Tim O’Neill reviews Adrian Goldsworthy’s The Fall of the West: The Death of the Roman Superpower, which explores how the Crisis of the Third Century, with its cavalcade of emperors, usurpers and assassinations, led to Rome’s eventual collapse:
Firstly, he notes how barbarian invasions are a symptom of Roman weakness and instability, not a cause of it. Over and over again during the Third Century renewed bouts of Roman civil strife invited larger and deeper raids by barbarians over the Rhine and Danube. This culminated in the massive land and seaborne raids on the eastern Empire by large Gothic and Herulian warbands in the AD 260s that was only finally brought to an end by Claudius II Gothicus in AD 269. That this barbarian reaction to Roman weakness — the Empire was at the lowest ebb of the Third Century crisis at the time — is a clear prefigurement of the later barbarian incursions and settlements in the west in the Fifth Century is a point that Goldsworthy makes very clearly.
Secondly, he notes that the “reforms” which are often said to have stabilised the Empire and brought the “Military Anarchy” to an end actually weakened it in the long run. He points out that the Empire was and had always been a military dictatorship. Augustus had created it out of years of civil war by winning the struggle for military supremacy. But what he created was what Goldsworthy refers to as “a veiled monarchy”. Though he was a military dictator who won control by force of arms, Augustus and his First and Second Century successors created a facade whereby they (and everyone else) pretended they ruled by consent, particularly by the consent of the Senate and the Senatorial class. In return, trusted Senators could receive relatively powerful (and rich) provincial governorships and other honours. The whole arrangement worked well and was in some ways inherently stable. The small number of Senators with any real power — ie ones who controlled rich provinces with large armies — could be carefully chosen and the remainder stayed in Rome where they could be carefully watched. The only major instability was the fact that while everyone was pretending that the emperors were not really kings, the whole idea of the succession to the throne-that-was-not-meant-to-be-a-throne was a murky one. Despite this, civil wars were rare in the first two centuries of the Empire and the whole system worked.
But when it broke down in the Third Century the veil was torn off and the Imperial system was exposed as the military dictatorship it had always been. So now it became clear that any Senator who could win the support of enough of the Army or, failing that, who could simply bribe the increasingly mercenary and predatory Praetorian Guard, could become emperor, albeit (in most cases) very briefly. All it took was a reverse in a foreign war against the resurgent Sassanid Persians or the increasingly bold Germanic barbarians and a usurper would appear or the Army or the Guard would mount an assassination and the whole process would repeat itself, seemingly on a shorter and shorter cycle of usurpation, civil war and anarchy.
This cycle became so intense that the primary goal of a Roman emperor was no longer wise rule and stability but mere survival. As the Third Century progressed changes were put in place — changes that were aimed solely at reducing the threat of usurpation. Senators were gradually excluded from military commands, since a Senator with a sizeable portion of the Army at his back was a usurper in waiting. But by giving more and more commands to the lower, equestrian order the emperors simply pushed the opportunity for usurpation down the Roman food chain and actually broadened the numbers of those who took it into their heads to jostle for the purple. The size, and therefore the garrisons, of the provinces were steadily reduced, since this left a governor of any given province with fewer troops with which to mount a challenge. But this in turn weakened the Empire militarily and strategically, since a governor no longer had the military force to deal with serious local threats himself. Incursions over the frontiers by barbarians increased in size and number and only the Emperor had the capacity to deal with them. Cities which had been unfortified for centuries began building walls for protection, both against barbarians and against the next cycle of civil wars.
So while these and similar changes — often called “reforms” — brought the Crisis to an end, Goldsworthy makes a strong case that in the longer run the Empire was weakened and that the seeds of the collapse of the Fifth Century were sown in the chaos of the Third.