Chapter Chapter 24 · The Twilight Of Rome

The text-books of ancient History give the date 476 as the year in

which Rome fell, because in that year the last emperor was driven off

his throne. But Rome, which was not built in a day, took a long time

falling. The process was so slow and so gradual that most Romans did

not realise how their old world was coming to an end. They complained

about the unrest of the times—they grumbled about the high prices of

food and about the low wages of the workmen—they cursed the profiteers

who had a monopoly of the grain and the wool and the gold coin.

Occasionally they rebelled against an unusually rapacious governor.

But the majority of the people during the first four centuries of our

era ate and drank (whatever their purse allowed them to buy) and hated

or loved (according to their nature) and went to the theatre (whenever

there was a free show of fighting gladiators) or starved in the slums

of the big cities, utterly ignorant of the fact that their empire had

outlived its usefulness and was doomed to perish.

How could they realise the threatened danger? Rome made a fine showing

of outward glory. Well-paved roads connected the different provinces,

the imperial police were active and showed little tenderness for

highwaymen. The frontier was closely guarded against the savage tribes

who seemed to be occupying the waste lands of northern Europe. The

whole world was paying tribute to the mighty city of Rome, and a score

of able men were working day and night to undo the mistakes of the

past and bring about a return to the happier conditions of the early

Republic.

But the underlying causes of the decay of the State, of which I have

told you in a former chapter, had not been removed and reform therefore

was impossible.

Rome was, first and last and all the time, a city-state as Athens and

Corinth had been city-states in ancient Hellas. It had been able to

dominate the Italian peninsula. But Rome as the ruler of the entire

civilised world was a political impossibility and could not endure. Her

young men were killed in her endless wars. Her farmers were ruined by

long military service and by taxation. They either became professional

beggars or hired themselves out to rich landowners who gave them board

and lodging in exchange for their services and made them “serfs,” those

unfortunate human beings who are neither slaves nor freemen, but who

have become part of the soil upon which they work, like so many cows,

and the trees.

The Empire, the State, had become everything. The common citizen had

dwindled down to less than nothing. As for the slaves, they had heard

the words that were spoken by Paul. They had accepted the message of

the humble carpenter of Nazareth. They did not rebel against their

masters. On the contrary, they had been taught to be meek and they

obeyed their superiors. But they had lost all interest in the affairs

of this world which had proved such a miserable place of abode. They

were willing to fight the good fight that they might enter into the

Kingdom of Heaven. But they were not willing to engage in warfare for

the benefit of an ambitious emperor who aspired to glory by way of a

foreign campaign in the land of the Parthians or the Numidians or the

Scots.

And so conditions grew worse as the centuries went by. The first

Emperors had continued the tradition of “leadership” which had given

the old tribal chieftains such a hold upon their subjects. But the

Emperors of the second and third centuries were Barrack-Emperors,

professional soldiers, who existed by the grace of their body-guards,

the so-called Prætorians. They succeeded each other with terrifying

rapidity, murdering their way into the palace and being murdered out

of it as soon as their successors had become rich enough to bribe the

guards into a new rebellion.

Meanwhile the barbarians were hammering at the gates of the northern

frontier. As there were no longer any native Roman armies to stop their

progress, foreign mercenaries had to be hired to fight the invader. As

the foreign soldier happened to be of the same blood as his supposed

enemy, he was apt to be quite lenient when he engaged in battle.

Finally, by way of experiment, a few tribes were allowed to settle

within the confines of the Empire. Others followed. Soon these tribes

complained bitterly of the greedy Roman tax-gatherers, who took away

their last penny. When they got no redress they marched to Rome and

loudly demanded that they be heard.

[Illustration: WHEN THE BARBARIANS GOT THROUGH WITH A ROMAN CITY]

This made Rome very uncomfortable as an Imperial residence. Constantine

(who ruled from 323 to 337) looked for a new capital. He chose

Byzantium, the gate-way for the commerce between Europe and Asia. The

city was renamed Constantinople, and the court moved eastward.

When Constantine died, his two sons, for the sake of a more efficient

administration, divided the Empire between them. The elder lived in

Rome and ruled in the west. The younger stayed in Constantinople and

was master of the east.

[Illustration: ROME]

Then came the fourth century and the terrible visitation of the Huns,

those mysterious Asiatic horsemen who for more than two centuries

maintained themselves in Northern Europe and continued their career of

bloodshed until they were defeated near Chalons-sur-Marne in France in

the year 451. As soon as the Huns had reached the Danube they had begun

to press hard upon the Goths. The Goths, in order to save themselves,

were thereupon obliged to invade Rome. The Emperor Valens tried to

stop them, but was killed near Adrianople in the year 378. Twenty-two

years later, under their king, Alaric, these same West Goths marched

westward and attacked Rome. They did not plunder, and destroyed only

a few palaces. Next came the Vandals, and showed less respect for the

venerable traditions of the city. Then the Burgundians. Then the East

Goths. Then the Alemanni. Then the Franks. There was no end to the

invasions. Rome at last was at the mercy of every ambitious highway

robber who could gather a few followers.

In the year 402 the Emperor fled to Ravenna, which was a sea-port and

strongly fortified, and there, in the year 475, Odoacer, commander of

a regiment of the German mercenaries, who wanted the farms of Italy

to be divided among themselves, gently but effectively pushed Romulus

Augustulus, the last of the emperors who ruled the western division,

from his throne, and proclaimed himself Patrician or ruler of Rome. The

eastern Emperor, who was very busy with his own affairs, recognised

him, and for ten years Odoacer ruled what was left of the western

provinces.

[Illustration: THE INVASIONS OF THE BARBARIANS]

A few years later, Theodoric, King of the East Goths, invaded the

newly formed Patriciate, took Ravenna, murdered Odoacer at his own

dinner table, and established a Gothic Kingdom amidst the ruins of the

western part of the Empire. This Patriciate state did not last long. In

the sixth century a motley crowd of Longobards and Saxons and Slavs and

Avars invaded Italy, destroyed the Gothic kingdom, and established a

new state of which Pavia became the capital.

Then at last the imperial city sank into a state of utter neglect and

despair. The ancient palaces had been plundered time and again. The

schools had been burned down. The teachers had been starved to death.

The rich people had been thrown out of their villas which were now

inhabited by evil-smelling and hairy barbarians. The roads had fallen

into decay. The old bridges were gone and commerce had come to a

standstill. Civilisation—the product of thousands of years of patient

labor on the part of Egyptians and Babylonians and Greeks and Romans,

which had lifted man high above the most daring dreams of his earliest

ancestors, threatened to perish from the western continent.

It is true that in the far east, Constantinople continued to be the

centre of an Empire for another thousand years. But it hardly counted

as a part of the European continent. Its interests lay in the east.

It began to forget its western origin. Gradually the Roman language

was given up for the Greek. The Roman alphabet was discarded and Roman

law was written in Greek characters and explained by Greek judges.

The Emperor became an Asiatic despot, worshipped as the god-like

kings of Thebes had been worshipped in the valley of the Nile, three

thousand years before. When missionaries of the Byzantine church looked

for fresh fields of activity, they went eastward and carried the

civilisation of Byzantium into the vast wilderness of Russia.

As for the west, it was left to the mercies of the Barbarians. For

twelve generations, murder, war, arson, plundering were the order of

the day. One thing—and one thing alone—saved Europe from complete

destruction, from a return to the days of cave-men and the hyena.

This was the church—the flock of humble men and women who for

many centuries had confessed themselves the followers of Jesus, the

carpenter of Nazareth, who had been killed that the mighty Roman Empire

might be saved the trouble of a street-riot in a little city somewhere

along the Syrian frontier.