Even as Rome was under attack from outside forces, it was also crumbling from within thanks to a severe financial crisis. Constant wars and overspending had significantly lightened imperial coffers, and oppressive taxation and inflation had widened the gap between rich and poor. In the hope of avoiding the taxman, many members of the wealthy classes had even fled to the countryside and set up independent fiefdoms.
At the same time, the empire was rocked by a labor deficit. With its economy faltering and its commercial and agricultural production in decline, the Empire began to lose its grip on Europe. The fate of Western Rome was partially sealed in the late third century, when the Emperor Diocletian divided the Empire into two halves—the Western Empire seated in the city of Milan, and the Eastern Empire in Byzantium, later known as Constantinople.
The division made the empire more easily governable in the short term, but over time the two halves drifted apart. East and West failed to adequately work together to combat outside threats, and the two often squabbled over resources and military aid.
As the gulf widened, the largely Greek-speaking Eastern Empire grew in wealth while the Latin-speaking West descended into economic crisis. Most importantly, the strength of the Eastern Empire served to divert Barbarian invasions to the West.
Emperors like Constantine ensured that the city of Constantinople was fortified and well guarded, but Italy and the city of Rome—which only had symbolic value for many in the East—were left vulnerable. The Western political structure would finally disintegrate in the fifth century, but the Eastern Empire endured in some form for another thousand years before being overwhelmed by the Ottoman Empire in the s.
At its height, the Roman Empire stretched from the Atlantic Ocean all the way to the Euphrates River in the Middle East, but its grandeur may have also been its downfall. With such a vast territory to govern, the empire faced an administrative and logistical nightmare.
Even with their excellent road systems, the Romans were unable to communicate quickly or effectively enough to manage their holdings. Other Italian cities suffered even worse fates. The Eastern Roman Empire had recovered Italy—and destroyed much of it in the process.
The Western Roman Empire had clearly fallen by the s. Italy was controlled by Justinian, many of its cities were ruined and much of its infrastructure was severely damaged. When later historians looked for the moment when the Western Empire fell, they found Marcellinus and his claim that Rome fell under Odoacer. In the memorable framing by the historian Brian Croke, the fall of Rome in is a manufactured historical turning point that has become an accepted historical fact.
For 1, years, we have picked the wrong time and blamed the wrong person for the fall of Rome. This mistake matters for two reasons. His words had real, deadly and long-lasting consequences. Second, the manufactured fall of Rome reveals the unstable boundaries between historical epochs. But, if we recognize that Rome did not fall in , the lessons we take from Roman history become quite different.
It instead shows how a false claim that a nation has perished can help cause the very problems its author invented. We ignore this danger at our peril. Contact us at letters time. Odoacer forces Romulus Augustus to resign in AD. By Edward J. Edward J. The author and editor of several prize-winning books, including The Final Pagan Generation, he lives in Carlsbad, California. TIME Ideas hosts the world's leading voices, providing commentary on events in news, society, and culture.
We welcome outside contributions. Next, moving to sea, the Vandals took up piracy and severely disrupted trade in the western Mediterranean. The recent assassination of Aetius, who was the most competent Roman general in the day and had died at the hands of none other than Valentinian III, the Emperor of Rome himself, only made the Vandals' path to naval power and domination all the easier.
This horrifying replay of Stilicho's death—shades of Honorius again! Unlike the Visigoths' earlier siege, the Vandals' attack involved prolonged, physical ruin, a destruction so complete and indiscriminate, so emblematic of wanton atrocity, that these barbarians' very name made its way into common parlance, and ultimately English, as a by-word for "the malicious destruction of property," vandalism.
The "Fall of Rome". Although Odovacar acted with little respect for formalities—he removed the child from the throne and sent him off to a monastery where he subsequently died—the usurper faced no real opposition, political or military. The reality of the matter was that barbarian leaders like him had been the power behind the throne for many years in Rome, and the German strongman did little more than end the pretense of non-barbarian control of the Roman West.
His move was, moreover, driven by economics as much as anything else. Despite the travails of their Western counterparts, the Eastern emperors—by then, there were two Roman emperors, one in Rome and one in Constantinople—continued to demand that the entire Empire pay taxes into a common treasury.
From there, few of these funds ever made their way back to the West where they were desperately needed to defend the state and rebuild its infrastructure. In open defiance of this tradition, Odovacar began keeping the monies he collected from those areas he governed.
The luxury-loving emperors of the East were incensed to find their outstretched hands empty and responded in a manner consistent with standard Roman policy in the day.
They hired barbarians to do their dirty work. In , Theodoric , the leader of the Ostrogoths who had at last been liberated from Hunnic dominion, was commissioned to head west and dispatch Odovacar, which he did in typically savage fashion. In the course of negotiating peace with his barbarian brother at a banquet, Theodoric stabbed him to death. But once he'd had a good look at the West, especially the desperate condition of things, the Ostrogothic general refused to hand Italy over to some far-off "Roman Emperor" who had no intention of actually ruling it but only milking it for taxes.
Now the lord of the land, Theodoric r. Roman Italy needed a caring hand like his, and this barbarian proved the last ruler in antiquity to lend it such.
Theodoric oversaw the repair of Roman roads and aqueducts, and under his governance Italy witnessed a small-scale renaissance, sadly its final breath of culture for much of the remaining millennium. To those who are able to grasp the complexity of these times, Theodoric's actions come as no surprise at all.
A veritable paradox, capable of both treachery and tenderness, he had been educated in Constantinople but remained essentially illiterate all his life.
Moreover, he had served in his youth as a hostage to the Eastern Romans and thus had learned the language of those highly civilized bureaucrats.
And like Odovacar, he was also a Christian and, although Arian, managed to maintain good relations with the orthodox powers-that-be, not that he wanted to live among them. To this day, however, his strained relations with his secretary Boethius , an orthodox Christian, dominate the accounts of his regime—Theodoric ultimately had Boethius executed—but the Ostrogothic king would be better remembered for building a sound and effective government centered in Ravenna northeastern Italy on the coast of the Adriatic Sea , where his tomb can still be seen.
It is fairer to him, perhaps, to recall his relationship with Cassiodorus , Boethius' successor to the post of secretary, who was also an orthodox Christian but not so contentious a man. Cassiodorus quietly oversaw the copying of many Classical manuscripts, which was an important contribution to the preservation of Greek and Roman literature and thought during the Middle Ages. All in all, whether or not any of them knew it—and quite a few probably did—these men were folding the tents of culture, packing its bags and quenching the fires of scholarship.
The West was readying itself for its Medieval "camping trip. The classic conundrum of antiquity, "Why did Rome fall? Few of the suggestions have made much of an impression. Many involve "invented histories" of some sort, speaking volumes about the answerer and syllables about the issue. More than one may be dismissed off-hand as so far from what-really-happened that, though they represent someone's history, it's clearly not the Romans'.
For instance, Rome did not fall because of the distractions pursuant to sexual indulgence. Given the influence of Christianity which the Romans had adopted as their exclusive religion by then, the conduct of those living in the fifth century after Christ was relatively sober. Indeed, if the data point to any venereal villains across the great expanse of Roman history, it is the Julio-Claudians who oversaw the height of Roman power in the first century CE and were truly perpetrators of immorality at large.
So, to make an argument relating sexual behavior to Rome's "fall"—and to judge it fairly from the historical evidence—involves the ludicrous conclusion that the erotic felonies of a Caligula or Nero, in fact, sustained Rome's triumph, instead of corroding it at its core.
That suggests that, to prevent the collapse of their society, the Romans should have kept the orgies up, so to speak, which is patently ridiculous. Simply put, sex—reproduction maybe, but not sex! Likewise, the climate and ecology of the time cannot be adduced as the reason for something so earth-shattering as the "Fall of Rome. All may have appealed to some but none to all or, more to the point, a majority of scholars.
And some of these answers have come from very good scholars, the likes of Edward Gibbon , the pre-eminent classical historian of England in the later half of the eighteenth century. Brilliant though it was, the thesis he expounded in his monumental and highly engaging magnum opus The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire —he argued that the rise of Christianity emasculated the native vigor of Rome, leaving it open to more virile conquerors, i.
For example, if Christianity so weakened the Roman West in late antiquity, why didn't it weaken the other half, the staunchly orthodox East which survived nearly a millennium after the collapse of the West?
Perhaps it's true that Christianity redirected the attention of many Romans away from affairs of state, but it did not undermine their civilization. To the contrary, it was as natural an outgrowth of their culture, as "Roman" as all sorts of other things they did: theatre, epic poetry, gladiators, ship-building, all of which were imports, just like Christianity.
Any hope of finding a better answer depends on assessing exactly what was happening in Rome at the time of its "fall" and the data do, in fact, point to some clear and significant trends. First of all, there's strong evidence of a steady decline in population across the entire Empire from the second century CE on.
For example, peaking at around a million or so in the Classical Age, the population of the city of Rome gradually dropped over the course of the next few centuries, reaching a low point of a mere six thousand by the 's. The reasons for this drastic if incremental reduction in human resources are not clear, though many Romans' luxurious lifestyle and their concomitant disinterest in producing and raising children must have played some part.
So did plagues, no doubt, as well as constant warfare on the frontiers and perhaps even lead-poisoning, evidenced in human skeletal remains recovered from Pompeii which show that the Romans there were indeed exposed to high concentrations of the lethal element. Nevertheless, it's unclear how widespread this problem was. Second, economic data point to other factors which doubtlessly contributed to the situation. Well-documented among the travails of third-century Rome—a full two centuries prior to its notorious "fall"—is a particularly long period of financial crisis which inaugurated the slow collapse of the economy in the West.
This economic depression was due in large part to the failure of the Romans' system of conquest and enslavement. When the flow of cheap slaves began to dry up, estates throughout the Empire could no longer live off the abuse of human resources on which they had formerly depended. So without any real industry or much agricultural machinery to work the land—Roman land-owners did know about water wheels and windmills but archaeologists have found evidence of very few being used in this period—the aristocrats of late Rome apparently watched the collapse of their economy and disdained practical matters such as retooling their farms to ensure their viability.
Finally, political affairs contributed to the difficulties plaguing late Rome. The general incompetence of emperors and the failure of traditional politics in the West led to a wretchedly corrupt political structure, characterized by an oppressive burden of taxation levied to support the growing army of soldiers barbari!
This, in turn, led to inflation and debasing of Roman coinage, which bred a lethal mix of apathy and angst that inspired many Romans to flee politics and later the poleis "city-states" of the Empire, the urban foundation on which rested most of ancient life. With that, actual power in Rome fell into the hands of local lords, and the concept of shared Roman civilization itself came under siege.
But states have survived disasters far worse than any or all of these. In sum, none of the theories or factors mentioned above explains why there's no simple answer to the simple question, " Why did Rome fall?
To a scholar, that demands an all-out Aristotelian response, a syllogism, an analysis of the question in terms of its principal elements, which are three: why, Rome, fell. Since "why" cannot be answered until the other components of the question have been determined, it's best not to start there. First, then, when we say "Rome," what do we mean?
The city? The empire? Its government? Its people? That Rome fell to the Visigoths in , to the Vandals in , not to mention its other earlier "falls" such as the one to that most-Roman-of-all-Romans, Julius Caesar himself 45 BCE , and its near capitulation to Hannibal before that. So if it's right to put the events of in the same category—they were hardly as destructive physically or psychologically as those which preceded—the ouster of Romulus Augustulus can hardly labelled " the fall of Rome," when compared to other ruinous sieges and takeovers of the city.
The Eastern Empire stood for nearly a millennium after , nearly as long again as classical Rome itself. So Rome as Empire can't be right. That definition doesn't work either. They're still there. They're called Italians. So, if the people of Rome ever "fell," apparently they got back up again. That's out, too. Whatever the answer, the question of which "Rome" fell in lies at the heart of the problem, and most of the answers that have been offered incline toward one but not all of the connotations the name Rome can carry.
Yet, all are inherent in the question, at least when it's phrased so simply as "Why did Rome fall? Hopefully, "fall" will prove a less obscure term than "Rome," and it does, unfortunately. But that's really not how things happened in late imperial Rome. Nothing went "boom"—"blaarhhh!
There must be a better metaphor and, if a derogatory term is in order—and speaking positively about Rome in the fifth century seems out of the question, without completely recasting the issue—it would be more suitable perhaps to say Rome "dissolved.
Scholars, after all, can hardly sit around seminar tables in serious discourse debating the reasons why the ancient cookie "crumbled.
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