The Fall of the Roman Empire
As the Roman Empire declined its leaders became interested more in personal survival than good governance. Adrian Goldsworthy draws comparisons with current crises.
People like having someone to blame for failure and disaster – especially when there is a chance that they might be held responsible themselves. In the midst of a grim financial crisis, governments are strident in pronouncing none of it to be their fault. Greedy bankers with their fat bonuses have been established as the villains, just as they used to be hailed as captains of commerce who drove the economy forward and contributed to political party funds.
Three centuries ago, the historian Edward Gibbon sought to apportion blame for the fall of the Roman Empire. It is a problem each generation views in the light of its own worries and obsessions, its own pressing concerns.
In the first two centuries AD, the Roman Empire was stable, sophisticated, wealthy and more powerful than any of its neighbours. Yet Rome split in two. By 476 the Western Empire’s last emperor Romulus Augustulus was deposed and deemed not worth the trouble of either killing or replacing. Emperors continued to rule the Eastern Empire from Constantinople for almost a millennium, but lost more and more territory.
No one has yet compared the current economic crisis with the fall of Rome, but the later Roman Empire did have financial problems as emperors devalued the coinage and brought on rampant inflation. By the end of the third century, bureaucrats and soldiers were paid in commodities such as grain, whose value was more stable than currency. However, ancient and modern economies are very different and so parallels are hard to draw.
There are other factors that make Rome’s problems seem irrelevant to the modern world. We have much faster communications and far higher expectations of what governments should do, while the world’s population has swollen to a size dwarfing that of the ancient world.
Things may be different now but there are still lessons to learn from the Roman experience. One factor strangely marginalised by historians is internal conflict. From 217 until the fall of the Western Empire there were only a handful of decades without a civil war. Some, admittedly, were brief coups which failed after a few months or even days, but others went on for years and were fought on a massive scale. In this period Roman soldiers were more likely to fight and die in pitched battles against other Romans than at the hands of foreign enemies. Even the briefest failed usurpation was followed by a wave of executions of anyone associated with its leaders.
Apart from a few infants proclaimed as co-rulers, all emperors lived through at least one civil war. The threat was intensely personal. No foreign enemy had the power to overthrow the empire, or for a long time even to conquer substantial areas of the provinces. A Roman challenger did not want to destroy the empire but kill and replace the current ruler. These were not conflicts about ideology, policy or even religion. In 312 Constantine ordered his soldiers to paint the Chi-Rho symbol of the Christian God on their shields before going into battle against a rival emperor. He did not claim to be fighting to promote Christianity, simply that God favoured him.
Emperors routinely abandoned foreign wars to deal with a usurper. They restructured the empire in an effort to stop any potential challenger from gaining too much influence. In the process they became no safer, but made it difficult to get things done. Their primary aim was their own survival and this attitude permeated all ranks of the civil service and military.
Loyalty to the emperor was far more important than efficiency. One of the best ways to prove allegiance was to condemn someone else for disloyalty. A man could not trust his colleagues, superiors or subordinates. The priorities of those in authority became those of survival, profit and power. Conspicuous talent risked a charge of excessive ambition.
The Roman Empire rotted from the top, its government becoming less and less efficient. It did not face serious competition and for a long time could win any conflict. But the decay continued and it became harder and harder to deploy resources to deal with a problem. A system that places short-term personal objectives over everything else can work for a surprisingly long time. But, when it is confronted by a serious crisis, failures tend to be massive and abrupt. In the early fifth century the Western Empire lost Britain, Spain, Africa and parts of Gaul in rapid succession. It never recovered, grew weaker and eventually ceased to exist.
If political leaders come to see remaining in power as their primary aim rather than governing well, then a country will become less efficient. The same is true in business. If the culture is one of personal success and immediate profit, then companies will fail catastrophically whenever the situation becomes less favourable. Both countries and companies can grow so large and wealthy that they no longer need to be efficient and both can seem successful as long as the wider situation remains favourable. The Roman Empire lived off its fat for centuries and no one could imagine that it would ever fall. Yet in the end it fell. It is not inevitable that our own free enterprise system will collapse as well, but it is not looking healthy.
