The Dark Ages Collection. David Hume
on the general love of unedifying pleasures, the games of the circus and licentious plays in the theatre, amusements of which the average Christian was not less avid than the average pagan.
But, it might be objected, we, whatever our faults, have at least right theological beliefs, whereas the barbarians who are permitted to overcome us are heathen or heretics. That is true, replies Salvian; in just one point we are better than they; but otherwise they are better than we. He then proceeds to enlarge on the virtues of the barbarians, which he uses, somewhat as Tacitus did in the Germania, as a foil to Roman civilisation. Among the Germans, or even among the Huns, we do not see the poor oppressed by the rich. If the Alamanni are given to drunkenness, if the Franks and Huns are perjured and perfidious, if the Alans are rapacious, are not all these vices found among us? On the other hand, the Vandals have put the provincials to shame by their high standard of sexual morality, and if the Saxons are ferocious and the Goths perfidious, both these peoples are wonderfully chaste.
There is no relief in Salvian’s gloomy picture. It must be accepted with the reserves with which we must always qualify the rhetoric of preachers or satirists when they denounce the vices of their age. But the tone of despondency is genuine. He says that “the Roman Republic is either dead, or at least is drawing her last breath in those parts in which she still seems to be alive.”103 He speaks as if this were a fact which was beyond dispute and to which men had already become accustomed. More than thirty years had elapsed since the news of the Goths at Rome had surprised Jerome in his retreat at Bethlehem and extorted the cry, Quid salvum est si Roma perit? Meanwhile the Romans had quickly recovered from the shock and had almost forgotten it. The calamity of the provinces did not move them to alter their way of life or renounce their usual amusements. And the one phrase that is worth remembering in Salvian’s gloomy, declamatory book is the epigram on Rome, Moritur et ridet.
§ 7. Modern Views on the Collapse of the Empire
The explanations of the calamities of the Empire which have been hazarded by modern writers are of a different order from those which occurred to witnesses of the events, but they are not much more satisfying. The illustrious historian whose name will always be associated with the “Decline” of the Roman Empire invoked the “principle of decay,” a principle which has itself to be explained. Depopulation, the Christian religion, the fiscal system have all been assigned as causes of the Empire’s decline in strength.104 If these or any of them were responsible for its dismemberment by the barbarians in the West, it may be asked how it was that in the East, where the same causes operated, the Empire survived much longer intact and united.
Consider depopulation. The depopulation of Italy was an important fact and it had far-reaching consequences.105 But it was a process which had probably reached its limit in the time of Augustus. There is no evidence that the Empire was less populous in the fourth and fifth centuries than in the first.106 The “sterility of the human harvest” in Italy and Greece affected the history of the Empire from its very beginning, but does not explain the collapse in the fifth century. The truth is that there are two distinct questions which have been confused. It is one thing to seek the causes which changed the Roman State from what it was in the best days of the Republic to what it had become in the age of Theodosius the Great — a change which from certain points of view may be called a “decline.” It is quite another thing to ask why the State which could resist its enemies on many frontiers in the days of Diocletian and Constantine and Julian suddenly gave way in the days of Honorius. “Depopulation” may partly supply the answer to the first question, but it is not an answer to the second. Nor can the events which transferred the greater part of western Europe to German masters be accounted for by the numbers of the peoples who invaded it. The notion of vast hosts of warriors, numbered by the hundreds of thousands, pouring over the frontiers, is, as we saw, perfectly untrue.107 The total number of one of the large East German nations probably seldom exceeded 100,000, and its army of fighting men can rarely have been more than from 20,000 to 30,000. They were not a deluge, overwhelming and irresistible, and the Empire had a well-organised military establishment at the end of the fourth century, fully sufficient in capable hands to beat them back. As a matter of fact, since the defeat at Hadrianople which was due to the blunders of Valens, no very important battle was won by German over Imperial forces during the whole course of the invasions.
It has often been alleged that Christianity in its political effects was a disintegrating force and tended to weaken the power of Rome to resist her enemies. It is difficult to see that it had any such tendency, so long as the Church itself was united. Theological heresies were indeed to prove a disintegrating force in the East in the seventh century, when differences in doctrine which had alienated the Christians in Egypt and Syria from the government of Constantine facilitated the conquests of the Saracens. But, after the defeat of Arianism, there was no such vital or deep-reaching division in the West, and the effect of Christianity was to unite, not to sever, to check, rather than to emphasise, national or sectional feeling. In the political calculations of Constantine it was probably this ideal of unity, as a counterpoise to the centrifugal tendencies which had been clearly revealed in the third century, that was the great recommendation of the religion which he raised to power.108 Nor is there the least reason to suppose that Christian teaching had the practical effect of making men less loyal to the Empire or less ready to defend it. The Christians were as pugnacious as the pagans. Some might read Augustine’s City of God with edification, but probably very few interpreted its theory with such strict practical logic as to be indifferent to the safety of the Empire. Hardly the author himself, though this has been disputed.
It was not long after Alaric’s capture of Rome that Volusian, a pagan senator of a distinguished family,109 whose mother was a Christian and a friend of Augustine, proposed the question whether the teaching of Christianity is not fatal to the welfare of a State, because a Christian smitten on one cheek would if he followed the precepts of the Gospel turn the other to the smiter. We have the letter110 in which Augustine answers the question and skilfully explains the texts so as to render it consistent with common sense. And to show that warfare is not forbidden another text is quoted in which soldiers who ask “What shall we do?” are bidden to “Do violence to no man, neither accuse any falsely, and be content with your wages.” They are not told not to serve or fight. The bishop goes on to suggest that those who wage a just war are really acting misericorditer, in a spirit of mercy and kindness to their enemies, as it is to the true interests of their enemies that their vices should be corrected. Augustine’s misericorditer laid down unintentionally a dangerous and hypocritical doctrine for the justification of war, the same principle which was used for justifying the Inquisition. But his definite statement that the Christian discipline does not condemn all wars was equivalent to saying that Christians were bound as much as pagans to defend Rome against the barbarians. And this was the general view. All the leading Churchmen of the fifth century were devoted to the Imperial idea, and when they worked for peace or compromise, as they often did, it was always when the cause of the barbarians was in the ascendant and resistance seemed hopeless.111
The truth is that the success of the barbarians in penetrating and founding states in the western provinces cannot be explained by any general consideration. It is accounted for by the actual events and would be clearer if the story were known more fully. The gradual collapse of the Roman power in this section of the Empire was the consequence of a series of contingent events. No general causes can be assigned that made it inevitable.
The first contingency was the irruption of the Huns into Europe, an event resulting from causes which were quite independent of the weakness or strength of the Roman Empire. It drove the Visigoths into the Illyrian provinces, and the difficult situation was unhappily mismanaged. One Emperor was defeated and lost his life; it was his own fault. That disaster, which need not have occurred, was a second contingency.112 His successor allowed a whole federate nation to settle on provincial soil; he took the line of least resistance and established an unfortunate precedent. He did not foresee consequences which, if he had lived ten or twenty years longer, might not have ensued. His death was a third contingency. But the situation need have given no reason for grave alarm if the succession had passed to an Emperor like himself, or Valentinian