Edward Gibbon and the Dark Ages (c. 476 - 1776 AD)

“I have recorded the triumph of barbarism and religion.”

 When Edward Gibbon (1737 - 1794) was twenty seven years old he visited Rome, and, standing in the ruins of the forum, he imagined he saw the ghosts of Scipio, Caesar, Pompey, and the other heroes of the Republic. He spent days lost in imagination, thrilled simply to walk on the same ground they had walked. Later, in a more melancholy mood, ...he wondered: how had the greatest empire the world had ever seen been reduced to rubble and phantasms? He resolved to dedicate his life to writing a new history of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776, 81, 89). The strain ruined his always fragile health and led to an early death, but he left a lasting legacy to mankind.

In Decline and Fall he argued that the collapse of Rome was attributable to the corrosive effects of Christianity on the institutions and character of Rome. For the first two centuries of the Empire, from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Empire was the principle civilizing force in the world. It’s invincible legions unified the Mediterranean under the Pax Romana and defended the frontiers, while within its borders a wise and moderate government established laws, protected commerce, and encouraged the arts.

This precarious accomplishment rested ultimately on the character of the Roman people. They lived simple lives on small farms, raised their crops and their families, venerated the old gods, and respected laws but not men. When the state called, they answered. These qualities, combined with the leadership of a ruthless and farseeing aristocracy, forged their empire.

However, their descendants gradually lost these virtues. They fell into debt as the grain of the empire flooded Italy’s markets, and one by one they were forced from their little farms and into the city, where bread and circuses transformed the proud citizens of the Republic into the rootless proles of the Empire. Military service became voluntary rather than obligatory, and the burden of defense increasingly fell on newly conquered peoples and barbarians. The old aristocracy was swept away by the autocracy of the Caesars. Finally the last and greatest bulwarks of the old character were destroyed: the old gods and the old philosophy were swept away by ecstatic mystery cults from the East, and above all, by Christianity.
The Christian ethic, according to Gibbon, is private rather than public. That is to say, they aim at the well-being of the individual rather than of the community. Christianity discouraged military service by preaching pacifism, family by preaching virginity, industry by preaching poverty, kindness by preaching fanaticism, and reason by preaching faith. Many believers shut themselves up in monasteries, where they were never heard from again, while those that remained slaughtered each other with gusto in order to settle disputes about a ridiculous fairy tale. All the while the tribes beyond the Rhine grew larger and more ferocious with every passing year. The temples were shuttered, the schools of philosophy were closed, and the light of reason was vanquished for a thousand years.

Eventually the dam had to break: on New Year’s Day, 406 AD, barbarian tribes stormed across the frozen Danube. They were never repelled. In the West a hollowed-out Empire, now little more than a name, survived until 476, while in the East, the feeble Byzantine Empire awaited destruction at the hands of a new power: Islam. The Age of Reason was over. The Dark Ages had begun.
The Roman Empire has had a central place in the political mythology of the West since it was founded. During the middle ages kings, popes, czars, emperors, and even sultans claimed its legacy as their own. Gibbon continued this tradition by appropriating the myth of Empire for the Enlightenment, which he believed heralded a new Empire of reason and virtue. From it we derive the tripartite division of Western history into Ancient, Mid Eval, and modern periods, as well as the official architecture of the United States, which imitates that of Greece and Rome in order to underline the point that it is the legitimate inheritor of the Roman tradition. Decline and Fall is also a polemic against the principle opponent of the Enlightenment in Gibbon's own time, the Church.

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St. Augustine and the City of God (c. 425 AD)

“Two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self.”

St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo Regius, (354 – 430) is a towering figure in the Western intellectual tradition – second perhaps only to Plato and Aristotle in influence in the Mid Eval world, and still in the first rank of ancient philosophers today. He was born into a family of some local prominence in the North African town of Thagaste, was ambitious for a career in the Roman administration, and set out to win his fame and fortune in Carthage, and later in Rome. He had long wrestled with philosophical questions, and was at various times a Manichaean and a Neo-Platonist. He was impressed by the eloquence of St. Ambrose in Milan (then the seat of the imperial government), and by the asceticism of St. Anthony, the Egyptian hermit who founded Christian monasticism. Under their influence he became a Christian. He resolved to imitate Anthony in his own life, and returned to North Africa with the intention of withdrawing from the world. However, the congregation at Hippo Regius pressed him into service as their Bishop, and he was thus occupied for the rest of his life. In his spare time he wrote works of theology and philosophy – including the enormously influential City of God.

It began as a reply to Pagan critics who blamed Christianity for the sack of Rome in 410. From the time of Constantine the Emperors had all been Christian (with the exception of Julian “the apostate”), and the new faith had become quite fashionable. Theodosius made Christianity the official state religion in 380, probably in the expectation, first advanced by Eusebius, that God would reward the Romans with victory. Something rather different had happened. After Theodosius’ death in 396 his son, Honorius, became emperor in the West. Honorius was a non-entity, but his general and adviser, Stilicho, was a general of the highest quality. During one of the periodic wars between the Romans and the Goths he stripped the Rhine of its garrison. When an unusually-cold winter caused the river to freeze over, the tribesmen on the other side walked across. Stunned by this stroke of extraordinarily bad luck, and turned against his adviser by jealous courtiers, Honorius executed Stilicho on suspicion of conspiring with the barbarians. The army mutinied, resistance to the invaders ended, and the Western half of the Empire effectively collapsed. Alaric, the Gothic king, besieged Rome in the hopes that he could intimidate Honorius into making him Stilicho’s replacement. Honorius refused, and Alaric sacked the city. It was the first time Rome had been occupied by a foreign enemy in eight hundred years.

From the time of Polybius Romans had been accustomed to thinking of their Empire as an immovable fixture of the cosmos, and had never dreamed they could be permanently beaten by the Barbarians. The sack of Rome, however, made it plain that Roman power in the West was in decline. Despite the face-saving compromise that preserved the imperial office in the West until 476, the writing was on the wall. For Pagans, the explanation for this calamity was clear – the old gods were angry that their rites were being ignored, and had sent the Germans to make their displeasure felt. On this theory, the Romans could expect to start winning battles again once they had slaughtered enough pigs and cows on the altar of Jove. Christians, for their part, felt they had some explaining to do, for they had made extravagant promises on God’s behalf, to which recent developments had given the lie.

Augustine’s answer to this situation was in part to show that the Romans had always endured calamities, including the sack of their city by the Celts in 387 BC, the bloody purges and civil wars in the time of Sulla and Marius, and later in the time of Caeser and Cato Minor, as well as military disasters such as the defeat at Cannae and Teutoberg Forest. If the old gods were so powerful, why hadn’t they protected the Romans then? Further, it was simply untrue that the Roman Empire had been built up by virtue. Just the contrary, Augustine argued, it had been won by pirates who plundered the whole Mediterranean, and slaughtered entire nations, in the quest for wealth and glory.

Augustine reversed Eusebius by arguing that God was not especially concerned with the fate of the Roman Empire or any other state. He pointed out that there had been empires before – the Assyrian, the Babylonian, the Persian, and so on – and that they had all regarded themselves as the special creation of the gods. The Roman Empire seemed to him no different. The obligation of the Christian, he said, was not to the Roman Empire specifically, but rather to civil government in general. In the absence of such government, life would be intolerable. In so much as Christians had to live in a fallen state, and in a fallen world (the doctrine of original sin was first advanced by Augustine), the imperfections of such states were inevitable. Nevertheless, Christians had an obligation to obey the laws, and also to defend the state in time of danger, for they depended on it for their life in this world.

For Augustine, all history was the story of two communities – the City of God, and the City of Man. Both were bound by common loves, the one of God, the other of the world. This was by no means to say that God only cared about Christians, for Augustine argued just the opposite – that there were many called Christians who would not dwell with God for eternity, and many who were not who would. There was no way to know in advance who would end up where, for the two cities were inextricably caught up with one another, and would not be fully separated until Judgment Day. This was part of the reason why Christians owed service to the state, even though it was a product of the City of Man rather than that of God. Nevertheless these two communities existed in perpetual enmity, and Augustine agreed with the Neo-Platonists that the world of sense-objects was irrevocably corrupt.  Rather than seeing people as belonging in the world, as the Greek philosophers had done, Augustine saw them as exiles in it. Their true home was in heaven (or in hell), and this life merely a place of sorrow, exile, and illusion. Until the world was redeemed in the final judgment, true happiness in it would always be impossible, and what joys people could find came to them by way of consolations rather than as things to be expected.

The history that mattered was therefore that of the City of God, defined by the covenant between Him and his people. The history of the City of Man seemed to Augustine little more than a kaleidoscope of meaningless events, mostly wicked, the ultimate pattern of which only God could know. Rather than trace the rise and fall of nations, the Christian should be concerned with events of spiritual significance – the fall of Adam, the incarnation of God as Christ, the final judgment that would bring all history to a close, all the lesser mediations between God and man in between, and most especially the individual’s private journey toward, or away from, their creator.

In a sense, Augustine was returning to an earlier, timeless conception of the past, such as we saw in Homer. History as Herodotus or Tacitus understood it was alien to Augustine’s philosophy, based as it was on the notion that events of real significance stood outside of the normal flow of time, while those that did stand within it were neither intelligible nor meaningful. For Augustine, as for Homer, continuity was real, change only apparent. Similarly, space and time are radically contracted, for the events that matter in large scale history are completely outside of any one person’s ability to influence, while those that they can influence are wholly private in nature. This theology, though gloomy, had certain advantages. It equipped people to face the problem of evil squarely, of equipping people to bear stoically the inevitable burdens, pains, and misfortunes of life, and of counselling love and patience toward all people. This was the view of life and history that dominated the Western tradition for over a thousand years. Indeed, we find Bossuet imitating it in 1681, and the philosophers of the Enlightenment reacting against it in the generations afterward.

Augustine completed the City of God shortly before the Vandal conquest of North Africa. Seeing the enemy approach, he had his library sent to friends in the Eastern provinces, while he determined to remain at his post. Hippo Regius held out for eighteen months hoping for relief that would never come. During the siege, Augustine was carried off by plague. He was by then an old man, who had given the better part of his life to the service of the community and the quest for truth. He could not know, when his exile came to an end, that he had written an enduring classic of Western philosophy.

Full text of the City of God: http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1201.htm

The Life of Augustine: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02084a.htm

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Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? (c. 200 - 650 AD)

Given the importance of the Roman Empire in the Western historical imagination, it is hardly surprising that so much energy has been spent investigating the causes for its decline and eventual collapse. The explanations that one is accustomed to reading – that it was due to either a general civic malaise called “degeneration,” or that it was the fault of the Christians and their otherworldly pacifism – are both, I think, unsatisfying. I would like to offer what is, I think, a better historical argument, which reflects more closely the opinions of practicing scholars.

During the reign of Marcus Aurelius three problems which characterized the decline of the Roman Empire began to collaborate: those of internal division, depopulation, and invasion. Civil War had been a problem even under the Republic, and persisted into the Empire, which never had a fixed principle of succession. Any Emperor, whether good or bad, had to fear assassination and mutiny, which competed with adoption and biological descent as the chief mechanisms for replacing one Emperor with another. Whenever an emperor died, either from natural causes or unnatural, executions, mutinies, and civil wars were likely to follow. This situation repeatedly squandered the lives, wealth, and energy of the Empire. It became particularly acute when Marcus Aurelius’ son, Commodus, was assassinated (192) – touching off generations of instability and civil war called “the crisis of the third century.” Diocletian (d. 311) attempted to resolve this problem by creating a new system called the tetrarchy, which split the Empire into two halves, and appointed senior and junior Emperors in both. The tetrarchy fell apart almost immediately, and when Constantine emerged as the victor from another round of civil wars (324), he abolished it. The precedent for dividing the Empire had been set, however, and it was followed by Theodosius, who upon his death (395) made his sons Honorius and Arcadius emperors in the West and East respectively.

Like the tetrarchy, this system simply compounded the problem. Although officially West and East were in alliance, in fact they were enemies. Both halves now faced the same problems of internal stability, but neither could draw on the resources of the other to resist foreign invasion. This was a bigger problem for the West than the East. Most of the wealth and population of the Empire had always been located in the East, and it also enjoyed several geographic advantages. Its capital was impregnable, the Bosporus prevented invaders of one half from crossing over to the other, it had shorter frontiers, and also fewer foreign enemies. The Western half, on the other hand, had fewer men and less wealth, as well as long and dangerous frontiers. Further, once an invader had crossed those frontiers, Italy, Gaul, or Spain were all within easy striking distance. In effect, the core areas of the Empire – Greece, Egypt, and Syria – had spun off the Western provinces, and these were unable to cope with the Germanic invaders on their own.

A second problem was depopulation. In the Antonine, Cyprian, and Justinianic plagues small pox, bubonic plague, measles, and other diseases repeatedly wracked the Empire’s major cities. Although demographic figures for the ancient world are impossible to establish with certainty, archeological evidence suggests that in one major city, Rome, the population fell from about a million inhabitants under Augustus to about half that in the time of Romulus Augstulus, and to about ten or twenty thousand in the time of Charlemagne. In other words, a major city simply evaporated. Contracting city walls, decayed or abandoned urban structures, and reforestation of farmland all suggest that demographic decline was not confined to Rome, but was widespread throughout the Empire. Roman administrators frequently expressed anxiety over the amount of empty land in the Empire – a law under Pertinax offered to give it away to anyone who would till it. Thus, even though the borders of the Empire remained stable until the early 5th century, much of that territory was slowly reverting to wasteland.

Barbarians on the frontiers were by no means a new problem for the Romans. However, the Germanic invaders of the 4th and 5th centuries were better organized than their predecessors, largely because they had learned from the Romans. Alaric’s Goths were by no means the wild, ill-disciplined hordes that the Romans had been dealing with for centuries. They understood the importance of organization, and began to collect into super-tribes called the “Franks,” “Goths,” and “Vandals.” They had also learned new and more disciplined ways of fighting. Initially they sought shelter from steppe nomads such as the Huns and Avars – a situation that might have been made to work to the advantage of Romans and Germans alike. But the Romans were unwilling or unable to absorb them peacefully. The people resented them, mid-level bureaucrats cheated them of payment and provisions, and the Emperors were unable to either negotiate with or militarily defeat them. During the last of the wars between them, the Western general Stilicho, desperate to fill out his army, stripped the Rhine of its garrison. When the river froze over during the unusually-cold winter of 406, the tribesmen on the other simply walked across unopposed. Shortly afterward Honorius, suspecting treachery, had Stilicho executed. What was left of the Western army fell apart or joined the invaders, and the Gothic leader, Alaric, sacked Rome (410.) After these disasters the Western Empire eked out a symbolic existence until 476, but in effect it had been replaced by Germanic successor states. 

The Eastern half of the Empire had little to fear from these developments (and, indeed, did nothing to prevent them.) Under Justinian it recaptured Italy, North Africa, and even parts of Spain. It did not, however, have the resources to hold onto these gains, and suffered major territorial losses in the 7th century to the Arabs. Normally they, like the Germans, were too internally divided to pose much of a threat to the Romans or the Persians, who had been using them as mercenaries for generations. But they, like the Germans, had learned from their imperial neighbors. If we set aside the theological claims of Islam, and look at it as simply an empirical matter, then the effect that Muhammad’s preaching had was to unite all of the smaller tribes of the Arabian peninsula into one enormous super-tribe. Rather than being held together by common ancestry, as the earlier tribes had been, the new super-tribe was to be held together by common faith and by common subordination to the Prophet and his successors, the Caliphs. At the same time Muhammad was unifying the Arabs (c. 630), the Persian and Roman Empires were in the middle of an unusually ferocious war, which saw several emperors on both sides assassinated, both capitals besieged, most of their richest provinces pillaged, and the better part of both armies slaughtered. A few short years after they concluded a peace treaty, the Arab tribesman exploded out of the desert. The Persian Empire was totally destroyed, and the Romans only barely survived. Although they eventually succeeded in throwing the invaders back across the mountains of southern Anatolia, North Africa, Egypt, Palestine, and Syria were permanently lost. With the Muslim conquests Roman pretensions to imperial rule in the Mediterranean came to an end. In so much as it had an imperial successor, it was the Umayyad, and later the Abbasid, caliphates. However, it is important to realize that the Roman Empire did not come to an end even then - it persisted, as an independent polity, until the mid-15th century.

The fall of the Roman Empire, then, is best seen as a combination of internal division, depopulation, and foreign invasion, and also the individual decisions made by the Emperors and their foreign enemies. Nothing in history is predestined, and it is conceivable that the Roman Empire could have found a way to navigate these crises. However, with such a set of problems, the deck does seem to have been stacked against them.

I’ve tried to offer a more satisfying explanation of the Roman Empire’s decline than polemics rooted in modern political and cultural controversies. I’m not by any means an expert on this period, and am merely conveying the opinions of people who are. Nevertheless, I am firmly persuaded that if we want to understand this fascinating and troubled period, or indeed any period in history, we need to set aside our present preoccupations and try to understand it on its own terms, and for its own sake.

A lecture on late antiquity by Harvard historian Paul Freedman (the entire course is excellent): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_ssRpso9e8&index=6&list=PL77A337915A76F660

Plague in the Roman Empire: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/12/plague-roman-empire-dna-medieval-graveyard_n_3261427.html

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Eusebius and Imperial Theology (c. 325)

“Just as God, who is gracious to the oppressed, raised up Moses as a leader for his people, so too He has raised up Constantine, to liberate God’s Church from her oppressors.”

The transformation of Christianity from an illegal cult to a specially-favored religion occurred during the lifetime of Eusebius Pamphilus, Bishop of Caesarea (c. 260 – 340.) He was a theologian and historian who combined Greek, Roman, and Hebraic ideas about history to create a new synthesis called Imperial Theology. It was, he argued, God’s will to unite Roman imperial power with the redeeming message of Christ. It was therefore no accident that Christ had been born during the reign of Augustus, for just as Augustus had restored peace to the material world, so Christ did in the spiritual. The former was an agent of God no less than the latter, and so too was Constantine, both an Emperor and a Saint, for he had united the power of the former with the redemption of the latter, and thereby established the first genuine empire of righteousness.

As Eusebius tells it in the Life of Constantine, he was made Emperor by his pious father, Constantius Chlorus, who died in 306. Wicked usurpers in the East, however – deceived, like Pharaoh, by demons and surrounded by sorcerers (i.e. the old gods and their priests) – refused to accept him, and cruelly persecuted the Church. Constantine, the New Moses, therefor determined to campaign against them.

He was not yet a Christian, but he thought seriously about spiritual matters. Reflecting, during the campaign against Maxentius in Italy, that the persecutors of Christians had often come to a bad end, but that his father, a Christian, had succeeded in everything, Constantine decided to call on the God of his father. Shortly before the battle of the Milvian Bridge (312), he and the entire army saw the sign of the cross in the sky, and written on it the words CONQUER BY THIS. That night Christ appeared to him in a dream, and commanded him to make a battle standard bearing the Labarum, which he did. This would prove a powerful totem throughout the rest of his career, for wherever it was placed during battle, Constantine’s soldiers invariably prevailed. Needless to say, with such powerful supports Maxentius didn’t have a chance. He and his army were drowned (like Pharaoh and his army) when the bridge collapsed under them during the battle. Constantine was afterwards a confirmed Christian.

Maximinus (not to be confused with Maxentius, Maximus, or any other number of people named Max-something at this particular time in Roman history) and Licinius, hearing of this victory, foolishly doubled down on the old gods. “It may well be said of them,” Eusebius said, “as it was of Pharaoh, that God hardened their hearts.” They persecuted the Christians with even greater cruelty, and were punished with an edifying series of disasters. Maximinus developed a worm-infested ulcer “in the secret parts of his person,” was defeated in battle, and had to flee disguised as a slave. Worse, his eyeballs fell out – just recompense for blinding so many martyrs. Licinius, despite losing repeatedly to Constantine in battle, and enjoying his clemency just as often, continually schemed against him. At last even Constantine’s superhuman patience was worn out, and he had him hanged.

After unifying the Roman world, Constantine had to deal with the Arian controversy. This was a theological dispute between an Alexandrian priest and his Bishop, the details of which need not detain us, but which quickly engulfed the entire Church in acrimony. Eusebius was sympathetic to the Arians, but he agreed with Constantine that the dispute was basically over nonsense. Constantine sent a letter to both parties, berating them for the absurdity of their quarrel, and politely but firmly instructing them to get along. When his had no effect he summoned a general council (Nicaea, 325), which restored the peace of the Church. In this way Constantine showed that he did not regard himself as any merely secular ruler. “You are the bishops whose jurisdiction is within the Church,” he said. “I also am a bishop, ordained by God to overlook whatever is external to the Church.” This conception of the imperial office necessarily included the suppression of heresy and idolatry – for just as the Bishops were entrusted with the care of souls within the Church, so too was he of souls outside of it. God had certainly rewarded these activities in the past, and He might reasonably be counted on to do so again in the future. Constantine therefor sent soldiers to North Africa to stamp out the Donatist and other heresies, withdrew state funding for gladiatorial contests, outlawed public sacrifice to the old gods, and discouraged veneration of their shrines by confiscating the idols within.

He also constructed dozens of magnificent churches across the Empire, including one on the ruins of the Temple Mount, where the Emperor Hadrian had built a shrine to Jupiter two centuries earlier. The new buildings were necessary, for Christianity had recently become quite fashionable. Constantine also of course built a new capital on the Bosporus – for centuries the richest, strongest, and most populous city in the Mediterranean world. At the end of these labors he was in his sixties, but still vigorous. He undertook further campaigns against the Barbarians, and put the Persians on notice that he considered himself the protector of the Christians within their empire. When the King of Kings invaded Christian Armenia anyway, Constantine prepared for war. However, before the campaign could get under way he fell ill. Realizing that his final days were near, he had himself baptized. Then, after reigning longer and better than even Alexander, he went peacefully to his reward.

“No one,” Eusebius said, “whether Greek or Barbarian, nay of the ancient Romans themselves, has ever been … worthy of comparison with him.” He had, indeed, enjoyed every worldly success. Eusebius makes it quite clear that this was not a consequence of his personal prowess, his wealth, the size of his armies, or even of luck, but of the special favor of God, on whom he always relied. Christianity was not, then, a mere set of opinions about the unseen – it was an effective battlefield technology. Indeed, it was the indispensable technology, for who can prevail without God’s help, or hope to defeat those who have it?
Eusebius, like many of his Christian contemporaries, looked on Constantine as literally a God-send. Not only had he restored the order of the Roman world after generations of chaos (i.e. “the crisis of the third century, beginning in 235), but he had also reversed the persecutions of Diocletian and his eastern successors, and elevated the clergy to a position of honor, perhaps next only to that of the army. This was no merely-theological blessing. Eusebius had lost friends, including his personal mentor, to the persecution, and had stood in real danger of being caught up in it himself. Naturally he showered Constantine with praise, and took care to emphasize the contributions of the clergy to his success.

The Roman Empire had always prevailed over its enemies in the past, for it had been, from the beginning, an agent of God’s power on earth. Now that it was also a bearer of His redeeming message, an even-more glorious future surely lay ahead.

Life of Eusebius: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05617b.htm
Text of the Life of Constantine: http://legacy.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/vita-constantine.asp

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Tacitus and the Corruption of Power (c. 100 AD)

“The story I now commence is rich in vicissitudes, grim with warfare, torn by civil strife, a tale of horror even during times of peace. … never has it been proved by such terrible disasters to Rome or by such clear evidence that Providence is concerned not with our peace of mind but rather with vengeance for our sin.”

Where Polybius sang the virtues of stoic Rome, Publius Cornelius Tacitus (c. 56 – c. 118 AD) denounced its vices. Officially Augustus had restored the Republic after generations of chaos, and both he and his heirs were merely its first servants. Unofficially, he had abolished it. After Actium (31 BC) Rome was, in fact, a military dictatorship, and knew no law higher than the will of the emperor. Under an Augustus or a Vespasian this was not necessarily a problem – but under a Nero, or a Caligula, it was a nightmare. Having lived through the particular nightmare of Domitian, and then finding himself, perhaps to his surprise, free to write as he pleased under the “five good emperors” (96 – 180 AD), Tacitus wrote his Histories and Annales as frank sermons on the evils of power. Unfortunately for the memory of Tiberius, Claudius, and Nero (among others), he chose them for his text. (The Roman Revolution was the subject of an earlier article, here: (https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1018204494860765&id=986713261343222&substory_index=0)

After vanquishing Marc Antony, Augustus had reigned wisely for a generation. When his own children died young, he settled reluctantly on his stepson, Tiberius, (42 BC – 37 AD) as his successor. Tiberius was a good general and administrator, but he resented Augustus for forcing him to divorce a wife he loved for an imperial floozy, and he hated and feared his mother, Livia, as a natural conspirator. He could never be quite certain that Augustus would not have him executed or exiled on account of her whispering campaigns, as he had others. As a result he tended to see conspiracies everywhere. By the time he became emperor (14 AD) he was fifty-five years old, bitter, and habitually suspicious. He could not bear his domineering mother, the city, its spineless senators, or its vulgar crowds. The master of the world had everything he could want, except for peace of mind, or a friend. He withdrew increasingly into himself, and then to the island of Capri - a fortress of solitude from which he only rarely emerged.

There was at least one man in Rome who knew how to take advantage of the vulnerable, sullen emperor, and who had the guts to try it. This was the prefect of the Praetorian Guard, Sejanus, who presented himself as just the sort of friend Tiberius needed. After winning the Emperor’s confidence, he volunteered for more and more duties, which Tiberius gratefully handed him. As he accumulated duties, he accumulated power – and since Tiberius soon trusted no one else, as long as he retained that trust he could do whatever he wanted. In effect, he was setting himself up as a de facto Emperor in his own right. Anyone with ambition for advancement, or even with regard for their own safety, had to court him – but anyone who remained aloof was vulnerable, for spies and informers were everywhere, and they were well-paid for vicious gossip. “To be rich or well-born was a crime,” Tacitus said. “Men were prosecuted for holding or for refusing office: merit of any kind meant certain ruin.”

However, this situation was also dangerous for Sejanus, for he was as hated as he was powerful, and if he ever lost Tiberius' trust he would probably lose his life as well. Once the climb to power had begun, it could not be safely halted – eventually, Tiberius would have to go. The problem was that he had a large family, and in the event of his death they would be the natural heirs. Since only Tiberius could order the death or exile of members of his family, Sejanus had to persuade Tiberius to dispose of them before he could dispose of Tiberius. This was not after all an impossible task, for Tiberius was suspicious and isolated, and his children feared him for the same reasons he had feared Augustus. One by one they were exiled, imprisoned, executed, or otherwise got-rid of. Sejanus was closing in for the kill.

There was only one left – the future Caligula – when Tiberius realized his friend was a viper. Expecting to receive the office that would very nearly make him Tiberius’ heir, Sejanus was instead surprised to find himself stripped of his command, denounced before the Senate, and then strangled. His corpse, and that of his children, were thrown off the Gemonian stairs and left for dogs and vultures. A bloody purge of the Senate followed. All at once the thing that had once guaranteed safety guaranteed ruin, for to have been friendly with Sejanus in any way now attracted the vengeful gaze of a frightened, cruel, vengeful, and temporarily omnipotent old man.

Tiberius reigned for another six years, but by this time he had probably become unhinged. Tacitus says he begged the Senate to protect “an old and lonely man” – there was, indeed, no one else he could turn to, for he was himself the murderer of most of his family. When he fainted during a voyage everyone assumed he was dead, breathed a sigh of relief, and rushed to hail Caligula. For a moment he seemed to recover, but some quick-thinking courtier smothered him with a pillow. Caligula was now the Emperor. But that is an entirely different tale of madness…

…

Tacitus’ histories are famous as a dire warning against the corruption of power. We do not know how accurate his descriptions are, for we have few sources for this period, and they are all unsatisfactory. What we do know is that Tacitus hated Tiberius and the other Julio-Claudians, bitterly resented his own humiliation under Domitian, and feared the advent of another mad demigod. One would never guess that his histories were written under the best government the Empire ever had. Further, he wrote for senators who regarded all emperors as tyrants, and who liked to think of themselves as the heirs of the stoic heroes of old Rome. However, with few exceptions, they never dared oppose an emperor – they could only avenge themselves in the history books. Tacitus, knowing what his audience wanted to hear, obliged them. We have good reason, then, to suspect the character portrait Tacitus provides us with.

Tacitus was a moralist first and a historian second. Or, rather, he thought they were the same thing. “The chief duty of a historian,” he said, “is to judge the actions of men, so that the good may meet with the reward due to virtue, and pernicious citizens may be deterred by the condemnation that awaits evil deeds at the tribunal of posterity.” Tiberius and the other Emperors were not, then, being studied for their own sake – they were being studied as a warning to the present. Similarly, his sketch of the German tribes, and of his father in-law, Agricola, also serve a moral purpose, for they were meant to recall to the New Rome the virtues of the Old. The good man, he implied, is the one of simple and upright habits. He serves his country under good governments and bad, and braves the hazards of politics with the same fortitude as those of war. Just as he can fall in the one struggle, he can fall in the other. No matter, he must serve. Far from being a prophet of ruin, as he is sometimes read, Tacitus agrees with Polybius that the Roman Empire is eternal. Emperors, however rotten, come and go.

Tacitus' acid character portraits, the relentless carnage of his palace, and his utter refusal to offer us a shred of consolation, guarantee him a place in both literature and history. As a guide to the dark and blood-splattered corridors of power, Tacitus has few equals. Those who accompany him on the tour he offers likely to forget the experience.

More on the life of Tacitus:

http://www.livius.org/person/tacitus/

Full text of the Histories:

http://classics.mit.edu/Tacitus/histories.html

Part of a Series on Philosophy of History (VII of XXXV)

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Modern-Intellectual-History/986713261343222

(The picture is a statue of Tiberius)

Questions: Do you agree with Tacitus that a good person has an obligation to serve his country, even if the government is rotten? Were tryrants like Tiberius inevitable under the imperial system, or might Rome have found a different way? Or was Tiberius a tyrant at all? Do you think the Republic could have been restored?

Polybius and the Rise of Rome (c. 125 BC)

“Who is so worthless or indolent as to not wish to know by what means, and under what system of government, the Romans in less than fifty-three years have subjected nearly the whole inhabited world to themselves – a thing unique in history?”

Who indeed? The rise of Rome from an insignificant town on the banks of the Tiber to a world-empire in a few short generations is one of the most inspiring dramas in the western historical imagination. Discipline and virtue, it teaches, can conquer the world.  Many people who watched this drama as it unfolded were just as impressed their descendants. They found their historian in Polybius (c. 200 – c. 118 BC), a Greek aristocrat held in genteel captivity by the Romans. Although technically a hostage who might have to be executed, he was shown every courtesy, and even made the tutor to a young Scipio Aemelianus – later Africanus Minor, conqueror of Carthage. While “visiting” he wrote a history of Rome’s rise in forty “books,” only five of which survive today. They remain our principle source for the Punic Wars. (264 – 146 BC)

Excepting perhaps the Gauls, Carthage was Republican Rome’s most serious foreign enemy. It was rich, powerful, had an expert navy, and knew how to use elephants. By the time the Romans had unified central and southern Italy, the Western Mediterranean was very nearly a Carthaginian Lake. When they seemed on the verge of conquering Sicily too, the Romans decided to act. (264) Although they had no naval experience to speak of, the Romans built a fleet from nothing and beat the Carthaginians at Ecnomus. (256) The Roman fleet was wiped out in a storm, and its accompanying expeditionary force massacred by the Carthaginians. They sent Regulus, their captive Roman general, back home to negotiate a peace, but made him promise to return if they refused. He promised, they refused, and he went back. The Carthaginians could not help but be amazed by his integrity, but eventually decided to torture him to death as a message to the Romans. His sons avenged themselves in like manner on some high-born Carthaginian captives. Both sides built new fleets and clashed again. This time the Carthaginians won (249), but after twenty-five years of war they, like the Romans, were too exhausted to continue.

By the time the next war began (219) Hanibal “Barca” ("lightning," 247 – 182) had risen to command. He was in Spain with the main Carthaginian army, and hit upon the unlikely plan of attacking the Romans from the north. He lost half his army crossing the Alps, but once in Italy found new allies, and wiped out major Roman armies at Ticino, Lake Trasimene, and Cannae. (218, 17, 16) The Roman alliance began to crumble, for most of the legionaries were dead on the field, and those that remained were bottled up inside the city, preparing to resist a siege that might end of the Republic. However, it never came. Hannibal’s army was inexperienced in siege warfare, he had received no help from Carthage, and he was reluctant to surrender the mobility that had won so many of his battles. With the Italian theatre temporarily in stalemate, the Romans decided to counter-attack in Spain. Hannibal’s brother, Hasdrubal, destroyed one of the invading armies at Ebro (215), but was himself defeated at the Metaurus River (207) by the Roman answer to Hannibal – the dashing young general Scipio (later Africanus Major.) In 205 he landed an army in Africa, threatening Carthage for the first time. Hannibal abandoned Italy in order to rescue the city, but lost the decisive battle at Zama. (202)

The Romans inflicted a humiliating peace – Carthage was stripped of its navy and its overseas empire, pledged not to make war without Roman consent, and was burdened with a massive indemnity. Hannibal used his reputation as a war hero to reform the government, but the mercantile aristocracy, fearing for their money, their power, and perhaps their lives, warned the Romans that he was planning to renew the war. Hannibal fled, was pursued to Bithynia, and committed suicide rather than allow himself to be captured. “Let us relieve the Romans of their anxiety,” he said, “since they think it taxes their patience to await the death of an old man.”

Carthage might have eventually renewed the contest, for its port made it one of the richest cities in the Mediterranean, and it paid off the Roman indemnity early. But it was ruled by a corrupt and short-sighted oligarchy, and found an implacable foe in Cato Censor. (234 – 149) During a diplomatic mission he was astonished at Carthage’s rapid recovery. When he returned he denounced the Senate for its inactivity, held up a fist full of figs as a symbol of the ancient enemy’s renewed prosperity, and made it his habit to end every speech with the motto “Carthage must be destroyed.” Under his prodding the Senate began to make impossible demands. The Carthaginians fulfilled them, but the Romans declared war anyway. They burned the city to the ground, massacred its inhabitants, salted the earth, and invited the gods to ruin anyone who ever tried to rebuild it. The brief, inglorious, and final Punic war ended in complete victory. (146) The last serious challenge to Roman hegemony had been removed. Henceforth, the real dangers to the Republic would all come from within.

…

Herodotus and Thucydides wrote the history of individual peoples, but did not attempt any broader perspective of the Mediterranean world. It is unlikely that they could have found one if they had, for they had no unifying theme apart from the folly of hubris. The rise of Rome, however, gave Polybius just such a theme. The history of all the different peoples in the Mediterranean could now be told as the history of Rome and its enemies. This remained the basic framework for much Latin history well into the Midi Eval period, and persisted in the Greek east until 1453. It still exerts a powerful hold on our historical imagination today – for who knows the history of the Carthaginians, or of the Persians, except through Roman eyes? They are forever cast as the villains in the saga of Rome’s rise to power. That saga was, for Polybius, no mere tale of adventure, but the history of the world.

What of the question with which we started? How did Rome do it? Polybius was a Greek, and he wrote in order to explain Rome to his countrymen. Indeed, he hoped they would submit to it, for he would probably be executed if they did not. But he also had more formidable reasons. First, Rome’s rise was a matter of institutions, for their government was Aristotle’s ideal mix of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, and it contained checks and balances which the unruly Greek democracies lacked. It was also a matter of character. The Romans were tough, virtuous, hard-working, loyal, disciplined, and strangers to luxury – as the Greeks had been in the days of Marathon. The Carthaginians, by contrast, were spoiled by wealth, found it impossible to work together, and left their fighting to mercenaries. It was also a matter of religion, for “the very thing that among other nations is regarded as an object of reproach – i.e. superstition – is that which maintains the cohesion of the Roman state.” “This might not have been necessary,” he continued, “if it had been possible to form a state composed of wise men; but as every multitude is fickle, full of lawless desires, unreasoned passion, and violent anger, it must be held together by invisible terrors and religious pageantry.” Following the logic of this argument, he presented Rome’s rise as the decree of the ultimate power – Fate, which not even the gods can resist. His explanation was thus an appeal to all Greeks, whether pious or skeptical, to submit to the new power. It would be hubris, he implied, to resist.

In the centuries since Herodotus and Thucydides, Plato and the Stoic philosophers had developed a cyclical view of time which held that the rise and fall of states is a part of a natural rhythm in which virtue brings victory, victory temptation, temptation vice, and vice defeat. It seems that this may have been a popular model in Greek historiography after Thucydides, although so much has been lost it is difficult to say. Polybius agreed that it held for lesser peoples, even for the Greeks, but not for the Romans. Fate, he said, had given them an Eternal City, and an Eternal Empire. It was destined to rise, but never to fall. 

Summary of Polybius and his work

http://www.ancient.eu/Polybius/

Full Text of the Histories

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Polybius/1*.html

Part of a series on Philosophy of History (VI of XXXV)

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Modern-Intellectual-History/986713261343222 

(The picture is an ancient bust of Hannibal)

Questions: Do you find Polybius' argument persuasive? Is character a decisive element in history? What about religion? Is it a necessary prop to social order, as Polybius argued, or mere ignorance, as we are so often told today? What about institutions? What is their role in history? Finally, do you see the hand of fate in history? Or is it principally the result of our freely chosen actions?