The years of Rome’s greatness seemed to her sons an age of gold, but even at the height of her prosperity there were traces of the evils that brought about her downfall. An autocracy, that is, the rule of one man, might be a perfect form of government were the autocrat not a man but a god, thus combining superhuman goodness and understanding with absolute power. Unfortunately, Roman emperors were representatives of human nature in all its phases. Some, like Augustus, were great rulers; others, though good men, incompetent in the management of public affairs; whilst not a few led evil lives and regarded their office as a means of gratifying their own desires.

The Emperor Nero (54–68), for instance, was cruel and profligate, guilty of the murder of his half-brother, mother, and wife, and also of the deaths of numberless senators and citizens whose wealth he coveted. Because he was an absolute ruler his corrupt officials were able to bribe and oppress his subjects as they wished until he was fortunately assassinated. He was the last of his line, the famous House of Julius to which Augustus had belonged, and the period that followed his death was known as ‘the year of the four Emperors’, because during that time no less than four rivals claimed and struggled for the coveted honour.

Nominally, the right of election lay with the Senate, but the final champion, Vespasian (69–79), was not even a Roman nor an aristocrat, but a soldier from the provinces. He had climbed the ladder of fame by sheer endurance and his power of managing others, and his accession was a triumph not for the Senate but the legions who had supported him and who now learned their power. Henceforward it would be the soldier with his naked sword who could make and unmake emperors, and especially the Praetorian Guard whose right it was to maintain order in Rome.

The gradual recognition of this idea had a disastrous effect on the government of the Empire. Too often the successful general of a campaign on the frontier would remember Vespasian and become obsessed with the thought that he also might be a Caesar. Led by ambition he would hold out to his legions hopes of the rewards they would receive were he crowned in Rome, and some sort of bargain would be struck, lowering the tone of the army by corrupting its loyalty and making its soldiers insolent and grasping.

The Senate attempted to deal with this difficulty of the succession by passing a law that every Emperor should, during his lifetime, name his successor, and that the latter should at once be hailed as Caesar, take a secondary share in the government, and have his effigy printed on coins. In this way he would become known to the whole Roman world, and when the Emperor died would at once be acknowledged in his place. Thus the Romans hoped to establish the theory that England expresses to-day in the phrase ‘The King never dies’.

Though to a certain extent successful in their efforts to avoid civil war, they failed to arrest other evils that were undermining the prosperity of the government. One of these was the imperial expenditure. It was only natural that the Emperor should assume a magnificence and liberality in excess of his wealthiest subjects, but in addition he found it necessary to buy the allegiance of the Praetorian Guard and to keep the Roman populace satisfied in its demands for free corn and expensive amusements.

The standard of luxury had grown, and Romans no longer admired, except in books, the simple life of their forefathers. Instead the fashionable ideal was that of the East they had enslaved, and the Emperor was gradually shut off from the mass of his subjects by a host of court officials who thronged his antechambers and exacted heavy bribes for admission. In this unhealthy atmosphere suspicion and plots grew apace like weeds, and money dripped through the imperial fingers as through a sieve, now into the pockets of one favourite, now of another.

‘I have lost a day,’ was said by the Emperor Titus (A.D. 79–81), whenever twenty-four hours had passed without his having made some valuable present to those about him. His courtiers were ready to fall on their knees and hail him for his liberality as ‘Darling of the human race’; but he only reigned for two years. Had he lived to exhaust his treasury it is probable that the greedy throng would have passed a different verdict.

Extravagance is as catching as the plague, and the Roman aristocracy did not fail to copy the imperial example. Just as the Emperor was surrounded by a court, so every noble of importance had his following of ‘clients’ who would wait submissively on his doorstep in the morning and attend him when he walked abroad to the Forum or the Public Baths. Some would be idle gentlemen, the penniless younger sons of noble houses, others professional poets ready to write flattering verses to order, others again famous gladiators whose long death-roll of victims had made them as popular in Rome as a champion tennis-player or footballer in England to-day. All were united in the one hope of gaining something from their patron, perhaps a gift of money, or his influence to secure them a coveted office, at the least an invitation to a banquet or feast.

The class of senators to which most of these aristocrats belonged had grown steadily richer as the years of empire increased, building up immense landed properties something like the feudal estates of a later date. These ‘villas’, as they were called, were miniature kingdoms over which their owners had secured absolute power. Their affairs were administered by an agent, probably a favoured slave who had gained his freedom, assisted by a small army of officials. The principal subjects of the landlord would be the small proprietors of farms who paid a rent or did various services in return for their houses, while below these again would be a larger number of actual slaves, employed as household servants, bakers, shoe-makers, shepherds, &c.

The most striking thing about the Roman ‘villa’ was that it was absolutely self-contained. All that was needed for the life of its inhabitants, whether food or clothing, could be grown and manufactured on the estate. The crimes that were committed there would be judged by the master or his agent, and from the former’s decision there would be little hope of appeal. Where the proprietor was harsh or selfish, miserable indeed was the condition of those condemned to live on his ‘villa’.

The income of the average senator in the fourth century A.D. was about £60,000, a very large sum when money was not as plentiful as it is to-day. Aurelius Symmachus, a young senator typical of this time, possessed no less than fifteen country seats, besides large estates in different parts of Italy and three town houses in Rome or her suburbs. It was his object to become Praetor of Rome, one of the highest offices in the city; and in order to gain popularity he and his father organized public games that cost them some £90,000. Lions and crocodiles were fetched from Africa, dogs from Scotland, a special breed of horses from Spain; while captured warriors were brought from Germany, whom he destined to fight with one another in the arena.

The life of this young senator, according to his letters, was controlled by purely selfish considerations. He did not want the praetorship in order to be of use to the Empire, but merely that the Empire might crown his career with a coveted honour. The same narrow outlook and lack of public spirit was common to the majority of the other men and women of his class, and so great was their blindness that they could not even see that they were undermining Rome’s power, far less avail to save her.

More fatal even than the corruption of the aristocracy was the decline of the middle classes, usually called the backbone of a nation’s greatness. ‘The name of Roman citizen,’ says a native of Marseilles in the fifth century, ‘formerly so highly valued and even bought with a great price, is now ... shunned, nay it is regarded with abomination.’

This change from the days of St. Paul may be traced back long before the time when Symmachus wasted his patrimony in bringing crocodiles from Africa and horses from Spain. Its cause was the gradual but constant increase of taxation required to fill the imperial treasury, and the unequal scale according to which such taxation was levied.

Rome’s main source of revenue was an impost on land, and ought by rights to have been exacted from the senatorial class that owned the majority of the large estates. Unfortunately, it was left to the local municipal councils, the curias, to collect this tax, and if it fell short of the amount required from the locality by the imperial treasury, the curiales, or class compelled as a duty to attend the councils, were held responsible for the deficit.

Here was a problem for Roman citizens of medium wealth, members of their curia by birth, quite unable to divest themselves of this more than doubtful honour, and conscious that their sons at eighteen must also accept the dignity and put their shoulders to the burden. It was one thing to assess the chief landlords of the neighbourhood at a sum that matched their revenues, it was another to obtain the money from them. In England to-day the man who refuses to pay his taxes is punished; in imperial Rome it was the tax-collector.

Possessed of money and influence, it was not hard for a senator to outwit mere curiales, either by obtaining an exemption from the Emperor, or by bribing the occasional inspectors sent by the central government to condone his refusal to pay. The imperial court set an example of corruption, and those who could imitate this example did so.

The curiales, faced by ruin, sought relief in various ways. Those with most wealth tried to raise themselves to senatorial rank: others, unable to achieve this, yet conscious that they must obtain the money required at all costs, demanded the heaviest taxes from those who could not resist them, so that the phrase spread abroad, ‘So many curiales just so many robbers.’

Less important members of the middle classes, unable to pay their share of taxation or to force others to do so instead, tried in every way to divest themselves of an honour grown intolerable, and the legislation of the later Empire shows their efforts to escape out of the net in which the government tried to hold them enmeshed. Some sought the protection of the nearest landowners, and joined the dependants of their ‘villas’: others, though forbidden by law, entered the army: while others again sold themselves into slavery, since a master’s self-interest would at least secure them food and clothing.

More desperate and adventurous spirits saw in brigandage a means both of livelihood and of revenge. Joining themselves to bands of criminals and escaped slaves, they infested the high roads, waylaid and robbed travellers, and carried off their spoils to mountain fastnesses. Thus, through fraud or violence, the ranks of the curiales diminished, and taxation fell with still heavier pressure on those who remained to support its burdens.

This evil state of affairs was intensified by the widespread system of slavery that, besides its bad influence on the character of both master and slave, had other economic defects. When forced labour and free work side by side, the former will nearly always drive the latter out of the market, because it can be provided more cheaply. A master need not pay his slaves wages; he can make them work as many hours as he chooses, and lodge and feed them just as he pleases. From his point of view it is more convenient to employ men who cannot leave his service however much they dislike the work and conditions. For these reasons business and trade tended to fall into the hands of wealthy slave-owners who could undersell the employers of free labour, and as the number of slaves increased the number of free workmen grew less.

In Rome, and the large towns also, free labourers who remained were corrupted like men and women of a higher rank by the general extravagance and love of pleasure. They did not agitate so much for a reform of taxation or the abolition of slavery, but for larger supplies of free corn and more frequent public games and spectacles.

An extravagant court, a corrupt government, slavery, class selfishness, these were some of the principal causes of Rome’s decline; but in recording them it must be remembered that the taint was only gradual, like some corroding acid eating away good metal. Not all curiales, in spite of popular assertions, were robbers, not every taxpayer on the verge of starvation, not every dependant of a ‘villa’ cowed and miserable. In many houses masters would free or help their slaves, slaves be found ready to die for their masters. The canker lay in the indifference of individual Roman citizens to evils that did not touch them personally, in the refusal to cure with radical reform even those that did, in the foolish confidence of the majority in the glory of the past as a safeguard for the present. ‘Faith in Rome killed all faith in a wider future for humanity.’

This lack of vision has ruined many an empire and kingdom, and Rome only half-opened her eyes even when the despised barbarians who were to expose her weakness were already knocking at the imperial gates.

‘Barbarian’, we have noticed, was the epithet used by the Roman of the early Empire to describe and condemn the person not fortunate enough to share his citizenship.

At this time the most formidable of the barbarians were the German tribes who inhabited large stretches of forest and mountain land to the north of the Danube and east of the Rhine—a tall, powerfully built race for the most part with ruddy hair and fierce blue eyes, whose business was warfare, and the occupation of their leisure hours the chase or gambling.

In his book, the Germania, Tacitus, a famous Roman historian of the first century, describes these Teutons, and besides drawing attention to their primitive customs and lack of culture, he made copy of their simplicity to lash the vices of his own countrymen.

The Germans, he said, did not live in walled towns but in straggling villages standing amid fields. These were either shared as common pasturage or tilled in allotments, parcelled out annually amongst the inhabitants. A number of villages would form a pagus or canton, a number of pagi a civitas or state. At the head of the state was more usually a king, but sometimes only a number of important chiefs, or dukes, who would be treated with the utmost reverence.

It was their place to preside over the small councils that dealt with the less important affairs of the state, and to lay before the larger meeting of the tribe measures that seemed to require public discussion. Lying round their camp fire in the moonlight the younger men would listen to the advice of the more experienced and clash their weapons as a sign of approval when some suggestion pleased them.

At the councils were chosen the principes, or magistrates, whose duty it was to administer justice in the various cantons and villages. Tribal law was very primitive in comparison with the Roman code that required highly trained lawyers to interpret it. Had a man betrayed his fellow villagers to their enemies, let him be hung from the nearest tree that all might learn the fitting reward of treachery. Had he turned coward and fled from the battle, let him be buried in a morass out of sight beneath a hurdle, that such shame should be quickly forgotten. Had he in a rage or by accident slain or injured a neighbour, let him pay a fine in compensation, half to his victim’s nearest relations, half to the state. If the decision did not satisfy those concerned, the family of the injured person could itself exact vengeance, but since it would probably meet with opposition in so doing, more bloodshed would almost certainly result, and a feud, like the later Corsican vendetta, be handed down from generation to generation.

Such a state of unrest had no horror for the German tribesman. From his earliest days he looked forward to the moment when, receiving from his kinsmen the gift of a shield and sword, he might leave boyhood behind him and assume a man’s responsibilities and dangers. With his comrades he would at once hasten to offer his services to some great leader of his tribe, and as a member of the latter’s comitatus, or following, go joyfully out to battle.

Like the Spartan of old he went with the cry ringing in his ears, ‘With your shield or on your shield!’

‘It is a disgrace’, says Tacitus, ‘for the chief to be surpassed in battle ... and it is an infamy and a reproach for life to have survived the chief and returned from the field.’

This statement explains the reckless daring with which the scattered groups of Germans would fling themselves time after time against the disciplined Roman phalanxes. The women shared the hardihood of the race, bringing and receiving as wedding-gifts not ornaments or beautiful clothes but a warrior’s horse, a lance, or sword.

‘Lest a woman should think herself to stand apart from aspirations after noble deeds and from the perils of war, she is reminded by the ceremony that inaugurates marriage that she is her husband’s partner in toil and danger, destined to suffer and die with him alike both in peace and war.’

Chaste, industrious, devoted to the interests of husband and children, yet so patriotic that, watching the battle, she would urge them rather to perish than retreat, the barbarian woman struck Tacitus as a living reproach to the many faithless, idle, pleasure-seeking wives and mothers of Rome in his own day. The German tribes might be uncouth, their armies without discipline, even their nobles ignorant of culture, but they were brave, hospitable, and loyal. Above all they held a distinction between right and wrong: they did not ‘laugh at vice’.

It is probable that in the days of Tacitus his views were received throughout the Roman Empire with an amused shrug of the shoulders, for to many the Germans were merely good fighters, whose giant build added considerably to the glory of a triumphal procession, when they walked sullenly in their shackles behind the Victor’s car. With the passing of the years into centuries, however, intercourse changed this attitude, and much of the contempt on one side and hatred on the other vanished.

Germans captured in childhood were brought up in Roman households and grew invaluable to their masters: numbers were freed and remained as citizens in the land of their captivity. The tribes along the borders became more civilized: they exchanged raw produce or furs in the nearest Roman markets for luxuries and comforts, and as their hatred of Rome disappeared admiration took its place. Something of the greatness of the Empire touched their imagination: they realized for the first time the possibilities of peace under an ordered government; and whole tribes offered their allegiance to a power that knew not only how to conquer but to rule. Emperors, nothing loath, gathered these new forces under their standards as auxiliaries or allies (foederati), and Franks from Flanders, at the imperial bidding, drove back fellow barbarians from the left bank of the Rhine; while fair-haired Alemanni and Saxons fell in Caesar’s service on the plains of Mesopotamia or on the arid sands of Africa. From auxiliary forces to the ranks of the regular army was an easy stage, the more so as the Roman legions were every year in greater need of recruits as the boundaries of the Empire spread.

It is at first sight surprising to find that the military profession was unpopular when we recall that it rested in the hands of the legions to make or dispossess their rulers; but such opportunities of acquiring bribes and plunder did not often fall to the lot of the ordinary soldier, while the disadvantages of his career were many.

A very small proportion of the army was kept in the large towns of the south, save in Rome that had its own Praetorian Guards: the majority of the legions defended the Rhine and Danube frontiers, or still worse were quartered in cold and foggy Britain, shut up in fortress outposts like York or Chester. English regiments to-day think little of service in far-distant countries like Egypt or India, indeed men are often glad to have the experience of seeing other lands; but the Roman soldier as he said farewell to his Italian village knew in his heart that it had practically passed out of his life. The shortest period of military service was sixteen years, the longest twenty-five; and when we remember that, owing to the slow and difficult means of transport, leave was impossible we see the Roman legionary was little more than the serf of his government, bound to spend all the best years of his life defending less warlike countrymen.

Moving with his family from outpost to outpost, the memories of his old home would grow blurred, and the legion to which he belonged would occupy the chief place in his thoughts. As he grew older his sons, bred in the atmosphere of war, would enlist in their turn, and so the military profession would tend to become a caste, handed down from father to son. The soldier could have little sympathy with fellow citizens whose interests he did not share, but would despise them because they did not know how to use arms. The civilians, on their side, would think the soldier rough and ignorant, and forget how much they were dependent on his protection for their trade and pleasure. Instead of trying to bridge this gulf, the government, in their terror of losing taxpayers, widened it by refusing to let curiales enlist. At the same time they filled up the gaps in the legions with corps of Franks, Germans, or Goths; because they were good fighting material, and others of their tribe had proved brave and loyal.

In the same way, when land in Italy fell out of cultivation, the Emperor would send numbers of barbarians as coloni or settlers to till the fields and build themselves homes. At first they might be looked on with suspicion by their neighbours, but gradually they would intermarry and their sons adopt Roman habits, until in time their descendants would sit in municipal councils, and even rise to become Praetors or Consuls.

When it is said that the Roman Empire fell because of the inroads of barbarians, the impression sometimes left on people’s minds is that hordes of uncivilized tribes, filled with contempt for Rome’s luxury and corruption, suddenly swept across the Alps in the fifth century, laying waste the whole of North Italy. This is far from the truth. The peaceful invasion of the Empire by barbarians, whether as slaves, traders, soldiers, or colonists, was a continuous movement from early imperial days. There is no doubt that, as it increased, it weakened the Roman power of resistance to the actually hostile raids along the frontiers that began in the second and third centuries and culminated in the collapse of the imperial government in the West in the fifth. An army partly composed of half-civilized barbarian troops could not prove so trustworthy as the well-disciplined and seasoned Romans of an earlier age; for the foreign element was liable in some gust of passion to join forces with those of its own blood against its oath of allegiance.

As to the main cause of the raids, it was rather love of Rome’s wealth than a sturdy contempt of luxury that led these barbarians to assault the dreaded legions. Had it been mere love of fighting, the Alemanni would as soon have slain their Saxon neighbours as the imperial troops; but nowhere save in Spain, or southern Gaul, or on the plains of Italy could they hope to find opulent cities or herds of cattle. Plunder was their earliest rallying cry; but in the third century the pressure of other tribes on their flank forced them to redouble in self-defence efforts begun for very different reasons.

This movement of the barbarians has been called ‘the Wandering of the Nations’. Gradually but surely, like a stream released from some mountain cavern, Goths from the North and Huns and Vandals from the East descended in irresistible numbers on southern Germany, driving the tribes who were already in possession there up against the barriers, first of the Danube and then of the Alps and Rhine.

Italy and Gaul ceased to be merely a paradise for looters, but were sought by barbarians, who had learned something of Rome’s civilization, as a refuge from other barbarians who trod women and children underfoot, leaving a track wherever their cruel hordes passed red with blood and fire. With their coming, Europe passed from the brightness of Rome into the ‘Dark Ages’.