Why Rome Fell: Goldsworthy on the West's Collapse and Civil War

Hello there. It's going to be a while before we get back to the series I started on the later Roman army and the

later Roman Empire. But for the moment, because things are so busy with the release of Athens and Sparta, the latest

non-fiction book, looking at classical Greece, so I've got lots of related podcast interviews, talks I'm doing

myself, online lectures. It's a bit of a rush, but with everything else, and I'm also trying to

start writing the next book as well, and quite a lot's going on. So, I haven't got time to do the more organized talks

that will require a little bit more preparation that I want to as we're doing a a closer look at the the Roman

cavalry theme that's ongoing, but also the the later Roman army. Those will return. We will get back to that later

in the year. Probably the cavalry one, which we've we've done a couple for so far sooner than the late Roman one, but

nevertheless, we will get there. For the moment, I'm looking at topics that hopefully will keep things ticking over,

keep people interested, and um that are easy enough for me to put together that don't require a lot of preparation. So,

I'm often finding a side or two of A4 from notes from a lecture I gave years ago. This one's based on one I gave at

the Hon Festival back in gosh 2007, something like that, when the fall of

the West, or how Rome fell as it was called in the US was released. And I remember the talk because um they put

you on quite a high stage in a tent in most of the cases. I did it a couple of times. I think I did it for Caesar.

Can't remember if they did Anthony and Cleopatra as well. Haven't done it for a while. Um but uh you know that's uh it's

a busy thing. But what I mostly remember is that I'm a bit of a wanderer when I'm on stage and talking, but the back of

the stage ended very abruptly not far behind the podium and there was a seven or eightt drop on the thing. So, it was

a slightly nerve-wracking thing that the fall wouldn't become literal as Goldsworthy disappears back off the

stage um in best Tuska fashion um at the end of act three. So, this was a talk meant to accompany

the book, but also to speak to a more general audience of enthusiasts, but people who aren't necessarily Roman

specialists, just interested in history, interested in books, interested in things, and talk about what the book was

meant to do. really the ideas of the central argument um that I've put there and it's not quite 20 years on but it's

a while since the book came out. I know I haven't convinced a lot of the late Roman specialists who still stick to

their uh interpretation of things but I pretty much still stand by the book. So I thought it wouldn't do any harm again

for context for our more detailed look at the later period to do an overview the overview of my take on the history.

It may also be useful for some of those I know a lot of people who watch the channel are more familiar with the late

republic the time of Caesar Cicero Pompy or the early empire Augustus and so on. So

some of the history some of what we talk about some of the institutions that are very familiar once you have read a bit

about the the later period again I can tell from the comments that there are quite a few people who have but it's not

everybody yet. So maybe this is a a useful introduction, another way into that period when we come back to look at

it in much more detail. So let's start at the end. 476 AD, Romulus Augustulus, the last emperor to

rule in Italy, but not rule in Rome. He was occupying the north and was the puppet of a father who controlled the

army such as it was in that part of the empire. He was never formally recognized by the Eastern Empire at all. The

Eastern Empire is stronger and healthier and will continue. Um, Ramulus Agugustus is simply this kid who um is deposed

when his army, the one has been commanded by his father, mutinies, the father is killed, the boy deposed, he

isn't actually worth killing. That's the end formally of the Roman Empire in the west

at least in terms of an emperor that's ruling from Italy. You will of course later on under Justinian get an attempt

to reconquer a large part of the lost western territory including Italy including Rome itself which lasts for

quite a long time really. It's it's ultimately fails but nevertheless is successful for a while. Um when Romulus

Augustulus was deposed didn't really make much of an impact on wider events. Nothing really was too dramatic because

he wasn't an emperor very much and he was too young to have much impact apart from that. But his predecessors had not

been that important. So much of the Western Empire had already gone, had already been carved up into kingdoms

ruled by Germanic warlords who might sometimes pay nominal lip service to belonging to the empire but

were effectively independent and it simply confirms what's already happened. There is of course the great irony of

the names. You've got man called Romulus or boy after Romulus the mythical founder of Rome

and a name that Augustus is supposed to have considered calling himself but instead went with Augustus Romulus and

Augustulus little Augustus. Um there's something heavily ironic about the whole thing of this this child emperor who is

simply a porn in the hands of his father in particular and those around him ruling the the last

stub really of an empire that had once been so huge and even know half of that empire but even the western empire had

lost nearly all the territory. um you know the big provinces, the big money spinners, Gaul had gone, the Spaines had

gone, the Vandals had controlled Africa. So there wasn't a lot left by this time. It was really a small area that even

nominally was part of the empire. But it goes just to quickly summarize the history

again when I first gave this talk and for the benefit of those who are either coming fresh to the channel or

are more familiar with the the early period you have the creation of the Roman Empire as we call it the

principate um under Augustus. Caesar Augustus is the great nephew of Julius Caesar. When Caesar's murdered, he's 18,

not nearly 19, plunges into Roman politics, declares himself to be heir to Caesar, not simply his private property,

but his honors, his dignities, his rank. No precedent for that sort of thing in Roman history. This is very much

thinking like a monarchy, gets involved in a civil war, fights against Mark Anthony, joins up with Mark

Anthony, uh disposes of under his orders Cicero and others, takes control of Italy as part of a triumpvirate. uh one

of the triumphas lepidus is soon marginalized. Mark Anthony and Augustus he'll become defeat Brutus and Casius

the conspirators then eventually fall out uh between each other. Antony is defeated battle of Actum 31 BC a naval

battle flees with following Cleopatra and a year later both of them commit suicide. Cleopatra rather later than

him, clearly hoping to negotiate. And this youngster, this great nephew of Julius

Caesar, who up until this point has been calling himself Caesar, uh now becomes the sole ruler of the Roman Empire

creates this system where he rules as Pringaps. That's first. uh the head of the state, the first of the Senate, the

greatest magistrate, servant of the state, not king, not dictator, not triumvier as he'd been, but somebody who

is a magistrate with powers voted to him with the approval of the people and who rules on their behalf for the good of

all. That's very much a veil before his undoubted military power. The reason he's there is that he now controls 60

legions. All the armies left over from the civil war period, he will reduce that to 28.

He will organize the army. He will control most of the provinces that have troops within them directly. So you have

um this system, the rule of one man. It's not entirely clear what he planned for the future and the idea is clearly

developed but certainly by the last few years of his life and for some time before it is assumed by most people that

he will be succeeded by somebody who acts in a similar way is effectively another princaps and this will be

Tiberius his stepson adopted as son who does succeed him in AD14 and you have the Julio Claudians Tiberius Caligula

Claudius Nero um who's the allurid version of the story much popularized by Robert Graves

and the the BBC adaptation of the novels in the IC Claudia series. Uh marvelous stuff. We will talk about those one day

as well. Uh just because they're great fun and a good way of sorting out the imperial family that period by putting

even if it's actors and actresses faces to the the names getting some sense of their story. The principate lasts for

over 200 years. Throughout the first century AD and 2 century AD, there is a prin occasionally there are experiments

with joint rule by two men um as principes. Two two emperors never really last usually because one of them dies

sometimes violently if he's the significantly younger and not liked but with Lucius Varys um it's natural

causes. There's a civil war at the death after the death of Nero after he's been um

discredited and forced to commit suicide. You have another civil war after the death not quite immediately

after the death of Comeodus who's of course the uh the nutcase emperor from uh Gladiator before that um who's

whacking Phoenix in Gladiator back in the old ' 60s movie fall of the Roman Empire. It's Christopher Clumber as a as

an equally loopy comeodus. Um, come succeeded at the age of 18. The record of young emperors is never very good.

They tend to, you know, when suddenly you're told you're master of the world and nobody is willing to say no to you

because they want your favor. Again, predictably things tend to go rather badly. Um, he's murdered briefly. You

have the three-month rule of Pertinax. And then when he dies, you have a longer civil war where eventually Septimius

Seis um triumphs. He establishes a new dynasty. He's succeeded by his two sons, Caracala and Getter, ruling jointly.

They hate each other. Get's murdered within barely a year. Uh Caracala will be murdered. An alleged

though clearly not illegitimate child of his. Um Elegabalis will eventually be proclaimed emperor with military

backing. He's so loopy that uh you know everybody notices quite quickly. He's deposed and murdered. Seis Alexander. So

you have a severe dynasty covering a few decades. There are major changes to the empire at that time. Uh the senatorial

um class starts to become less important. Equestrians the social class below the senate much much more

numerous. They start to become more significant. Um the army is increased in size. There is a general sense of it

being harsh. The historian Dioasius talks about after an age of gold, an age of iron and rust.

And um emperors become much more concerned with staying alive, staying in power than presenting the old facade

that Augustus had cultivated of being a servant of the state, just one senator amongst many, the most distinguished,

but nevertheless part of that body, part of that social class. You get a sense of a change mood by the supposed last words

of Septimius Seis to his sons uh when he's dying there in York and he's supposed to tell them love one another,

indulge the soldiers, despise everyone else, there is something harsher about the empire, but it's also what's clear

is that where whereas you've had one major civil war every century, which isn't great uh in the first and second

centuries AD and a few other attempted coups that never really get very far, You have uh the murder of Getter, then

the murder of Caracala that prompted by his Ptorian prefect, the commander of his bodyguard. He's then um deposed by

another rebellion, the one that proclaims Elegabalis. You move into the 3rd century when you have a period of a

couple of generations where emperors come and go extraordinarily quickly and virtually

all of them die violently. Claudicus, Gothicus, is one of the few to die of natural causes. he catches the plague.

So these are very disturbed times. Scholars will refer to it as the 3rd century crisis when um it's often there

are some emperors that again we've only confirmed that they existed because now and again a coin will turn up minted by

somebody who only lasted a matter of months. Often there's more than one emperor simultaneously controlling only

part of the empire. And you have Deusius gets himself killed fighting the Goths. Valyrian gets captured by the Persians,

but all the others who die violently die violently either at their own hands or of their fellow Romans. And they are

they kill themselves when they've been discredited, overthrown, and they don't want to face any uh open execution and

punishment. Some stability returns with the rule of Dialesian.

Um you've had a little bit before with the emperor Aurelian who fights very effectively to bring back under central

control most of the empire that had fragmented into several empires uh ruling at the same time. One in Gaul,

one in the east uh based around Palmyra in that case and involving the you know the uh semi- mythic well not semi-

mythical but the the heavily romanticized Queen Zenobia in our sources. Again fascinating period and

we'd like to know a lot more about it because the sources aren't great. Dialesian establishes what comes to be

known as the tetrarchy, the rule of four, where the empire for administrative purposes is divided into

an eastern and western half. In each of those areas, you have a senior emperor and Augustus who has a junior emperor, a

Caesar. So that you've got four men sharing the job of being emperor. Imperial rule is more directly imposed

because those four men can be in four different places at the head of four different armies at any one time making

it easier to deal with several problems simultaneously. There is looks as if there's a

substantial increase in at least the number of units in the army possibly the size of the army. Um greater

fortification of Roman bases they get smaller but better fortified. uh army reforms that creates eventually the

cometensees a field army as well as uh more regional troops the limitani uh provinces are divided Britain starts

off as a single province uh under the severs it's divided into two upper and lower by the time you get to the late

4th century it's been split into four possibly five and within those provinces whereas a governor in Hadrien's day

controlled everything civil administ administration, the military, the lot. Now you have separate military and

civilian bureaucracies. There's a significant change. You have multiple emperors. The tetrarchy itself doesn't

really last in that form very long. And when Dialesian retires, which is a rare thing for a Roman emperor to do, um it

doesn't outlive him. you quickly have an extra emperor proclaimed because you have people like Constantine who are

left out of the system son of one of the uh the previous emperors one of the tetrarchs doesn't want to be

marginalized now and it's rare that you get um as few as one emperor but is it two is it three is it four it depends on

the period there are periods of stability manages to rule as sole emperor for a while though he then

appoints his oldest son but later on executes puts him as a joint ruler. Near the end of his reign, he starts to share

out power and mark out um other sons as successors and relatives. But that doesn't work. There's infighting within

them. Several are killed in the um and their the people surrounding them, the families go.

Civil war is never quite as frequent in the 4th century as it had been for so much of the third. Dialesian creates

that amount of stability. But the basic truth is that after Caracala's murder, there are only three periods of 10 years

without a civil war somewhere within the empire. So it remains very common. The division between east and west becomes

stronger though this is still one empire. The laws are the same everywhere. If an emperor in the west

answers a legal question, gives a ruling on a matter, it will apply in the east and vice versa. Um so

they exist. You have periods in the 4th century of strength. Constantine is a very successful emperor, but his biggest

victories do actually come over other Romans. Again, this civil war pattern is there. You have conflict in the east

with the Persians. You have conflict elsewhere, particularly along the Ryan Danube frontiers with various Germanic

groups and others. into the fifth century, the western empire starts to fall in stages and

provinces become overrun and it proves impossible to recapture them and retake them. Um, Germanic warlords that have

come in as large scale raiding bands, as migrating groups settle down, begin to take territory, begin to set up

kingdoms, and you can't really stop it. So, it's a gradual thing, and there are big steps down. The loss of Africa is a

particularly severe one because it deprivives the empire of a major supplier of grain but also a major

supplier of troops. This was an important region and when the Vandals take it over and it proves impossible in

spite of several attempts combined with the Eastern Empire to retake it, they fail and it doesn't happen until

Justinians day. That's a major blow. But the loss of a lot of Gaul, the loss of a lot of the Spanish Peninsula, these are

all big deals. Losing somewhere like Britain is another blow, perhaps less severe. And again, we'll we'll do

another one on the fall of Roman Britain and immediate post Roman Britain another day. It's a fascinating topic, though

frustrating one. Again, the the evidence leaves a lot more questions than we can answer. Um, but nevertheless, it's um

a dramatic but it's a gradual collapse. But perhaps the most famous thing about the Roman Empire is that it fell or

because inevitably with Edward Gibbons's decline and fall of the Roman Empire, we talk about the decline and fall of Rome.

So it's a phrase that's firmly embedded in the wider consciousness and you'll get it used of other empires, of

politicians, of regimes. It is a classic of history. It is a remarkable piece of literature. It wouldn't conform to

modern standards of scholarship. It is nevertheless staggering when you go back and read it how much research

that Gibbon did. Now a lot more material particularly in the way of inscriptions and archaeology has become available

since then. Nevertheless, he did an awful lot but he wrote it with great style which again is not something

encouraged academically these days. Um and we might as well go back because it's to what why he claimed he was

writing. So it was at Rome on the 15th of October 1764 as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the capital while the

barefooted friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the

city first started to my mind it like a lot of stories about important parts of people's life their memory changes or

they start to forget or they embellish it or they believe the stories they've told it changed slightly a few times as

as he told it as as I say is often the case with human beings He doesn't really push a clear argument.

I mean, everybody tends to jump and assume, oh yes, you know, given blames the Christians. He clearly does not like

um the Catholic Church as it emerges. A lot of Christian thinkers, bishops, leaders, um the long and very bitter

schisms that occur. And remember, Gibbon carried this right up. He didn't just look at the fall of the Western Empire.

He went much further than than I do uh and many people, most ancient historians do. went right up to the 15th century in

the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks. So he covered a huge sweep of ground and

there is it's interesting Gibbon was an MP although he did vow never to speak in parliament but um the the tone of

pessimism increases as he goes on and this is partly because he was one of the MPs who voted in to send more uh troops

to America for 1776. So when Admiral and General How cooperated in the the New York campaign, uh Gibbon had been one of

the people that approved that by the time he's coming out with the next volume, you've had Yorktown, you've had

the end of the war, the American colonies have gone, there's now an independent country and people then were

wondering, is this, you know, the dark days of the British Empire? Are we in decline? In fact, we know with hindsight

that the empire would only expand, that you would have the heyday under Victoria uh in the next century. But again,

Gibbon didn't know that. It's also partly the theme if you work on something like this is the same as

working on the late republic. There is something depressing about it because so many people seem to do really stupid

things for no particular reason. And there does seem a lack of perspective in political leaders that they don't step

back and think, yeah, what is actually good overall rather than what's good for me personally or what will damage my

opponent. But the idea that he blamed the Christians and the church isn't quite

there for all the cynicism. Um, and we have to remember the personal story. Gibbon as a teenager when he was a

student at Oxford had decided to convert to Catholicism. This was clearly not a great idea in Protestant England of the

18th century. His father even sent him off to Switzerland for this sort of Calvinist reprogramming basically. So he

clearly had some, you know, he'd had strong emotions one way, they come out the other way, uh, later on when he

comes to write. So, and I think as well he starts to enjoy the humor and pointing out the absurdity of some of

these things, but he doesn't actually blame it in that sense because he doesn't ever systematically

start saying, well, A, B, and C are the reasons why the Roman Empire fell. It's more a story. He does highlight lots of

problems, lots of things that were bad. But he also says this, the decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable

effect of immodderate greatness. Prosperity repined the principle of decay. The causes of destruction

multiplied with the extent of conquest, and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the

stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of its ruin is simple and obvious. And

instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it lasted so long.

And there is, you know, there's a fair bit of truth in that in the sense that Rome not only is huge by the standards

of any empires, even the the ones of the 19th and early 20th century, but it lasted an extraordinarily long time and

left a profound influence culturally on subsequent history because it's big. Now, Rome was so

successful for so long. This is an empire that stretches from what's now southern Scotland out to the Euphrates

and beyond. It stretches to the Sahara Desert and at times has um sends expeditions into the desert

communities there. It's um sophisticated in it's got a road infrastructure that is bigger than anything that really is

there to well into the 19th century and in some areas where the Roman roads are

still the important roots later on into the early 20th century. They have bars. One of the most

sophisticated pieces of engineering the Romans ever produce. And it's just to make life more comfortable. The bath

house doesn't do anything practical in that sense. They have underfloor central heating, glass in the windows, literacy

to a very high degree. And you can see styles of shoes, hairstyles that are copied throughout the empire. And we can

also assume that there are songs, there are stories, there are the mimes, the um plays done in dance to music, ballets

almost I suppose um as well as some of the plays that appear almost everywhere. Gladiators and gladiatorial games,

chariot racing, popular everywhere. There's an awful lot of culture that spreads throughout this vast region and

then stays for a long time. And yes, it changes. It's not entirely static, but it tends to change on an empirewide

basis. And when the Romans do become Christian or emperors like Constantine start to um adopt the new faith that

again will also spread. So there are aspects of common culture as well as sophistication. There are signs of

prosperity. If you look at the monuments particularly of the period up to the 2nd century AD, they are spectacular. And

when you go to something like the bars of Caracala in Rome and imagine them fully roofed, the sheer size of these

things is staggering. And this will continue through. I mean, you've obviously got Hagios Sophia as a later

example in Constantinople with its great dome. But go there and stand at the in the Pantheon, you know, built under

Augustus, rebuilt under Hadrien and stare up at that huge roof and think this is best part of 2,000 years old.

And it is still incredibly impressive. And the Romans do build some great monuments in those later periods as

well. Perhaps fewer. There's less money around. Um, and a lot is being devoted to churches as time goes on. But

nevertheless, you know, another one I can remember getting off the bus at Siggoia in Spain and we were right there

next to the Roman aqueduct and it's this massive thing spanning the valley. It really is spectacular. that also has a

practical purpose because it was supplying water to the town I think even into the early 20th century. You know

they built so much they seem very sophisticated they seem very modern and yet they fall and what follows are the

early medieval period if you want to be um fashionable for these days or the dark ages.

However you look at them, this is clearly not progress in terms of size of population, scale of the economy,

sophistication of building. Nobody can build a bath house anymore. Hardly anybody's literate in most of these

areas. This is particularly true in the West and particularly true the further away you get from the Mediterranean. So

how and why could this happen? Why is this is one of those examples in the human experience where it's not about

progress. It is about regression. It's about things getting worse for a long long time. You know, Gibbon was not far

off when he talked about how really until his own day that the height of the Roman Empire was the best time to live.

And in many respects, things had not significantly improved. They were starting to overtake them in his day.

But it had taken that long, at least in Europe. Again, changes in some of the eastern parts of the world where a the

Roman Empire lasted longer, but civilization had a a deeper route anyway. um a little bit different.

So there have been a huge number of explanations. It is one of the big questions of history and particularly

ancient history. Why did Rome fall? Why did things get more basic, more local, more confused, more primitive for such a

long time? How can you be so sophisticated, so advanced, and yet fail and not be pushed over by a technically

superior society, more sophisticated society, instead apparently being tipped over by the forces of barbarism? Now, an

awful lot of different theories have been put forward. There is um a very tongue-in-cheek article written

by a German scholar who cataloged 200 explanations for the fall of the Roman did it alphabetically just to make the

point. you get everything blamed. It's lead pipes were poisoning everybody. They were all going a bit potty. Climate

change is another big one. That one obviously has become more fashionable as um this has become a such a concern in

the modern era. Um and there are some signs. It's one of those things I always get bothered when in news reports you

have them talking about um comparing temperature changes now to pre-industrial levels as if there was a

a sort of set pre-industrial level. and instead the climate has changed considerably over the millennia because

that's the nature of the earth. Um, and has often had a dramatic impact on those caught up in it if you don't adapt to

that change. In the Roman case, I don't think on its own that would explain it, but there are

things going on. There do seem to be one of the reasons for movements of um tribal groups from Denmark, the North

Sea area, is that there does seem to have been riding rising sea levels at the time that are um putting too much

salt into some land that had been usable for grazing and as arable land ceases to be so that you can't support yourself.

So things are going on. Um but nevertheless to make the case that that was the sole

or even the main cause is very hard. there isn't the evidence to support that. Um, you've also got blame it on

the Germans. You know, it's a load of Germanic hairy barbarians who come in and shatter down the Roman Empire. Hence

the fact that you could still be talking, you know, using the word vandal to mean anybody who's breaking things

for no reason for military pressure. Uh, the Huns, not Germanic, but an even more savage, wild barbarian group. uh you

have the great irony that of course by the first world war they were talking about the honeys at the gates and um the

using this term that wasn't based on a Germanic thing for what was perceived to be hostile well not perceived to be

hostile but the the uh the German enemy the first of all the German rival then the German enemy post 1914 expression

being used in France in Britain um you could blame it on the Christians that's as I say a lot of people think

Gibbon did that but he didn't really he doesn't like a lot of the changes that are occurring but he doesn't hold that

out as this sole reason for why things go bad um partly because he's cataloging how things have gone bad before the

Christians become a significant force um decadence you know he talks about that in the the passage we read out this

sense that um it's a classic human thing you know people slog with ability with talent to build something but their

their descendants will take it for granted they've been rich from the start. They haven't had to work. They're

less driven, less effective, more inclined to let things slip and more inclined to indulge themselves. You

know, Rome is a victim of its own success. It is so wealthy that people get bored and they start to do all sorts

of weird things. And you can see this in the behavior of emperors like Nero, you know, somebody who wants to perform on

stage, who has these grand parties, even while an emperor who liked to dance in public. Um

and if you read you know Petronius the sat satiricon from Nero's day this is there is a strong sense of decadence.

You get it in Tacitus that we're not you know there is this very pessimistic Roman view we're not as good as our

ancestors were. It isn't quite the Chinese view that your ancestors are watching you and disapproving and yes

we're clearly not as good as them but also they don't like us. There's this sort of wisful Roman sense that somehow

things have got worse. you know, there is an essential pessimism within the Roman character that um even in the

Republic, they're thinking, oh, you know, we're not quite as moral as we used to be and as brave as we used to

be. No, um we're not all like the elder Kato. We're not like um the men who made the republic great in

the first place. Uh so you have all these different theories but most of them they might explain a bit there

might be something in them but they don't really explain it all in one simple way. One of

the big divisions is do you see it as an internal collapse causing the fall or external? You are simply unable to cope

with the threats that come from outside and you are pushed over. So you know there's a French scholar the Roman

Empire did not die it was assassinated. um tendency is to reflect the preoccupations of the age. So Rome and

its fall are inevitably invoked in the context of each new power. Um, you know, I've lost count of the number of times

people have told me that, oh, well, you know, you can see from the Roman example, this is modern America. And

there was a spate in the early 2000s of books saying, you know, are we Rome? Are we destined to fall? Um, coming from

journalists, uh, political thinkers. Um, it keeps coming back. Uh, because people were saying much the same thing about

the British Empire around about 1900. And you know, think of Kipling's recessional, you know, um the idea that

if you don't keep on your guard, you will decline, you will get weaker, and the wolves that are outside will eat

you, tear you apart. Um the strange thing is is that everybody, regardless of their their perspective, tends to use

this example. So if you are um a critic of American power from another country, you tend to see this as an encouragement

that oh well, you know, they might decline. um a patriotic American might well see it as a warning. You know, this

is the danger. We can avoid this danger, but we have to be careful. We have to be aware of the risk. Um similar views were

expressed in Britain uh back when Britain was a a great power. Um so you have books, television taking up

this theme. Every now and again I'll get people asking me, will you do an interview on this type of thing or talk

about it? I don't because I don't see myself as qualified to be a commentator on current political events. and I want

to understand the past and the more we focus on that if we try and see the past in the light of the present we will

always succeed in doing that but I don't think we'll be understanding the past very well um and you know you'd get this

the time it's it's but of course it isn't new because again we're in 26 you're going to have all the

commemorations of 1776 you know July is not so far away now um the founding fathers both at that initial stage but

also as they were shaping America after the war had a very had an eye very clearly on the examples of Greece and

Rome and particularly Rome. It's partly because they were educated men. Education in those days meant a

strong awareness of the classics but also because there's lots of theory both from the philosophers of the time but

also subsequently there was considerable interest. though they were trying to create a republic

that would succeed where the Roman Republic had fallen. So it would not decline into becoming a monarchy as it

had under Augustus, people like Solar and Caesar before that, but also one that would not fall. So the idea is to

was to create a constitution, a system that would be stable enough to cope with all the problems likely to come in the

future um and yet survive basically intact and be robust enough to adapt when it needed without changing its its

basic self. That was the aim drawing very much on well we don't want to have what do we don't want what happened to

Rome to happen to us. So even though you have a senate, even though you have very classical influence on the buildings,

the monuments, nevertheless, the idea is well, let's learn from their experience and not just copy it. I remember um

again early 2000s it was more common. uh but it it does happen now and again where being asked to go and take part in

a seminar on future relations between the US and China back in 2001 and there were two of us out of six

talking about the Roman example. One on the uh I was talking about us talk about the republic of all things and then I

think they had Susan Matton talking about the empire. That was out of as I say a third of the historians gathered

to talk about superpower competition, how empires rise, fall, the strategy. What can we what can be learned from

Roman grand strategy? Was there a Roman grand strategy? Uh most of the others there was one on um I think it was

Napoleonic France. There was the Admiral T and the Royal Navy. Uh Germany in the buildup to the First World War and

National Socialist Germany and the Nazis. Um so otherwise it was quite modern but the

idea is if you're going to learn from history you do need to be very careful when you're studying it to try and

understand it. So that's the focus of my work my writings books like fall of the west how

Rome fell this talk today. So you can think about modern parallels but you need first always to go to the evidence

and try and see what does the evidence say not what would I like it to say. So really this breaks down into two

questions. It's not why did Rome fall. It's why did the western half of the empire fall in the fifth century AD and

the eastern half continue for another thousand years. Near enough, not quite, but getting close to it

because that's always the problem. If you start saying there are inherent weaknesses in the system, well, why is

it one half goes and the other half doesn't? You also have the idea that it didn't fall at all has become quite

common. I think it's there's a push back now but for a long time it was becoming dominant in academia. It was about

transformation transition instead of Rome collapsing it transformed into early medieval uh Europe.

And um part of that as well was an interesting thing. Much of the the flourishing

scholarship on the later empire has tended to be built around the idea that everything was great. Lots of things

were good and also that the later empire was actually not weaker than the earlier empire but more efficient and stronger.

So the emphasis on uh the amateurism of senatorial governors, military commanders, the um lack of a clear and

simple system for succession in the system created by Augustus. These things have come in for heavy critic criticism

and been blamed for what happens later. Um again, you know, you're talking some big leaps here of centuries.

There's a whole generation of specialists. Now we're coming well we're well well into the second generation of

late antique people who have drastically changed our understanding of the third fourth fifth centuries um and simply

uncovered a lot of stuff that people weren't looking at before. So it it's overwhelmingly positive if I think

sometimes it goes a little bit the other way and there's still an element they're not quite as defensive as they were

initially of a sense of having to justify that they were looking at this and that partly meant talking up the

late Roman Empire as vibrant strong efficient not at all in decline perhaps even progress and again that's why you

have the early medieval period and not the dark ages anymore people don't like to talk about that even with that people

will emphasize continuity which you do see in some areas. Sophistication of some of the kingdoms like the Franks

that emerge. Um so it becomes this transformation. The barbarians have invaded but they've

somehow been pacified and it's all become um they come in, they settle, they want a piece of the action in the

Roman Empire, but they're not really they are not the vandals um proverbly so that come in to smash things. They are

not about murder, rape, massacre, destruction. They are about um bringing in their own culture being keeping their

own identity but creating these kingdoms with as much of the Roman system as they could preserve.

And you can certainly see in the religious threads you know Christianity will continue and the u the organization

of the Catholic Church preserves the organization of the old Roman Empire in terms of where the um dascese are laid

out. So that and much of the literature for the period is Christian. So that can give less of a sense of change than if

we had the equivalent of a Tacitus or a Dioasius or Namianis for these later periods when it's gone.

And you do have to be aware that the impact of the fall of Rome is not felt in the same way everywhere. There are

some regions where it doesn't appear to make too much difference and archaeologically again tends to be true

the closer you are to the Mediterranean. There isn't necessarily a drastic break in terms of the sort of goods that are

being deposited, the lifestyle that people seem to be living. There is a sense they are still part of a a bigger

economy with trade on a a long distance basis again particularly through over uh over the water.

So an academic idea tends to play down the fall of the empire altogether. It's

almost been written out to some extent and it's simply looking at this transition to

what had been the Roman western Roman Empire becomes a number of independent but to a fair degree Romanized kingdoms

where the dynasty might be Germanic and um but so had so many commanders of the late Roman army.

those days. I think it's an academic idea. I don't think that's reached popular

consciousness at all. I think people are still, if you look at whenever anything like this comes up in the press or um or

popular culture, it's very much the given idea, decline, fall, destruction, barbarians, um you know, till the no

grass goes grows where my horse has trod. That sort of sense of barbarians unleash, civilization collapsing, and a

decent civilization being swept aside. But it has been strong in academia with relatively few voices raised against it

for a while. Um again, we're going back now. These these are older books now as are most of mine. That's the scary

thing. I was talking in my son's school last week and um you know, thinking how the majority of my books were published

before these kids were born. And even when I went to my old college in Oxford a few months ago was almost as true with

at least half of my output, I think was before many of these kids were born. certainly before they were old enough to

read them. Um, you had Brian Ward Perkins and Peter Heather both wrote very good, very

readable, accessible books about the whole question of the fall. Peter Heather's more of a narrative. Um, Brian

Ward Perkins more thematic emphasizing that actually in a lot of areas material culture does decline. the you can see

the further north you go, the further away you get from the Mediterranean, there is more sense that instead of

having goods that have come from hundreds or even thousand miles or so away, everything is locally made and

there's less of it. There's just less stuff. You don't have the sophisticated engineering capacity that was there

before. You're not literate. Change is actually very drastic. and the impression overwhelmingly of a much more

primitive, simpler and localized society than what had been before. Peter Heather emphasized very much the role of the

Huns in provoking movements by the Goths and others. He emphasizes the dangers the empire faces, but is is clear that

the Western Empire is pushed over. It does fall. It doesn't simply transform. Now, he also in there and later books

has emphasized, well, there are underlying problems, economic ones. He doesn't think the Mediterranean

agricultural system could keep going much longer. Um but nevertheless, there are specific events um particularly

around surrounding the Goths on whom he's obviously um being one of the key scholars studying uh that process for um

you know the last few decades. I agree with that picture. I don't really agree with their explanations as

to why this is happening. I think they are more focused on the external side of things. Um, partly because my main

interests have obviously always been and still are in earlier Roman history. I'm one of the uh great advantages of

writing for a wider audience is that I can step out of my very narrow academic specialization.

You know, not too far. I'm not suddenly going to write a history of the 17th century or anything like that. But I can

start to look at big topics that are adjacent to my fields, hence the fact I've just done the Athens and Sparta

book. Doing this book on um late antiquity, on the fall of the Roman Empire took me to periods that are less

familiar, unless my less the areas where I've done a lot of work in the past and cumulatively, you know, your knowledge

increases. So I am an outsider to the field and as I said right at the beginning I don't think I've convinced

that many of the specialists but their criticisms their counterarguments still haven't convinced me. So this is my

case. I think one thing is really missing in all of this and that's civil war and that's the weakness of the

empire itself. I think the best way to illustrate this is actually to tell a story from the 4th

century AD that's recounted by Amianis Marcelinus and that's of a general named Silylvanas who is blood by blood is

partly a Frank but is a Roman senior officer senior commander part of the Roman establishment and no there's never

any question that he might be disloyal to Rome in a general sense and sort of you know want to grow his beard and um

kick off his shoes and go and you know in a wild highland charge that sort of thing. Um

he is a Roman officer and there are plenty of people who are part Allen, part Goth, part um Frank, you know,

there there are lots of people within the Roman system as there have been for a long time. That ability to absorb

others and make them Roman, perhaps the strongest Roman genius, you know, that's how the empire has

succeeded and become so big for so long. In 351 he changed sides during a civil war but after that was loyal to the

emperor Constantius II given a command in Gaul. So you know an important area with responsibility for a significant

army. In AD 355 a minor official who's going to be operating in the area asks him for letters of recommendation. Again

fairly standard Roman thing. Letters of recommendation are the commonest form of writing surviving from the ancient world

particular from the Roman world. It's all about this sense of you know patronage and um you vouch for someone

effectively. Now this chapter gets the letters and then these are probably writing tablets

rubs off all the text just keeps the signature of Silylvanas. He then forges incriminating documents to which

Sylvanas' signature is attached and passes them to a connection at court who brings them to Constantius.

So you've got forged documents that are implicating a general who hasn't actually done anything. The emperor

quickly orders arrests, but friends of Silylvanas, including some other Franks, so you know there are there's a sort of

clan element to some of this, they protest his innocence. The emperor isn't sure. He's got influential people and

he's got to be careful about um punishing a senior commander, particularly when other senior

commanders and officials are to speaking up for him. He sends a man to Gaul to find out what

was going on. The man in question, however, doesn't bother to investigate at all and just starts arresting and

punishing people and taking a share of their profit and essentially abusing his position. but he isn't interested in the

truth simply in what can I gain from this. Soon afterwards, somebody looks more

closely at the documents and realizes that there's traces of the earlier text there and that these are forgeries.

Some of those involved a punish, but most of them actually get away because again they've got connections at court.

So by this time the emperor knows that Silylvanas is innocent. But communications are slow in this

period. Obviously, it can't move any faster than in most terms, you know, a horse can ride or um pull a carriage or

a ship can sail. Um I know one of the comments earlier on was talking about carrier pigeons. Well, that's fine, but

only in certain circumstances are they useful and they are attested, but they are not a regular feature of

communication. So, the general this stage has heard that he has been denounced um through

his friends. you know, they've warned him, look, there's trouble going on, and expects execution.

He wonders about fleeing. Eventually, he decides that he might as well rebel because that's the only way to live for

him and his family. That's one of the other things and that's changed since the late republic and he it starts to

change under the Julio Claudians where if somebody becomes under imperial suspicion is is condemned, a lot of

their family may go with them. But it's in late antiquity where this is much more thorough and you can wipe out

everybody, you know, women, children, the lot. So, it isn't just the the actual political threats.

Um, but he hesitates. You know, this is his only way out. He seems to be a dead man walking unless he runs away, but

he's been a loyal commander, so he hasn't done anything. And he's also not sure. That's a big decision to make to

flee from the high office you've got. So he pays a donative to his soldiers in Constantius's name that has become due

and it's been sent to him. This is all official. Um Amianis points out if he sought the insignia of imperial power,

he would have given out this large s in his own name. So it does suggest this is a man who is not plotting um a rebellion

against the emperor. He's not going to proclaim himself emperor because if you're doing that, you really wouldn't

reward your soldiers on behalf of the emperor that you're planning to oppose. But four days later, obviously, he makes

up his mind, declares himself emperor at Cologne. And um to show how improvised it all is,

Amianis tells the story that the purple cloak that was part of the emperor's regalia, had to be made by taking off

the little flags, the Vexelum flags from some standards, some of which were purple, and sewing them together. So,

you know, there is not any sign of clear preparation and forethought with this. It's all very improvised and he's only

got a very small army at his command because most of it is broken up in winter quarters,

perhaps a few thousand men, but it's not a vast force with which to challenge the man who controls the whole empire.

Constantius sends Erskinus, another commander on whose staff Amianus was serving, who is also under suspicion. So

again it shows you that many of your senior people there are doubts about their loyalty and this is really how

does vindicate himself send him off to deal with another threat and therefore prove your loyalty to the current

emperor because obviously you will have had the temptation to join that person and that you don't and actually get rid

of them. Well that's committed you to Constantius. Um he's sent there when he hears the

news of this eucipation. Again, remember everything takes time for these messages to go back and forth. Usinus and his

staff pretend support and with funds they've brought with them bribe two units of the small army he's got to kill

Sylvanas and Sylvanas was dragged out of chapel where he had in terror taken refuge on his way to a Christian service

was cut to ribbons by their swords. And then Amaya says, "Thus died a general of considerable merit who had resorted to

the most desperate measures to save himself for fear of the calumnies in which he was ins snared during his

absence by a faction of enemies. So it's a really depressing story because you have a capable and loyal

commander who is forced to rebel because of lies told about him. People have forged documents and then is um

betrayed again. The emperor sends somebody else who to clear himself gets the soldiers to betray this man and

murder him. So what have you done in the process? You have lost the services of a good commander. You have encouraged the

soldiers to think that well you can proclaim somebody emperor one day and then a bit later when somebody offers

you more money you can kill them without any problem. Not great for discipline. not great for particularly your more

senior officers knowing can they trust each other know which side are you on where am I going to end up you want to

be still alive whoever's emperor but that's very very difficult and this to me is the key to it all and it's it's

not a unique story in Amianis you were full of these false accusations of officials abusing their power to uh

condemn people seize part of their property um of failure of communications of emperors who have great trouble

knowing what's going on of um you know an investigation into the army in North Africa when a general has demanded

camels from a city to supply his troops on campaign and probably demanded more than he needs. The city refuses and then

the investigation ends up um uncovering other problems but then you know various bribery goes on. The problems basically

aren't solved. You don't have an efficient army working as it should. Instead, you've got lots of individual

bureaucrats and army officers who are protecting their own back and trying to make themselves as wealthy as possible

and survive in this cutthroat environment. And that's the thing. The moral of our story is civil war

instability. A very suspicious emperor with poor communications comes back to a video I did a while ago. How much does

an emperor really know about what's going on? In late antiquity, it does look as if it's actually harder for the

emperor to know because it's harder to access the emperor. You don't get all the letters that you had early on, often

with petitions, obviously not presenting somebody's case rather than uh unambiguous fact and unbiased uh

reportage, but you have at least lots of information and it's easier to go out. and you've got your

provincial governors coming back and forth Rome because they're senators and any part of their career is spent for

you can talk to them. You can keep an eye on them. You know who they are personally. The later emperors deal with

a much bigger bureaucracy and a much larger pool of um sources for their senior army officers, most of whom are

equestrians. This is not a group where you can know everyone and it's much harder to know what's going on. You've

also got the danger that every emperor knows that his biggest threat comes from other Romans. It is a Roman who is most

likely to rebel against him and overthrow him which leads to his death. You know, you don't Romulus Augustulus

is too insignificant to be worth killing. But earlier emperors that is not the case. You lose power. You are

dead. In the same way that with um Sylvanas, he knows that if he's the emperor's suspecting him and going to

condemn him, that's it. He's dead. No trial, no court of inquiry, no court marshall, no real ability to defend

himself. If the emperor doesn't trust you and the emperor decides he's going to have you killed, you're going to be

killed unless you rebel against that emperor. So, it shows how easy it was for a a eucipation to begin because

that's what that is. This is an attempt to overthrow Constantius and take the throne for himself or at least take part

of the the empire and control it as emperor only for the reason that if you don't do it, you're going to be dead.

And it shows it isn't just the fighting. Again, it comes back to this frequency of civil

war. As I say, only three periods of 10 years after 217 without a civil war until the collapse of the Western Empire

in 476, which means that everybody experiences civil war during their lifetime. If you reach adulthood, you

know, this is a real thing. It is not a a theoretical possibility, this distant threat. This is very real. It's likely

to happen. Now, it might happen in a different distant part of the empire from you. It might not be directly

involved. The fighting might be over quickly, might not involve huge armies, might be that like poor old Silylvanas,

his own men are persuaded to um dispatch him very very quickly after a brief period where they've been loyally

supporting him. But there's a ripple effect. You could see it from the investigations of the

man sent to find out what was going on by Constantius Gaul. instead of actually looking into the real issues, he just

starts finding rich people and having them arrested, condemned, executed, confiscating their property. You have,

you know, there's Paul the Chain who appears in um Amianis' account, this fellow who was very gifted in finding

excuses, pretext, connections between people so that one victim led to a next, the next, and so on and so on. And whole

families are again being destroyed. At the very least, they're losing all their property, but very often they're losing

their lives as well. on the basis of no real evidence. It's and it's this is existing. You have plenty of officials

who are doing this for their personal advantage because remember part of the whole point of forging the letters was

that a man could send them to his connections at court. Those would then condemn Sylvanas to the emperor and the

emperor would pat them on the head and say what good little boys they were and give them good jobs, favors in the

future. The best way to prove your own loyalty is to rat on someone else. And if you don't know of any real treachery,

the temptation to invent to make sure you do it first because again there's this neurotic fear that if you don't

somebody else will you might get condemned. Simply being innocent was not necessarily protection in these

circumstances. So that ripple effect this is going to distort and remember letters of

recommendation were what the fellow wanted in the first place. So many people in senior jobs in the

bureaucracy, in the army, throughout the empire have got there because people have written letters saying, "He's a

good chap. Imagine you see me when he comes before you. Please, I'd be very grateful if you did him a favor, if you

gave him this post, if you gave him this promotion." So, every time there's a civil war, again, it comes back to this

ripple effect. Lots of people are connected in some way or other. And if you have a particularly vindictive and

ambitious and ruthless official investigating them, then a lot of people can die as a result of this. More than

that, even more will know that this is a dangerous world. It is far less secure. If you look at Tacitus and his accounts

of the Julio Claudians, it's essentially the elite in Rome that are at risk from the ambitions of Corteas of the emperor

or crazy emperors like Caligula or but people like Senus under Tiberius engineer the demise of various

distinguished men. Um but it isn't the wider population again because the empire and it's the state in a sense is

bigger in terms of the number of bureaucrats the number of senior officers and more desperate spread

throughout the provincial communities not just focused in Rome the impact of these eucipations will spread and the

the punishments that occur after them and of course when you come to the fighting in the civil wars as I pointed

out before yes the Romans are going to win each civil war but they're also going to lose it as well Roman soldiers

will die and even the ones that don't die that are persuaded to change sides isn't great for their morale. It isn't

great for their discipline. It isn't great for controlling them in the future if they know that they can get a good

bounty by basically selling themselves to the highest bidder. And officers will be that much more cautious because they

know when there is a mutiny, if you've been unpopular and a bit of a martinette, you're likely to face the um

anger of the men you've commanded who now can condemn you as being loyal to the old regime or simply choosing the

wrong side. The cost to the provinces, to communities, and to simple trust within

the system. The systems work on the basis everybody knows the rules, plays the game and does their job to at least

a reasonable degree and are rewarded as a result. And there will be abuses of this at every stage even in the best of

systems. But that's the basic idea. When you have a system where doing your job well isn't necessarily very good

protection and can still lead to you being condemned and swiftly executed along with your family, then you know

the incentives are more to keep your head down and try not to attract anybody's attention rather than to

actually go off and do particularly well. The more famous you are, the more at risk you are.

I I find it strange and it it still strikes me that civil wars are underststudied. Now, there are good

books looking at some of the impact and some of the studies from John Matthews onwards of of Amianis have looked at

characters like Paul the Chain and how Amianis presents this. But I'm I'm not sure that's fed through to an awareness

of how inefficient and how unstable as a system this is to make an army work or a state work. And again, it comes back to

Gibbons's point. The fact that it lasts so long ought to surprise us in some respects, but it is so big. You know,

the Romans are simply bigger, more powerful than anybody else out there. There is no one who can push them over

in one go. Even the Huns under a tiller at their height are not a match for the Roman Empire for all the terror they

spread and the damage they do inflict. And they're very unstable. When a tiller goes and he's, you know, found dead,

they're never quite as formidable again. not in the same way of that degree of unity that he was able to create amongst

the Huns and all the allies and all the subject races he picked up along the way.

I think there is a danger that people almost accept civil war eucipation as part of the background of late antiquity

and don't really think about the full implications of it. It's almost as if it's an especially robust system for

selecting the next emperor. So for me, this is an empire that didn't work. The implication of this is that

again, it comes back to this sheer size. Rome's massive. It's far bigger than anyone else. It doesn't have any

competitors that are anything like its equal. You know, you've got the Persians who are the biggest empire out there.

But while they might raid deep into Roman territory, the trend is throughout the 3rd and fourth centuries in the long

run it's Romans who take territory from the Persians. The Persians might come in sack some Roman cities, extort some

money, take off slaves or captives as to work as forced labor slaves effectively in the the heart of the empire, but they

don't stay. Whereas the Romans do make these gradual advances. But there are clear um campaigns that go badly. The

Persians are formidable militarily. They are um much more organized as an army, discipline, deficient, capable of

siegecraft. Um they are a dangerous enemy, but they are not going to turn up at Constantinople, let alone Italy for

most of this time. They are not as big as the combined Roman Empire by any margin. And the barbarian groups are

much much smaller. Again, other people take a different view, but to me, there is no sign that

the threats faced in the third and fourth centuries or into the fifth was stronger, more dangerous than before.

There are clearly periods in this era when there is a bigger threat. So, obviously, a tiller at his height is a

bigger threat. Some of the more capable, aggressive Persian kings are a bigger threat than some who inherit when

they're very young or who are troubled by civil war. Um, some leaders amongst the barbarian tribes are more

charismatic, more powerful, able to unite more groups together and therefore pose a bigger threat to the Romans than

at other times. But this has always been true. You have had an Armenius. You've had a debilus. You've had defeats

against the Paththeians in the past. Some Paththean kings have been stronger than others. You've had this ability of

tribes to come together and unite. The idea that there are big tribal confederations

in the later fourth and into the fifth century that are drastically different from the ones faced by Julius Caesar in

the first century BC just doesn't stack up. The numbers don't seem any bigger. The level of organization. Yes, you have

groups like the Alammani, all the men. You have the Franks that they do combine, but then groups like the Swaybe

had done this before. Um charismatic leaders like Ariistas had done this sort of thing.

It's if you look at the numbers in the armies, there don't seem to be bigger or

even more tactically dangerous forces around than there had been earlier. The Romans have suffered defeats in the old

days. They've won lots of victories in the old days. The idea that it's more dangerous, this is something we will

come back to in much, much more detail later on. You know, theoretically, the Romans have

huge resources. They have a big army that depending on how you interpret the noticia dignitum many have

argued is bigger than the army of the earlier days than the army of the principate. Um and yet when in 409 the

vandals and various allied tribes go into Spain. The noticia tells us that there ought to be a field army of 16

regiments in Spain. There is no sign of any concerted resistance on that level. you know, there's there's virtually no

opposition. So, the noticia may be telling us what the empire was supposed to have, but not what was actually

there. They're invisible in the sources. You know, these barbarian hordes are probably not as vast as some people have

imagined them to be. and Peter Heler's work on the Goths has tended to emphasize numbers that are not huge for

the Gothic Gothic forces at Adrian Opople for instance that certainly are not bigger than those

routinely faced by earlier Roman armies. Um so I don't think there are more but

again that might vary at certain periods you might have very large and formidable opponents but that's always been the

case. Maybe that's becoming slightly more frequent, but even that there is that intimate link between perception of

strength and the degree of threat you face. So the more the Romans are seen as weak, the bigger the threats become. And

clearly at times with all the civil wars, they are very very weak because troops are being drawn away to go and

fight for as people are contesting the imperial throne rather than being based on the frontier ready to face off

against any attackers. That's clearly there. So there's a lot of reason why the Romans will get

attacked more as they seem to be more weak. That would in indeed be an indication that they are perceived to be

weaker by many of their outsiders in this later period. Um but again it comes back to this point that the barbarians

and foreigners are not seen as the most dangerous opponent because most Roman emperors are far more concerned with

eucipation. The threat from within other Romans who are going to kill them. That's the threat for the emperors. And

the thought of being either implicated in one of these, falsely accused of one of these, or being on the losing side of

one of these is a concern for senior officers and bureaucrats. Then personal profit is important for

them. Actually, doing your job well is fairly low down. And there's no particular incentive because it doesn't

make you safe. It doesn't make you honored. The best way to prove loyalty, comes back to this point, is to report

on somebody else. sneak on somebody else and be prove your loyalty that way. Show well, you know, it's not me, it's him,

it's him. Deal with him. Um, so things don't work as well. And it comes back. We've done more on the Gothic war in a

more detailed v uh video about Adrien Opal. Six years to defeat these groups of

migrants. Of the battles, four of them, you lose three, draw one. You eventually defeat

them through the sheer weight of numbers and the fact they've got nowhere to go, but they get a fairly good peace

settlement. The Huns and the others do strike at a weak structure. It is not as strong as

it had been. So all this idea that it everything is marvelous until a couple of bad uh bad luck events like the Goths

not being dealt with properly happens and then weakens everything and that leads to the Vandals and so on, I don't

really buy it. I don't think the system is anywhere near as strong in the first place. It's still bigger, stronger than

anybody else out there, but it is not what it had been. And it doesn't show high level of flexibility and

adaptability at this stage in dealing with all these problems. In part because so much of the priority is on internal

disputes and power struggles and civil war. Everybody's becoming stronger because

the Romans are weak and everybody's becoming more aggressive because the Romans seem weak. But it isn't as simple

that just to say that it's all about civil wars. Obviously there's implications for other factors are

involved the economy. I can't help thinking if ever we did have sufficient data which I doubt will

emerge about the successive plagues from the antines onwards that these had a much bigger impact than we we tend to

think. They often rather are dismissed. um the taxation burden becomes heavier but the system may not be that efficient

in collecting. Lots of things are weakening the system and it comes down to

again post the severance you have more emphasis on emperors securing their own position with an army that's geared to

serve them. Excuse me. As I've said before, the division of provinces into smaller and

smaller regions, each with their own little garrison, but where the commander of the garrison is separate from the

civil administration and then you have your field armies that are again separated out, different command

structure rather than actually being this is an efficient way of dealing with real

problems. I suspect a lot of this is to reduce the ability of any one individual to have too much power so that they can

rebel against you. It's all about controlling your own people, keeping everybody down. That I think is the

priority and that's dictating how you are organizing the empire because that it creates this essential problem that

when you have a problem that could in the past been dealt with by a provincial governor, no one on the spot has the

resources to raise enough troops and supply them to deal with a substantial barbarian army in the way that a

provincial governor could. So you have to rely on the emperor sending aid or more likely coming himself to do this.

And even with four emperors that you have under the tetrarchy though rarely afterwards. Um you usually have two or

maybe three. They can't be everywhere and they can't move from one end of the empire even one end of the west. You

know they can't move from the Danube to um Britain in 5 minutes. So

things just don't work as well. Everything's made worse by the instability and eventually it

becomes fatal because of that. We've got lots of problems with evidence. There will be great

difficulties establishing a lot of what is going on. I think that there is a big weakness when the Senate becomes

marginalized. That that level where you had 600 or so people the emperor could know who provided many of your senior

officers and governors were easier to control politically. When you spread out command to equestrians, that sounds

great in that first you think, well, they won't be able to rebel because they can't be senators, can't be emperors.

But very quickly, they are. They are rebelling and they are becoming emperors. And it it's a much harder

group because it's so much larger to control. You can't know them. Nor are they focused on Rome. All senators in

the past had to have property in Italy. They had to have a a residence in Rome and they had to spend a lot of their

life there. Equestrians aren't like that. they don't have that connection to any central place. The capitals that

emerge, even Constantinople though later this will develop more don't necessarily have that draw for people to live there

permanently. Um where again politically that can be a source of instability but also you can keep an eye on them.

So so much seems to be about keeping the emperor safe which in fact renders the empire less efficient, less able to deal

with problems which can discredit emperors and lead to them over being overthrown.

So that was my take. That's the take in the book, The Fall of the West, how Rome fell. And as I say, I haven't changed it

in any significant way since then. To me, this is this is a neglected area that civil war is simply not studied

anywhere near as much as it should be. And its impact on the army, on the state, on society is it's pushed to the

side because again it seems so common that it's not taken seriously whereas we should be taking it very seriously

because it is so common. Are there lessons for the present day? Um the book came out 15 odd years ago,

more than that now. Um when the world was rather different, things have changed. I don't think in

the end you can't just make any simple parallel. The British Empire in 1900 was not the Roman Empire. The United States

today is not the Roman Empire. Conditions of the modern world are very very different. If we want to learn

lessons from the past, they need to be more general. They need to be more about how systems work, how they can become

efficient, how they become inefficient, and how that can become baked into the system whereby other priorities are so

strong that personal advantage, securing your own position, getting rid of or at least beating down opponents becomes

more important than actually doing your job well. You know, forget what you're there for. Um, you know, Britain is

about to go through a a struggle for the leadership of the Labour Party, which means who is prime minister. Fairly

obviously, while people are concentrating on that, as with the Conservative Party before when they were

in fighting, they can't be doing the other things they're supposed to be doing. That becomes the priority. That

becomes the focus. Nothing like as serious as civil wars or anything like that, but nevertheless, it's a

reflection of how you can become de distracted from what the purpose of government is supposed to be. Instead,

to look more at the personal objectives within this. Now, I'm not going to comment about uh anybody else, and I I'm

probably breaking my rule even mentioning uh what's likely to be going on soon in Britain. This is not a

channel for commenting on current affairs. Don't want to do that. I'm not qualified to do it. I would much prefer

people to think about the past, learn from the past, and then hopefully thinking more about situations in the

past encourages you to think more subtly about current affairs in the world, which for all of us in a democracy is

very important because going out there and voting um we are making choices that will have some influence.

However, you know, smaller component in the big machine, we are one thing is a warning because the Roman

Empire, most of these systemic failures, systemic problems, weaknesses that I've been talking about

that encourage civil war, encourage this instability, they go on for centuries. comes back to this point that Rome is so

big that it can't fall quickly because there's no one to push it over and there's no one offering a better

alternative out there saying, "Hey, I've got a much, you know, a culture that's really attractive. You'd be wealthier.

You'd be more comfortable. You'd have much more fun. Come and join my state." The Persians aren't doing that, and

there's nobody else out there. Clearly, by comparison to the rest of the world, the Romans see themselves as superior.

And as the the empire falls, even the kingdoms created by the various Germanic groups and warlords, they're desperately

trying to keep as much of the Roman Empire going as they possibly can because life is better then. It doesn't

work because the bigger pattern, the economy, the infrastructure that supported that has gone. Um, the

Persians think they're the best thing in the world and the Romans are sort of not quite as good, but better than all the

other barbarians out there. Romans think the same about the Persians. But there are not they're not persuading each

other this is a better way to live. The Roman Empire is so big and faces no equal competitor, no real challenger

that it doesn't need to be efficient. And this is perhaps a more valid warning for our times that institutions,

organizations, businesses, armed forces can tolerate an awful lot of failings, um, inadequacies, weaknesses

most of the time, particularly if they're big and they're bigger than anyone else out there and they're not

facing serious competition. But then when it comes to the point, these things can start to show themselves and things

can go badly wrong very quickly. But again, if you're huge and there's nobody able to destroy you or push you over,

you can still survive. So, you know, competition in commerce works up to a point, but you end up with a a business

that is so dominant in the market that even if it's it's not as efficient as it should be or could be, it's very hard

for somebody smaller to come along and take that market away from them. So, you can live off your fat in a sense

for a very long time. But when the crisis comes, it tends to come suddenly, rather abruptly.

So that was the theme of the book. I think it's still a valid one that we ought to be on our guard everywhere when

um the tendency of institutions is to start thinking of their own interests rather than why they were created in the

first place, what they were supposed to do. Um and where whether it's a leader as well as an individual where people

start forgetting the point the common good the good of the nation and instead it becomes personal profit survival

success the other entrenched lobbies that will lobby for their point of view regardless of whether this is a good

thing more generally um that there is a tendency as in the Roman period for bureaucracies to get bigger but achieve

less. That isn't inevitable. You can keep a system going if everybody if the the ideology is there and enough there

is enough incentive to do your job well and there is some scrutiny. But you can also end up with a very complacent

institution that simply well it's all right so it doesn't really matter what the end result is. And again if it's big

if enough gets done that it's okay you don't necessarily spot all the weaknesses. So, I wouldn't say any of

this is terribly profound and I do not go out there with any of my books to make some point saying we must change

the world according to this. That's not what I'm here for. As I say, my aim is always to try and understand the past.

But, however, when you deal with a a question like why did the Roman Empire fall, then some of these things need to

come to mind. You need to think about, you need to consider. So, that's a summary of the book pretty much. And I

suspect uh well I'm sitting on a chair so I couldn't fall off the the stage that isn't there as I felt I was going

to do every moment at Hon all those years ago. Um I think that talk was probably done in a much shorter

time because again I had my slot of 40 minutes or 45 minutes or whatever it was. I do remember with great guilt I

was told afterwards that um there was a little old lady in the front row who wanted to ask a question and because I

was raised on pad das I didn't see her. So I I sort of point it out to everybody but this this poor person who was

waiting there patiently. So um my apologies and if you write in the comments I will

do my best to get around to um answering things. As you may have noticed it tends to happen that every now and again every

few weeks I'm able to sit down for half an hour an hour and answer lots of comments. Um but I can't do it all the

time because so much is going on. So there we are. I know there will be plenty of people from comments I've made

before who will not buy this analysis. Don't accept my interpretation. There's no reason why you should. Um

simply it's a question of we all look at the evidence. We all try to understand it as best we can. As I say, a lot of

the specialists, I don't think too many of them have been convinced by all that much of of my claim, my argument. Um, a

few have been a bit, but um, a lot are still still like to see it that way. I haven't noticed a huge surge of work on

civil wars and their impact, though maybe I'm wrong. Maybe that's been coming out and I just haven't spotted it

because I haven't been doing a lot on this period since I did the book. U be nice to think that. Um, and it probably

wouldn't be because of my book. It probably just because scholars have come around to realizing, oh, maybe we better

deal with this. There aren't simple answers to any of the big questions. And a question like

this where the sources are so difficult where we lack all the data that would be needed to understand you know the the

economic side of all of this which has got to be vital has got to be important we cannot understand it we can guess we

can suggest um I've concentrated on the political military side the instability the civil war elements because I think

that's neglected but also in the end I think if you keep fighting each other for so long as the Romans did then it's

not going to last things are going to get worse you will decline. You will become less efficient. And when each

challenge comes along, the chances are that you're not going to deal with it this time. And the decline is really a

series of sudden abrupt steps down, then a bit of a plateau, then another step down until eventually there's nothing

left. So that for me is the story of the end of the Roman Empire in the West, the fall of the West.

Um I'm not sure what we'll be doing next week. I think this one will probably have come out as the first one in June,

but it depends. Um, we will be looking at the the movie The Fall of the Roman Empire with with Graeme Sum before too

long. At least I hope so. I haven't yet. I said yes, but we haven't yet confirmed the date because I've been lagging

behind. So, there will be another Fall of the Empire, though admittedly a movie that only really covers the end of the

2nd century AD. Um, and is strange in many respects, but has its moments, has its drama, has a great scale about it.

It really is a an epic of epics. when it comes to the sheer number of extras, the size of the sets, it's very rarely been

matched, particularly in the the era of color. I mean, if you feel going back to some of the silence, uh the sort of uh

you know, really huge things of those early days. Um we will have a few other things. We will, I promise, we'll get

back to cavalry before too long. And then a bit after that, a few months later, maybe late summer, early autumn,

we'll be back in more detail into late antiquity, the late Roman army, the late Roman Empire. And um again, you know,

feel free to comment, feel feel free to tell me that I'm talking through my hat at this point. Um we'll go on, we'll try

and explore it. If people raise issues, I'll try and talk about those again. Um but that's it for today. Thanks for

watching.