that strength did not rest on terror. It rested on the leading ally’s credibility. The other allies trusted the leading ally not only to defend them when defense was called for, but to use its power responsibly in the interests of all. They had built an empire not of conquest, but of trust. And it is this, Madden holds, that the United States has done as well.

Consider this contrast:

The Roman system encountered its most severe test in the late 200’s B.C.E., when the Carthaginian general Hannibal invaded Italy. Hannibal was one of the great commanders of history, and his strategy against Rome was essentially the same as Alexander’s against Persia: insert an army into the territory of the enemy empire, win a battle or two, show the empire’s subjects they no longer need fear the empire’s power, and then watch the enemy empire shatter into fragments.The strategy worked for Alexander. It failed for Hannibal. Despite inflicting defeat after defeat upon the Roman army on the territory of Italy, Hannibal could not crack the Roman alliance. Even after he sacked Italian cities in an effort to make the Italians fear him more than the Romans, the alliance held firm.

Hannibal’s difficulty was that the Italians did not fear the Romans. They trusted them—and they preferred the deal the Romans offered them not only to subordination by Hannibal and Carthage but even to the recovery of their own independence. Such a recovery would have meant returning to a condition in which each Italian city must constantly prepare for war against any and all of its neighbors. Roman rule, by contrast, meant peace and security for all.

The Romans finally turned the tide of war by doing to the Carthaginians what the Carthaginians had done to them: they landed an army on their home territories, first in Spain and finally in what is now Tunisia. The result dramatized the difference between the Roman and Carthaginian polities: when Rome won a battle against Carthage, Carthage’s allies did desert, and the Carthaginian empire disintegrated.

Yet even under these conditions, Rome did not destroy Carthage. Only after a third war a half-century later did Rome finally impose its notorious “Carthaginian peace.” (Two thousand years later, the U.S. Congress would debate how to treat Germany once World War II came to an end. One hard-line Senator was accused of seeking a “Carthaginian peace.” He answered: “Well we haven’t had much trouble from Carthage recently.”)

Trustworthy security is a precious and highly desired resource.