The Vindication of Brutus

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is as much political allegory as it is history. It is both a celebration and a warning; a celebration of the Imperial achievment and a warning over the sources of decay. For the man who walked through the ruined Forum, reflecting on the vanished glory of Rome, as his ears were filled with the chants of barefooted friars, was as much Marcus Brutus as he was Edward Gibbon. For Gibbon, in the guise of Brutus, the root cause of Roman decline was neither Christianity nor was it Barbarians: it was the willful the abdication of the old republican virtues of freedom and public service.

I consider this passage

If a man were called to fix a period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus. The vast extent of the Roman empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom.

It is an age of tolerance, of domestic peace and of social harmony. But yet something is missing; and that something is what Gibbon refers to as the 'inestimable gift of freedom.' I am not talking here about 'democracy', which for Gibbon was a dangerous thing, but the concept of the 'balanced constitution'; of law, social responsibility, civic duty and good governance all working in harmony; the kind of constitution that emerged in 1689 after the Glorious Revolution in England.

It is, if you like, also the constitution of the old Roman Republic at its zenith, before it was destroyed by mob violence, class conflict and civil war. For Gibbon civilized life has to be based on an ideal combination of order and 'rational freedom', created by the Republic but lost by the Empire. The Empire, even the Empire of the Antonines, was based on despotism, and as such was "destitute of constitutional freedom." The Antonine state was, as he puts it, "an absolute monarchy disguised by the forms of the commonwealth." In other words, if the rule of the Antonines was benevolent it was benevolent by chance alone. It gave rise to Marcus Aurelius; but it could just as easily give way to Commodus.

The contrast Gibbon draws between Aurelius, the father, and Commodus, the son, was intended to highlight the fragility of the whole Antonine age. Benevolence had been created by chance, not by design, the fundamental truth that lies at the root of all despotism. The image of liberty, to put this another way, was not the same as true liberty. Gibbon admired Marcus Aurelius-just as he admired Frederick the Great-for his personal qualities; but imperial rule was still "absolute and without control." For Gibbon it is a mark of a truly good society that no single individual should be entrusted with absolute power-"Unless public liberty is protected by intrepid and vigilant guardians the authority of so formidable a magistrate will degenerate into despotism." After all, virtue and wisdom are not hereditary. Would not Brutus nod his head in agreement?

The other point connected to this-and herein lies the real explanation for the subsequent and relentless decline of the Roman world-is that benevolent despotism is demoralising and enervating. Under the Antonines the days of Cicero and the free nobility are long gone; private comfort has replaced civic responsibility: the Empire is set to decline because the 'will to freedom' has been lost-"as long as they [the nobility] were indulged in the enjoyment of their baths, their theatres and their villas, they cheerfully resigned the more dangerous cares of empire." More than this, in public felicity lay the latent causes of corruption-"The Roman monarchy, having attained its full strength and maturity, began to verge towards its decline." The causes are internal, and the Empire could never have fallen to Barbarians, or been undermined by the Christians, if it had not already been corrupted from within. The Romans may have retained personal valour, but they no longer "possessed that public courage, which is nourished by the love of independence."

Ultimately, Gibbon's view of the whole Roman world, no matter his residual sympathy, is one condescension and superiority; of celebration of his own time, of the age of virtue and progress. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is Brutus' final vindication.

Tacitus and the Critique of Tyranny

I suppose if people remember anything of Tacitus it will be for the words he put into the mouth of the Caledoanian leader Calgacus just before the battle of Mons Graupius;


Whenever I consider the origin of this war and the necessities of our position, I have a sure confidence that this day, and this union of yours, will be the beginning of freedom to the whole of Britain. To all of us slavery is a thing unknown; there are no lands beyond us, and even the sea is not safe, menaced as we are by a Roman fleet. And thus in war and battle, in which the brave find glory, even the coward will find safety. Former contests, in which, with varying fortune, the Romans were resisted, still left in us a last hope of succour, inasmuch as being the most renowned nation of Britain, dwelling in the very heart of the country, and out of sight of the shores of the conquered, we could keep even our eyes unpolluted by the contagion of slavery. To us who dwell on the uttermost confines of the earth and of freedom, this remote sanctuary of Britain's glory has up to this time been a defence. Now, however, the furthest limits of Britain are thrown open, and the unknown always passes for the marvellous. But there are no tribes beyond us, nothing indeed but waves and rocks, and the yet more terrible Romans, from whose oppression escape is vainly sought by obedience and submission. Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace

It is perhaps the most devastating critique of Roman power, of the whole 'civilising' mission of Empire ever written, all the more forceful because they were put together by an insider, the son-in-law of Agricola, the man who won the battle. It is a case against aggression; it is also, at a deeper level, the voice of the dead Republic, speaking against the Emperors.

In the Annals Tacitus concedes that the peace of Augustus was a necessary corrective to the chaos of the Civil Wars, though he does not agree that his dictatorship should have been made permanent. But his criticism is even more trenchant; for it is not a call for a return to the Republic, dead and gone; it is a critique of the Roman people, who lacked the strength of will and purpose to stand by their ancient freedoms. By this measure the despotism of Augustus was based on abdication and consensus. The Emperor, he wrote, had "won over the soldiers with gifts, the populace with cheap corn and all men with the sweets of repose." Bread and peace, in other words, had a higher value than freedom. After all, for the hungry, and for the fearful, even slavery has attractions.

For Tacitus safety and submission came at a high price; an Empire established by a desire for peace was maintained by terror. He takes great pains in his writing to record the 'tools of despotism', making note even of the names of informers, whom he considers to be especially loathsome. Rome, the master of the world, was a city ruled by fear, a fear that created a space between people, forcing them into solitude and isolation.

Tacitus, in a sense, identifies with an ideal of freedom, not represented in the self-interested anti-imperial conspiracies of his day. He finds this ideal far beyond Rome in the barbarian tribes of the north, in the Caledonians and in the Germans; in men like Calgacus and Arminius, to whom he also gave a voice in defence of freedom. In the Germania he contrasts the virtues of the barbarians with the vices of the Romans. Their courage, their simplicity and their sense of honour are all admired because, at the deepest level, they recall a time when such values were held high by the Romans themselves.

In the end even the peace secured at the price of freedom was a false trade for Tacitus, a 'dreadful peace', diminishing by degrees through the reign of Tiberius, Nero, and, worst of all, Domitian, savage rulers who produced a savage people. Yet there was still sources of redemption, examples to be followed, none better the Consul Marius Lepidus, who lived through difficult times, always observing the highest standards of conduct. Even under the worst forms of tyranny, Tacitus concludes, moral choices can and should be made.

Rome and Constantinople

The crisis for both parts of the late Roman Empire really begins with the defeat and death of the Emperor Valens at the Battle of Adrianople in 378AD. Theodosius the Great managed to stabilise the situation for a time by co-opting the semi-independent barbarian tribes into the army as foederatii. As a strategy this was not new; the Romans had been in the practice of absorbing potentially useful auxiliaries for centuries. The problem was on this occasion there were simply too many, and the conventional Roman forces were too weak to deal with these new allies if the turned troublesome, as they did after the death of Theodosius in 395. The commander of the Visigoths, Alaric, declared himself a king and started to ravage the eastern provinces. This came at an especially bad time, for the empire was divided between two particularly weak rulers, Arcadius in the east and Honorius in the west, whose governments intrigued shamelessly, one against the other. Caring nothing for the wider welfare of the Empire, and anxious only to be rid of Alaric, the chamberlain Eutropius, chief minister to Arcadius, tempted Alaric to the west by granting him the top command of the province of Illyricum. Now another dangerous precedent had been set; for Alaric was both Barbarian king and Roman general, well placed to exploit the political divisions within the empire.

Eutropius' actions had, with deliberation, created huge problems for Stilicho, guardian of Honorius and a talented soldier, who was viewed in the east as a political enemy. To defend Italy Stilicho was forced to find troops wherever he could, abandoning Britain, and weakening the Rhine fortresses, which added still further to his problems by allowing new groups of barbarians to cross the river in force, entering Gaul virtually without opposition. They were never to be removed. Stilicho's enemies used this as an excuse to have him executed, causing thousands of troops loyal to him only to join up with Alaric, who entered Rome itself in 410AD.

The east learned quickly from the process of disintegration and collapse in the west by closing ranks among the leading political class, thus avoiding the destructive public struggles which were doing so much to weaken the remainder of the empire. Barbarian commanders in the eastern army were, in time to come, not allowed to become too powerful, usually by keeping them separate from a foederatii power base. In the west-what was left of the west-stability could only be achieved by granting ever greater concessions to barbarian strongmen, and by allowing ever larger foederatii 'kingdoms'.

In the east power was transmitted through established bureaucratic structures in church and state; in the west much depended on the transitory and uncertain authority of a single strongman, like Stilicho, Flavius Aetius and then Ricimer. By this means a serious gap grew up between the nominal authority of the Emperor, usually hidden away in Ravenna, and the real authority of a virtual military dictator. When the Attila and the Huns came there was nothing at all in the west to deter their progress, no great strategic barrier like Constantinople in the east. At the Battle of Chalons in 451, the last epic contest of the Roman west, one barbarian army faced another barbarian army; the barbarians won.

After the murder of Aetius the empire in the west was really no more that a series of dying fragments, with almost no tax base, where the fate of one shadowy emperor after another lay in the hands of Ricimer, before the last was sent packing by yet another ambitious commander in 476. In the east the great gate of Constantinople kept the Huns and others out of the rich and populated provinces of Anatolia and beyond, safe for as long as relations were good with the Persian Empire. The east was certainly saved by its shorter frontiers, by its greater wealth and by its strategically placed capital. But in the end perhaps the only thing that really mattered was that it had a far higher degree of statecraft; a reliance not on the strength of generals but the cunning of politicians

The Romans in Britain

I rather suspect that Roman attitudes towards Britain were rather like British attitudes towards the north-west frontier of their own nineteenth century Indian Empire: important to hold but difficult to love. Dio Cassius, when writing of the third century campaign of Septimius Severus in the north of the island, was to lament the difficulties caused by the 'bogs and forests', the very same things that had hindered the conquest under Claudius almost two hundred years before. Ammianus Marcellinus, a fourth century Roman historian, was to praise the Emperor Constans for a surprise visit he made to the island in 343AD, in terms that would suggest he had crossed to the ends of the earth!

But Britain remained attractive, in economic and strategic terms, for the rest of the Roman world; at once a place of profit and settlement in the south, and mystery and barbarism in the north, the direction of Ultima Thule and the Fortunate Islands. Even Antoninus Pius, the most unwarlike of Emperors, was determined to make his mark there, advancing his army into what was later to become the south of Scotland, the only expansion of his reign. And it was from Britain that Constantine the Great began what was perhaps the last great military campaign of the Roman world, one that was to transform the Empire. "Fortunate Britain, now most blessed of lands since you have been the first to see Constantine as Caesar."

Attila and the Empire of the Will

There is little doubt that Attila was skilled, both as a soldier and more generally as the ruler of a great Hun confederation. He was also rampaging and brutal, though given the nature of his rule, and the peoples he ruled over, he had little alternative. Despite justifiable Roman fears of the Hun threat, not all of the contemporary assessments of Attila are perhaps as negative as one might assume. Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus, a Roman historian, describes him thus;

Of middle height, he was manly in apperance and well made, neither too frail nor too heavy; he was quick of wit and agile of limb, a very practiced horseman and a skilful archer; he was indefatigable with a spear. A born warrior; he was renowned for the arts of peace, without avarice and little swayed by desire, endowed with gifts of the mind, not swerving from his purpose for any kind of evil instigation. He bore wrongs with utmost patience and loved labour. Undaunted by danger, he was excelled by none in the endurance of hunger, thirst and vigil.

Others who knew him remarked that he was not himself greedy for plunder. When he was visited by a Roman diplomatic mission it was noted that he drank from a simple wooden bowl, as might be used by the lowest of his followers.

What he did have a taste for, though, was power; and he was utterly ruthless in maintaining his position at the head of a great barbarian alliance, that included not only his own Huns but also Ostrogoths, Gepids, Franks, Rugians, Sciri, Burgundians and Thuringians. And the only way that he could maintain his hold, and ensure their loyalty, was by finding fresh opportunities for plunder and yet more plunder. His empire, in other words, was an alliance for robbery and destruction. It was also an 'Empire of the Will', so to say, for reasons that should become a little clearer as I proceed.

So, in his quest for plunder, Attila was drawn over the borders of the Roman Empire, first in the east, where he raided in 440, 442 and again in 447. The object was not to conquer but to draw out all of the sources of wealth, so much so that by 450 the Empire was close to economic exhaustion. The whole destructive, and it might be said, self-destructive campaign, continued, first in Gaul and then in Italy, where the waves were broken. Of this John Julius Norwich has written;

Had the Hunnish army not been halted in these two successive campaigns, had its leader toppled Valentinian from his throne and set up his own capital in Ravenna or Rome, there is little doubt that both Gaul and Italy would have been reduced to spiritual and cultural deserts, just as surely and just as completely as the Balkan peninsula was reduced by the Ottoman Turks a thousand years later. ("Byzantium. The Early Centuries", 1988, p. 157)

In the end this great threat came to nothing for one simple reason: Attila was a man caught between two worlds; that of the barbarian nomads, and that of the settled urban world of the Romans. He needed war simply to survive, though old fashioned mounted archery was no longer enough. To take the great cities of the empire he needed siege equipment; he needed to keep their populations under control; to build an administration; to make laws. He did none of these things, and never rose to the real challenge of imperial rule, unlike, say, Genghis Khan, with whom otherwise he mighty stand comparison. In the end the vast Hunnish empire simply imploded on Attila's death in 453, leaving little more than a savage memory.

The true victors are those who create history: Attila was just passing through.