The Fall of the Roman Empire by Michael Grant Read Free Book Online Page B

same, the diversion of Imperial resources necessitated by such civil wars was disastrous. And during the very last years of the West, after the dynasty of the Valentinians had finally vanished, the chaos deepened. By now most of the ostensible rulers were mere figureheads depending on powerful generals, among whom the German Ricimer (456-72) was pre-eminent. Yet these war-lords still did not venture to seize the monarchical title itself - until 476, when the last Western Emperor was removed from Ravenna, and Odoacer became King of Italy.
    Contemporary writers, throughout the entire duration of the Empire, were very well aware of the exceptional damage caused by all these rebellions. Ammianus, in particular, declared military rebels the supreme evil. He had a clear and definite sense of the mutual obligations which linked the lawful Emperor to his people, and was profoundly conscious that, if the ruler was not loyally obeyed by his subjects, the entire safety of the Roman world would collapse.
    Augustine, too, demanded 'what fury of foreign peoples, what barbarian cruelty, can be compared with the harm done by civil wars?'. And two of the most prominent among the many insurgents, Magnus Maximus (383-8) whose generals killed Gratian, and Eugenius (392-4) whose Master of Soldiers probably murdered Valentinian 11, are bracketed by the poet Claudian as a pair of truly guilty men:
Two tyrants burst upon the western climes,
Their savage bosoms stored with various crimes;
Fierce Britain was to one the native earth:
The other owed to Germany his birth,
A banished, servile wretch: both soiled with guilt:
Alike their hands a master's blood had split.
    Yet such a perpetrator or figurehead of a military revolt, while his tenure of power lasted, sometimes controlled a territory of great size. And, very often, there was no lack of people ready to flock to his colours. As the anonymous treatise On Matters of Warfare points out, the discontented poor saw no reason at all why they should not change masters and rally to such rebellions.

The disastrous character of those movements was clearly seen by Gibbon, and by the French historian Montesquieu before him. Montesquieu identified this whole process of traitorous usurpations as one of the principal reasons for the downfall of Rome, tracing how, when once the Empire had grown to such vast dimensions, political differences that had earlier been nothing worse than healthy arguments became transformed into deadly civil wars.

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The People against the Army

    We now come to the second cause of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire: the general failure of its armies to perform the tasks that were required of them. For the Roman armies collapsed, in what at first sight seems an unaccountable fashion, before foreign forces which were, in theory, much their inferiors both in numbers and equipment: the sort of enemies that Rome had often encountered before, and had defeated. In fact, faced with recalcitrant public opinion, and an almost total failure of understanding between the army and the people, Rome had allowed its armies to become fatally weakened.
    Our chief source of information about the late Roman army is the Record of Official Posts, Notitia Dignitatum. This record gives a list of the principal official posts in the Western and Eastern Empires as they existed in the year 395. Moreover, in so far as the military commanders are concerned, it adds particulars of the units which these officers commanded.
    This Record of Official Posts is at one and the same time vitally important and thoroughly misleading. According to its statistics, the troops of the combined Empires numbered between 500,000 and 600,000, twice the size of the forces that had efficiently defended the Roman world two centuries earlier. Of this total number of soldiers, the Western Empire possessed slightly less than half - perhaps a little under 250,000, of whom the majority was stationed on or near the Rhine and Danube