Still Thinking about the Fall of Rome

The Fall of the West: The Death of the Roman Superpower, by Adrian Goldsworthy; Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2009, 544 pages, £25.

The story behind a book title is often interesting in itself, and the competing titles of Adrian Goldsworthy’s latest book are a case in point. In the USA, it was published by Yale University Press as How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower. Yet in the rest of the English-speaking world, the same book was published as The Fall of the West: The Death of the Roman Superpower.

Why? Goldsworthy provides some hints about this in his preface. In the United States, Roman history is taken seriously by public figures of all kinds, and also academics. The USA has always been conscious of Rome as a prototype republic, a king-rejecting society which went on to great and glorious things. It’s not for nothing that Washington DC bristles with pseudo-Roman public buildings, has a house of parliament known as the Senate, and why George Washington himself appears (in marble) clad in a toga. Americans, says Goldsworthy, are quick to see links between ancient Rome and their own present-day superpower status, and the more unsympathetic fellow travellers among them are also quick to hint at the impending collapse of the “evil republic”.

And what does The Fall of the West tell us about the UK, and about ourselves? First of all, it tells us that books about the fall of Rome will not have the same broad appeal as they will in the United States. Outside the USA, the fall of Rome is the province of a minority of academics in ever-shrinking Classics departments in increasingly hostile universities. It also reminds us that “the West” is not a concept currently in favour in the academic environment and among the chattering classes, eroded by years of name-calling, accusations of “Eurocentrism” and post-colonialism, and more recently by a fear of the rise of Islam (which, historically, seems to parallel any decline in the West).

What is Goldsworthy’s take on all this? Refreshingly, he declares that he is not going to be one of those historians who ostensibly writes about Rome only to round off with some stinging paragraphs about George W. Bush and the war in Iraq. Fundamentally, Goldsworthy is sick of this, and wants to write about Rome on its own terms, looking at—brace yourself—what actually happened as the Roman empire declined, split and declined further.

This is not to say that Goldsworthy doesn’t think we can learn a lot from the decline of the Roman empire. He thinks we can, and he provides a lot of lessons. The moral of the story—thoughtfully provided in the epilogue “An Even Simpler Moral”—is challenging. Although historians have identified over 200 possible causes and contributing factors to the decline of the Roman superpower, the ones on which Goldsworthy focuses are poor leadership and galloping bureaucracy, where promotion was based not on merit but on one’s ability to stay on the side of those (however briefly) in charge.

K-Rudd take note: what accelerated the decline was the increasing use of the “column” style of leadership, surrounded by a self-sustaining, unproductive and non-accountable nomenklatura. Power gradually leaked away from the Senate, the majority of whose members were men of proven enterprise, achievement and merit, drawn from a broad range of backgrounds. Instead, it was absorbed more and more into the position of the emperor and his entourage of military and dynastic favourites.

Rome got rid of kings and yet managed to grow them again, like a Hydra head. This was not as dangerous if the leader was someone like Caesar Augustus, but there were, in Rome’s history, very few men like Augustus—especially after Augustus. Poor leadership bred paranoia and instability, with as many as five emperors claiming power in one year. It also fostered the retinue of smooth-talking, bribing, manipulating contenders for the purple, who paid less attention to the efficient running of the empire and more to their own slice of the ever-crumbling cake.

Doesn’t this all sound horribly familiar? The recipe for civic strength is such a simple one: take a strong leader who is conscious of his duties, can take advice, will make decisions, and who wants the body politic to thrive and prosper under his leadership. Add a group of prudent advisers, drawn from diverse backgrounds and with proven skills, who will benefit from a strong and prosperous body politic, but suffer from a weakened one. Proceed with caution. And conversely, the recipe for disaster is to have weak and vacillating leaders, swayed by poor advisers, and to ensure that none of these people will suffer in any way if the whole thing goes pear-shaped, because their pay is not linked to their performance.

Goldsworthy begins with the reign of Marcus Aurelius towards the end of the second century AD, and ends with Justinian, emperor of the East, in the middle of the sixth century. It is a substantial period to cover, and what is surprising is that Goldsworthy covers it so thoroughly in a comparatively short space. The reason for this is that he is scrupulously honest about the lack of primary material available for quite long periods of Roman history. Much historians’ work in the past has been educated guesses, dodgy figures, and extrapolations from very small pieces of surviving text. The population of the Roman empire cannot be accurately calculated at any period, even at its height. The value of money, the prices, the rates of exchange, the amount of real poverty and hardship, are also largely guesswork.

This raises obvious questions about the use of Roman history to justify the individual historian’s pet theories, and it is worth considering Goldsworthy also in this light. The interesting thing about his work, as opposed to the work of many Roman social historians, is that he has focused on politics and bureaucracy, where the sources are the most abundant. What these records tell us about the fall of the Roman empire is that it rotted from the top. Other elements like the failure of the postal system, the lack of real economic competition after the destruction of Carthage, or even the decline in the birth-rate, are all harder to prove as key factors because of the lack of surviving evidence. Importantly for Goldsworthy’s thesis, they could also all have been reversed by strong leadership and the appointment of talented and skilful administrators, rather than sycophants and professional extortionists.

Goldsworthy’s book is divided (like Gaul) into three parts, but each part is then broken down into digestible chapters. Some of these, like “Sunset on an Outpost of Empire”, about the isles of Britain, are absolutely delightful. Others, like “East and West”, had me checking his footnotes very thoroughly. But whenever I found something I didn’t agree with on the early church, I was usually able to track it to the Cambridge Ancient History series, so I am happy to blame Henry Chadwick rather than Goldsworthy.

The digestibility of the chapters is important in a work of this length: if one chapter seems overburdened with sentences like “Petronius told Archalaeus that Justinius had not advised Procopius that Constans would be replaced with Ossibus”, then you can always go and read the chapter about the Huns. There’s no nonsense about the Huns, swarthy and slitty-eyed, with their elongated horn-tipped bows and shrewd blackmail. The Goths are also good value, moving in vast and hungry hordes past the crumbling edges of the empire, heading for security and decent grazing land.

Goldsworthy rejects the very popular historians’ conceit that the Roman empire didn’t really fall—it just got changed into something else, that something else being early feudal Europe, with its petty city-states and its so-called Holy Roman Emperor. The names of various institutions survived, and “Caesar” became “Kaiser”. Yet there were no aqueducts, no senate, no indoor plumbing, no postal service, no common currency, and not much law and order. Literacy evaporated; great cities dwindled to villages of a few hundred souls living in thatched huts.

When something changes that much, can you really argue that it has survived? Goldsworthy, quite radically, says that this is nonsense—what followed in the wake of Rome was nothing like Rome at all. He calls instead for a firmer approach to the end of empire: to admit that there is such a thing as “decline”, and that this is not a Eurocentric construct based on culturally-determined notions. Instead, when most people’s standard of living changes drastically for the worse over barely a hundred years, and stays that way, it’s reasonable to call that a decline, and reasonable to describe that decline as something negative rather than positive.

This offers much food for thought about how we reconstruct history to suit current whims. The fall of Rome has even been linked to climate change, although Goldsworthy is rightly sceptical of this as a unified field theory of economic and social decline (unless the Romans introduced an emissions trading scheme and destroyed their own economy). A useful acid test for any historian experiencing the urges of political correctness in this area is to ask: where would I have preferred to live? In a Roman city with reasonable sewers, public baths, and a wide range of goods available for purchase, or in a mud hut, illiterate and restricted by dire poverty? Only the most hardened eco-terrorist actually believes that they would rather live in conditions of near-starvation, trapped in the aching tedium of subsistence farming, and with no end in sight outside of sudden death (and this is only because none of them has had to live in that state).

Goldsworthy’s book has a number of beautiful full-colour illustrations, and his maps are easy to follow and very helpful—I always want more maps, so naturally there are not enough for me in this book, but on balance they are probably adequate for a normal reader. But above all, The Fall of the West is an immensely satisfying read. You don’t have to be a specialist to understand it or enjoy it; if one chapter gets the better of you, try another. It has already provoked a lot of comment; I hope it continues to do so.

Dr Philippa Martyr reviewed the third volume of Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History in the March issue.