Download The Rise and Fall of Rome (Lecture Notes)

The Rise and Fall of Rome (Lecture Notes)
Summary Review: The Roman Empire
The homeland of the Romans had poor soil, no metals, and no
outlet to the sea. Their society was organized for war and
victory was a supreme cultural value. Each citizen owed the
state 16 years of military service. Roman education
emphasized “patience and endurance”.
Roman Weakness: The Roman Empire was an empire of coast
with long, exposed landward frontiers. The African coastal
provinces were flanked by deserts, which gave the Romans a
false sense of security. Europe was never satisfactorily
defended, even after 100 years of conquest and expansion. The
most critical mistake Julius Caesar made was to not continue
expansion and acceptance of the Germanic cultures across the
Rhine River. These cultures would always feel bitterness and
envy for being excluded from the empire.
Roman Expansion: Retired soldiers, Latin-speaking and
schooled in allegiance to Rome, helped spread a common
culture across the empire, settling in lands where they had
been stationed and often marrying local women.
Everywhere, the empire promoted the same classical style for
buildings and urban planning: symmetrical, harmonious,
regular, and based on Greek architecture. Engineering was the
Romans’ ultimate art. They discovered how to make cement,
which made unprecedented feats of building possible.
Everywhere the empire reached, Romans invested in
infrastructure, building roads, sewers, and aqueducts.
Amphitheatres, temples, city walls, public baths, and
monumental gates were erected at public expense, alongside
the temples that civic-minded patrons usually endowed. The
buildings serviced new cities, built in Rome’s image, where
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there were none before, or enlarged and embellished cities that
already existed.
Trade as well as war shipped elements of a common culture
around the empire. Rome exported Mediterranean amenities –
the building patterns of villas and cities, wine, olive oil, mosaics
– to the provinces, or forced Mediterranean crops like wine
grapes and olive trees to grow in unlikely climates. As
industries became geographically specialized, trade and new
commercial relationships crisscrossed the entire empire.
Roman identity, a sense of belonging to Rome, spread with
Roman ways of life, as Rome granted Roman citizenship to
subject communities.
When Rome was a small city-republic, two annually elected
chief executives, called consuls, shared power between
themselves, subject to checks by the assembly of nobles and
notables known as the senate, and by the tribunes,
representatives of the common citizens. Increasingly, however,
as the state expanded, in the emergencies of war, power was
confided to individuals, called dictators, who were expected to
relinquish control when the emergency was over. In the second
half of the first century B.C.E., this system finally broke down
in a series of struggles between rival contenders for sole power.
In 27 B.C.E., all parties accepted Augustus, who had emerged
as victor from the civil wars, as head of state and of
government for life, with the right to name his successor.
Yet this was by no means a uniform empire. It was so bigt that
it could only work by permitting the provinces to retain their
local customs and religious practices. At one level it was a
federation of cities, at another a federation of peoples.
Everywhere, Rome ruled with the collaboration, sometimes
enforced, of established elites.
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The Western Roman Empire and its
Invaders
The empire suffered from abiding problems: its sprawling size,
its long, vulnerable land frontier; the unruly behavior of its
politicized soldiery, with Roman armies fighting each other to
make and unmake emperors; the uneasy, usually hostile
relationship with rivals in Persia. Two new, growing dangers
were increasingly apparent. First, for most of the elite,
Christianity seemed subversive. Challenging the worship of the
emperor as divine and the connection across the empire to
cults of the patron gods of Rome. Second, Germanic peoples
beyond the empire’s borders in Europe coveted Roman wealth.
Marcus Aurelius anticipated ways in which the empire would
cope with these problems for the next three centuries. He
sensed the need to divide responsibility for governing the vast
empire, admitting his adoptive brother to the rank of coemperor and delegating to him responsibility for guarding the
eastern frontier.
In combination with the strain of threats from Persia and the
convulsions of Roman politics, Germanic invasions in the third
century almost dissolved the empire. In the late fourth century,
the struggle to keep out the immigrants became hopeless.
The biggest bands of migrants, numbering tens of thousands at
a time, and traveling with women and children, were driven by
stresses that arose beyond their borders, in the Eurasian
steppelands. Here, the mid and late fourth century was a
traumatic time, when war or hunger or plague or exceptional
cold or some combination of such events induced
unprecedented mobility, conflict, and confusion. Late in the
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fourth century, the Huns broke out of their heartlands in the
depths of Asia, perhaps on the northeast borders of China,
where many scholars identify them with the people the Chinese
called Xiongnu. A kind of ricochet effect set in, as peoples
collided and cannoned off each other. Or perhaps all the
turbulence of peoples, Germans and steppelanders alike, was
the result of common problems: cold weather, shrinking
pastures; or new sources of wealth, such as trade and booty,
enriching new classes and disrupting the traditional stability of
the societies concerned. Whatever the reasons, in the late
fourth and early fifth centuries, displaced communities lined
up for admission into the enticing empires of Rome, Persia,
China, and India.
Germans were not nomadic by nature but, according to their
own earliest historian, Jordanes, who wrote in the sixth
century, were “driven to wander in a prolonged search for
lands to cultivate,” The Ostrogoths, or Eastern Goths, for
example, farmed on the banks of the Don River in what is now
Ukraine from the late second century until the 370’s, when
Hun invaders forced them over the Dniester River into the
territory of the Visigoths or Western Goths. In 376, a reputed
200,000 Visigothic refugees were admitted into the Roman
Empire. But the Romans then left them to starve, provoking a
terrible revenge at the battle of Adrianople in 378 when the
Goths killed a Roman emperor along with most of his army.
From 395 to 418, the Visigoths undertook a destructive
migration across the empire, terrorizing areas they crossed. In
410, they sacked Rome, inspiring speculations about the end of
the world among shocked subjects of the empire, before
settling as paid “guests” and, in effect, the masters of the local
population in southern France and northern Spain. Other
Germanic peoples found the Visigoths’ example irresistible.
Rome’s frontier with the Germans was becoming indefensible.
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Meanwhile, the center of power in the dwindling empire
shifted eastward into the mostly Greek-speaking zone, where
barbarian incursions were more limited. Constantinople
replaced Rome as the principal seat of the emperors. In 323,
the Emperor Constantine elevated this dauntingly defensible
small garrison town, surrounded on three sides by water and
close to the threatened Danube and Persian frontiers, into an
imperial capital. From here, the emperors were able to keep
invaders out of most of the eastern provinces of the empire in
the fourth and fifth centuries.
In part, the greater durability of the eastern empire was the
result of the direction invaders took. The Rhine River was an
easily crossed frontier, especially in the cold winters of the
early fifth century, when the river often froze. From there,
invaders usually swung through northern France toward
Spain, or turned south to reach Italy. Moreover, the eastern
provinces of the empire, from Italy’s Adriatic coast eastward,
could be relatively easily reached, supplied, and garrisoned
from Constantinople, whereas the western Mediterranean lay
beyond the terrible navigational bottlenecks between Italy,
Sicily, and North Africa.
Finally, the eastern provinces, especially those east of the
Adriatic, were better equipped for survival by the presence of
the emperor and by the wealth of great estates in regions
where mountain barriers, deserts, and seas deterred at least
some invaders.
The western empire was beset with problems. Impeded by war,
long-range exchanges of personnel and commerce became
increasingly impractical. Communications decayed.
Aristocrats withdrew from traditional civic responsibilities,
retiring to their estates, struggling to keep them going amid
invasions. Bishops replaced bureaucrats. In localities from
which imperial authority vanished, holy men took on the jobs
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of judges. Almost everywhere, barbarian experts in warfare
took military commands. Garrisons withdrew from outposts of
empire beyond the Rhine, the Danube, and the English
Channel. After 476, there was no longer a co emperor in the
west. Regional and local priorities replaced empire-wide
perspectives. The most extreme form of the dissolution of
authority inside the empire was the establishment of kingdoms
led by foreigners, as Germans, settled as uneasy allies,
entrusted with tasks of imperial defense, and quartered at the
expense of their host communities, gradually usurped or
accepted authority over non-Germanic populations. Where
such kingdoms delivered peace and administered laws, they
replaced the empire as the primary focus of people’s
allegiance.
Rome was the last of the world monarchies the Bible foretold.
Its end would mean the end of time. Everyone, including
barbarian kings, connived in pretending that the empire had
survived. Yet to Romans, the new rulers remained barbarians,
foreigners of inferior culture. In turn, the limits of barbarian
identification with Rome were of enormous importance. The
notion of Roman citizenship gradually dissolved. Although the
barbarians envied Roman civilization, most of them hankered
after their own identities and, not surprisingly amid the
dislocation of the times, clung to their roots. Many groups tried
to differentiate themselves by upholding, at least for a time,
unorthodox versions of Christianity. Some of their scholars
and kings took almost as much interest in preserving their own
traditional literature as in retaining or rescuing the works of
classical and Christian writers. Law codes of barbarian
kingdoms prescribed different rules for Germans and Romans.
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