IV
THE LESSON OF THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
“L’histoire est un recommencement perpétuel,” a French writer has said. If the forms in which history manifests itself are infinitely various, the forces which inspire it are always the same, and are everywhere at work, on a large scale or on a small, openly or secretly. It is, therefore, not to be wondered at that the decadence of the Roman Empire is being repeated in our time in the modern world.
This assertion may seem paradoxical and strange. What! are we moderns on the downward grade? Why, one hears of nothing but progress on every side. Never was there an epoch more proud of its loudly vaunted achievements. The sciences are adding discovery to discovery. The wealth of the world is increasing with giddy rapidity. Comfort and culture are spreading in every class and in every country. One after another, most recondite treasures of the earth are falling into our hands. We are gradually fighting down all the forces of nature which for so long a time kept our ancestors at a distance, impeded them, even threatened them with death, from the law of gravity to the most insidious maladies. Is it permissible to talk of decadence at the very moment when man has made himself lord of the whole earth, and is even learning to fly? History cannot show a richer, wiser, more powerful, more daring epoch than the present one. No wonder that most people would resent the suggestion that we, in the flush of our brilliant successes, are seeing the repetition of that ancient and terrible history of the last centuries of the Roman Empire, which was one of the saddest and deadliest episodes in the world’s history.
And yet that history is repeating itself, to a certain extent at any rate. The showy wealth and the noisy triumphs of modern civilisation veil, but do not hide, this recommencement de l’histoire from him who studies, in a spirit of philosophy, our times and the decadence of the Roman Empire. It is true that there are immense differences between the two civilisations and the two epochs. But notwithstanding these differences, what wonderful resemblances there are! Consider especially that disease which corrupted the trunk of the Roman Empire, and which is beginning slowly, subtly, insidiously to eat the heart out of the modern world.
The disease which killed the Roman Empire was, in fact, excessive urbanisation. Neither the attacks of barbarism from outside, nor those of Christianity from within, would have prevailed against its might and its massive weight, if the strength of the colossus had not been already undermined by this internal cancer. But, slowly and steadily, the disease had spread through the trunk of the Empire, and had attacked its most vital organs one after the other, fostered on its deadly errand by wealth, peace, art, literature, culture, religion, all the blessings which men most long for and most prize.
In order to understand this extraordinary phenomenon of Roman history, we must hark back to the generations that lived quietly and in a relatively happy state in the flowery times of Rome’s real power and greatness. After two centuries of war, at the beginning of the Christian era, peace was finally established in the great Empire which Rome had conquered. In the days of peace, the barbarian West learned from the Romans how to cultivate the earth, to cut the forests, to excavate the minerals, to navigate the rivers, to speak and to write Latin. It became civilised, and bought the manufactures of the ancient industrial cities of the East. Every fresh market of the West, as it was opened up, gave a stimulus to the ancient industries of the East, which found in such market a new clientèle. Contact with the barbarism of the West rapidly gave fresh youth to the old civilisation of the East,—Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor,—which had decayed somewhat in the great crisis of the last century of the republic. Everywhere fresh lands were brought under cultivation, methods of agriculture were perfected, minerals were searched for, new industries and new branches of commerce were opened up. Prosperity and luxury preceding in every nation, even the most barbarous, and in every class, even the poorest, which acquired a taste for the luxuries of civilisation.
An epoch of rapid increase of wealth, of lucky enterprises, of frequent, close, and varied commercial and intellectual intercourse between the most distant peoples, began. In every part of the Empire, in Gaul as well as in Asia Minor, in Spain as well as in Africa, these new trades, these new industries and agricultural enterprises gave rise to a prosperous middle class and to provincial aristocracies,—nouveaux riches families,—which gradually came to form the governing class of the Empire, migrated to the cities, strode to enlarge them, to embellish them, and to make them more comfortable, reproducing in every part of the Empire the splendours of the urban civilisation after the Greco-Asiatic model as perfected by the practical Roman spirit of organisation. In every province, the example of the Emperor in Rome found imitators. In the first and second centuries, every rich family spent part of its possessions on the embellishment of the cities, and made provision for the common people of profits, comforts, and pleasures: they built palaces, villas, theatres, temples, baths, and aqueducts. They distributed grain, oil, amusements, and money. They endowed public services and assumed the rôle of pious founders.
The Empire covered itself with cities great and small, rivalling each other in splendour and wealth; and into these cities, at the expense of depopulating the countryside where nobody was willing any longer to live, it attracted the peasantry, the village artisans, and the yeomanry. In these cities, schools were opened in which the youth of the middle class were taught eloquence, literature, and philosophy, and trained for official posts, the number of which increased from generation to generation, and for the liberal professions. Thus, in the second century A.D., the Empire spread, in the sun of the pax Romana, which illumined the world, its countless marble-decked cities, as our time spreads, in the sun of modern civilisation, the confused and smoky opulence of its cities, large and moderate-sized, crowded, disordered, a blaze of light by night, bristling with chimneys and shrouded in black fog by day. In other words, the most important phenomenon in the whole history of the Roman Empire, during the first two centuries of the Christian era, is, as in the nineteenth century, the rapid growth and enrichment of the cities.
The phenomenon was not then so rapid nor on so large a scale as it is to-day; not a single city in the Empire, not even Rome, ever attained, in my opinion, a population of one million inhabitants. The cities which seemed big in those days would be only of moderate size now. Populations and riches were smaller. But the phenomenon in itself was the same.
From the third century onwards, the excessive urbanisation in the Roman Empire, which had been the cause of the splendour and apparent wealth of the preceding century, began to change into a dissolving force, which drove that brilliant world back into the chaos from which urbanisation had evolved it. Little by little, the expenditure of the urban civilisation, the cities and their increasing luxury, out-distanced the fertility of the countryside, and, from that moment, the latter began to be depopulated and sterilised by the cities. With each succeeding generation, the impulse towards the cities became stronger. The numbers and the requirements of the modern population increased. The State and the wealthy classes were inundated with requests, prayers, and threats, urging them to satisfy these requirements, to adorn and enrich ever more and more the cities, which were the glory and splendour of the Empire.
In order to feed, amuse, and clothe crowded city-populations; to carry through the construction of the magnificent monuments whose ruins we still admire; to provide work for the industries and arts of the cities,—agriculture was, little by little, ground down by ever-increasing burdens. The position of the peasant, in the solitude of the depopulated countryside, became ever more sad and gloomy, just as the cities became fairer, bigger, fuller of amusement and festivals. The impulse towards the cities increased, and one day the Empire awoke to find that its cities were swarming with beggars, idlers, vagabonds, masons, plasterers, sculptors, painters, dancers, actors, singers—in short, the whole tribe of the artisans of pleasure and of luxury. But in the fields, which were expected to feed all these men who had crowded into the cities to work or to idle, there was a dearth of peasants to cultivate the land. Also, with the disappearance of the rural population, the problem of recruiting the army, which drew its soldiers then, as always, from the country, became increasingly serious. While the cities tricked themselves out with magnificent monuments, the Empire was threatened with a dearth of bread and of soldiers.
It must be owned that the Empire struggled against this menace with desperate vigour. It introduced the villeinage of the soil. It tried to bind the peasants to the land. It established heredity of trade or calling. But the effort was fruitless. Aggravated by one of the most tremendous intellectual blunders in the annals of history, the crisis became insoluble. The agriculture of the Empire, and with it the Empire itself, received its death-blow. The East and the West split apart, and, left to itself, the West went to pieces. The greatest of the works of Rome, the Empire founded by her in Europe, including the immense territory bounded by the Rhine and the Danube, lay a vast ruin: a ruin of shattered monuments, of peoples relapsed into barbarism, of perished arts, of forgotten tongues, of laws thrown to the four winds, of roads, villages, cities razed from the face of the earth, swallowed up in the primeval forest which slowly and tenaciously thrust out its tentacles, in that cemetery of a past civilisation, and entwined the giant bones of Rome!
But the reader will say: “But that is not happening, and never will happen, to contemporary civilisation. Even if it cannot be denied that there is a certain analogy between the history of the first two centuries of the Empire and that of modern times, the analogy stops short at this point. The world will never witness another catastrophe like that of the Roman Empire; or at any rate, nobody now alive will witness it.”
I heartily concur in this opinion. Modern civilisation will resist the ills which assail it better than ancient civilisation resisted them. But it will be able to do so because it is stronger, not because it does not contain within itself the germ of the cancer which destroyed the Roman world. Many symptoms prove this. I will dilate upon one of them only, the most serious, the most salient, the most generally recognised and felt, even though few up to the present have seen in it an analogy and a resemblance to the great historical crisis of the fall of the Roman Empire. I refer to the rise in the cost of living.
To-day, Europe and America resound from one end to another with a chorus of complaints from men and women who have to live in the cities. Rent, bread, milk, meat, vegetables, eggs, clothes—everything, in short, is rising in price. Even people in the thirties can remember having witnessed times of fable, a kind of mythical golden age, in which things were worth practically nothing compared with their price to-day. Governments are besieged with entreaties, threats, and prayers to provide supplies, but they do not know how to do so. What is the cause, what the remedy, of this strange phenomenon? Some lay the blame on the taxes; some on Protection; some on the merchants and speculators.
And indeed, at first sight, the phenomenon seems inexplicable. At no period of history was there such a determined rush to make money as at the present time. No age had at its disposal so many and such effective means of making it. The men of to-day are obsessed to such an extent by the frenzy for work that they no longer have time to live. Statistics tell us in exact figures the yearly increase in the production of the world. So the earth ought to be wallowing in abundance, an abundance such as the world has never seen heretofore. How comes it, then, that men everywhere complain, and most loudly in the richest countries, of the intolerable dearness of everything? What is the object, what the effect, of the work of the man of to-day, if not abundance but scarcity is the recompense of daily toil?
This scarcity is a graver and more complex phenomenon than those who most complain of it suppose, and is not the fault of government or traders. It is a veritable recommencement de l’histoire, and the study of the Roman Empire can be of the greatest service in helping us to understand it. It is the first serious, universally felt symptom of that excessive urbanisation which was the ruin of ancient Rome. This modern society arises from the over-development of the cities, from the too rapid increase in the needs and luxuries of the multitudes who live in the cities. Men and money concentrate in the cities, and swell the urban industries and luxury, public and private, intent on putting into operation all the marvels which the fertile modern genius, inspired by competition in the race for progress, is continually inventing. The countryside, on the other hand, has in the last half-century been left too much to itself, and agriculture has been too much neglected, exactly as began to be the case in the Roman Empire at the beginning of the second century of the Christian era. It is easy to guess what must be the natural consequence of this lop-sided arrangement. The cities grow bigger; industries increase in number and in size; the luxury and the needs of the masses, crowded together in the cities, augment. On the other hand, there is no proportionate increase in the productiveness of the land. And so the increase in wealth is accompanied by an increasing scarcity of the fruits of the earth; and the things which serve to clothe and feed us—cotton, linen, hemp, wool, cereals, meat, vegetables—nearly all rise in price much more than do manufactured goods. This explains the scarcity that vexes the cities in proportion to their growth in size.
In no country is this phenomenon more apparent and interesting than in the United States. Which of the nations of the world could more easily revel in the most marvellous abundance of everything which it is possible to conceive? The United States has no lack of territories to cultivate; or of capital, which accumulates every year in immeasurable quantity; or of strong arms, Europe providing her with immigrants in the prime of life; or of the spirit of enterprise and of untiring energy. And yet, in no country of Europe are complaints of the expense of living more generally and loudly raised than in the United States. Why? Because in America the disproportion between the progress of the country and that of the cities, between industrial progress and agricultural progress, is even greater than in Europe, the home of populations which for centuries have been accustomed to a country life. Consequently the scarcity is greater and more vexatious in the United States, because the wealth of that country is greater than that of Europe.
Someone will say: “However that may be, if this scarcity which we are experiencing is the most obvious symptom of the excessive urbanisation from which our civilisation is suffering, the suffering cannot be a very serious matter; it must be far from assuming the grave and dangerous aspect which it bore in the time of the Roman Empire. So in this respect also we can consider ourselves lucky; this excessive urbanisation does not cause us more than a certain material uneasiness, which is felt by the middle and lower classes in the cities. In the Roman Empire, on the other hand, it produced a historical catastrophe.” All that is true, without a doubt, but precisely on this account ought the lesson, with which the history of the fall of the Roman Empire is pregnant, to be read and pondered.
In the Roman Empire, too, for a long time, just as now in Europe and America, this excessive urbanisation only occasioned a by-no-means intolerable material uneasiness to the most numerous and poorest classes of town-dweller. In the first and second centuries,—that is to say, in the two most prosperous and splendid centuries of the Empire,—numerous inscriptions remind us of gifts made by rich citizens or precautions taken by the cities to meet the scarcity of victuals which pressed hard upon the poorer classes. It is scarcely necessary to mention Rome in this connection, so notorious is the fact. From the day when it became the metropolis of a vast Empire, the scarcity of victuals became a permanent feature of the city; and the State had to furnish the city with the famous frumentationes, which were, in the last two centuries of the Republic and throughout the Empire, one of Rome’s most serious preoccupations. Mistress of a mighty Empire, Rome was for centuries sure of being obeyed in the most distant provinces by the people that her sword had conquered; but there was never a day in the year when she was sure of keeping the wolf from the door!
In the Roman Empire also, then, for a long time the excessive urbanisation made itself felt in the shape of a troublesome, but by no means intolerable, rise in the cost of living in the cities. Why did it gradually bring about a terrific social dissolution? Because the Roman Empire, instead of leaving its cities to fight down this evil, tried to abolish it by artificial means; and those artificial means it applied ever more and more extensively, the more serious the evil became. The crisis of the cities of the Empire began in the third century, which saw the depopulation of the countryside, and the diminution of agricultural production, while in the cities, on the other hand, victuals were rising in price, and the number of beggars was increasing in a most alarming way. If the State had allowed this crisis to run its natural course, what would have happened? Of course things would of themselves have regained their equilibrium little by little. Part of the urban proletariat, unable to live in the overcrowded cities, and seeing themselves condemned to a sort of chronic famine and gradual extinction, would have returned to work in the fields. When the drain on the population of the countryside becomes too great, the evil admits of only one remedy: and that is, that life in the cities should be allowed to become unbearable to a certain number of the citizens, so that they may be tempted to exchange it for life and work in the fields.
But the Roman State could not bring itself to let the evil follow its natural course. The large cities, beginning with Rome, had too great influence with the Government; and throughout the Empire the city beautiful and rich had come to represent the model of civilisation. Little by little, the State let itself be persuaded to do for each of its cities what it had done for Rome ever since its earliest conception of a world-policy under the delusion that it could thus stave off the impending crisis. With a view to easing the misery of the urban proletariat, it took public works in hand in every direction, regardless of their utility. It distributed victuals free or at half-price. It multiplied philanthropic institutions and encouraged the wealthy families to imitate and to assist it. But all these schemes cost money, which the State could secure only by increasing the taxes on agriculture, while the wealthy families had to spend in the cities the bulk of the wealth which they derived from their country property. The result was that life was artificially made easier and more comfortable in the cities, and harder and more difficult in the country, whereas the natural trend of circumstances would have produced the opposite effect. The evil, treated in so ridiculous a way, became worse. The exodus of the peasants into the cities increased, and brought a corresponding increase in the demands on the public purse for the amelioration of the conditions of city life. The intensification of the evil was met by an increase in the dose of the very remedy which aggravated it—useless expenditure in the cities, ruinous taxes on agriculture. Matters went from worse to worse, until the system reached the limit of its elasticity, and the whole social fabric collapsed in a colossal catastrophe.
This is precisely the mistake which modern civilisation must learn to avoid. The catastrophe of the Roman Empire teaches us moderns one lesson: and that is, that the evil from which the great cities of the civil world are suffering at present is a salutary, health-giving, and beneficent visitation. For it puts a natural brake on the growth of cities and of their luxury, and keeps the population in the fields, where the rise in the price of living brings profit, greater comfort, and improved living in its train. It is, in short, the vis medicatrix naturæ, which tends to restore the balance between agriculture and industry, between the city and the country, a balance which the development of modern civilisation has upset. Therefore all the artificial measures which pretend to mitigate this evil, at the very moment when the force of circumstances demands that this development shall stop, must be pernicious. While they tide over a trifling evil of the moment, they lay up for the future troubles and difficulties and dangers of infinitely greater gravity.
Even if modern civilisation adopted in its entirety the policy pursued by the Roman Empire, and tried to eradicate the evil with the same deadly artificial measures which only aggravated it, there would still doubtless be no ground for fearing a catastrophe in the future analogous to that which overwhelmed Greco-Roman civilisation. Modern civilisation is too vast, too powerful, too deep-rooted, to have any fear of a similar fate. But if not destroyed, modern civilisation might be profoundly shaken and weakened in the event of its imitating the policy of Rome and seeking to favour the cities overmuch at the expense of the country;—all the more shaken and weakened, because, dazzled as we all are by the triumphs of the world in which we live, and by the surface marks of its powers and grandeur, it is much more difficult for us than it was for the ancients in a similar case to discern the signs of old age in it, and the cracks which are spreading in the edifice in which we live.
There is a further lesson to be learned by us moderns from the history of the decadence of the Roman Empire: and that is, not to mistake the glamour of the external manifestations of wealth and power for signs of real wealth and power. A civilisation is not always in reality richer and stronger in times when it bears the most visible marks of so being; we are rather apt to find that, when it is most dazzling in outward seeming, its decadence has already begun. We often halt in stupefaction and admiration before the great ruins of ancient Rome, especially those offered by the European provinces of the Empire. We think how great, powerful, and rich must have been the Empire which could rear monuments so massive that all the centuries have not been able to sweep them entirely from the face of the earth. And yet, if we are to look at these relics in their right light, we must remember that practically all the great Roman monuments whose remains survive to our day on a large scale, belong to the third, fourth, and fifth centuries of the Christian era—to the centuries of decadence and dissolution. As the Empire weakens and ages, its monuments become more and more elaborate and colossal. A fairly safe rule for guessing the century to which Roman monuments belong is to assume that the more imposing the ruins, the later is the epoch to which they should be attributed.
For Rome herself, the time of the greatest expansion, splendour, and population was the middle of the fourth century—that is to say, when her decadence was already far advanced. Not till then did Rome become, for the number and size of her temples, the magnificence of her baths, her basilicas, and her private palaces, for the beauty of her public gardens, for her size and population, the first and most marvellous city of the Empire: the portent which evokes the admiration of the whole world. How much smaller, on the other hand, how much more simple and modest was she in the first century, a time when the Empire really was at its most flourishing epoch, with its frontiers safe, its population on the up-grade, its cities developing themselves by a process of growth which was still a perfectly natural one, agriculture, trade, and industries in a sound condition, and the State well organised and strong.
Nor is this a historical paradox. It is only what always happens to a greater or less extent. In families as in nations and civilisations, ostentation, display, the doing on a grand scale everything, even what might be done on a small scale without detriment, or even advantageously, are a sign of decadence rather than of progress. The passion for the colossal and the enormous is not a healthy passion, nor does it flourish in epochs of strength and sound moral and social equilibrium; it is a passion which thrives in epochs of decadence, epochs convulsed by a deep-seated disproportion between desires and reality, a thirst for excitements and violent sensations, lavish in the expenditure of labour and of wealth to procure a fallacious illusion of grandeur and power, spurred on by a spirit of rivalry and of competition which easily degenerates into false pride.
Not the least of the causes contributing to the maintenance and increase in the ancient cities of that sumptuousness of festivals, ceremonies, and monuments which gradually ruined the Roman Empire was the rivalry between the big, the medium-sized, and the small cities of the Empire, between provinces and districts, between classes, families, professions, sects, and religions. When a city built a theatre, or baths, or a basilica, at once her sister-cities wanted one too, as big or bigger. If a rich family built or endowed a temple or baths, the other families wished to do the same or more. There was a continual competition between the religions to have the finest temple or the most sumptuous ceremonial. That explains why a little city like Verona, for instance, has an enormous amphitheatre, in which the whole population of the city could be accommodated several times over. That explains why the provinces, the cities and private individuals, in this competition of display and magnificence, all showered enormous wealth on that display, wealth which would have been better spent in defending the Empire or in preserving its economic resources. Many of those remains which evoke our admiration to-day meant, in the days when they reared their proud bulk to the sky, the ruin of the Empire!
And now let us search our own consciences. Can we honestly declare that our epoch is untainted by this mania for grandeur and display, this spirit of sterile public and private rivalry, which caused the ancient Roman Empire to squander such vast treasures, and cloaked its fatal decadence with a vesture of splendour? I cannot suppose that our freedom from such taint would be maintained by anyone who remarked the headlong growth of public and private luxury, the ever swelling vanity of nations, professions, and classes, the tendency to mistake in everything the grandeur of colossal proportions for the grandeur of intrinsic virtue. Whoever casts his eyes around him, in America as well as in Europe, sees this impression gaining ground on all sides and acquiring force. It fouls the stream of politics, religion, literature, philosophy and art. It corrupts or transforms the spirit of the upper as well as of the lower classes. Not only that, but there is a prevailing tendency to consider this impression a sign of force, a proof of greatness and of progress. The history of Rome admonishes us, then, to distrust this illusion, and to sound the spirit of our civilisation to its deepest depths—that spirit which to us seems a limpid mirror of perfection, while it is really very much the opposite. If, after twenty centuries of work and study, we find ourselves, fortunate heirs of an ancient civilisation, in a position to live more safely and more comfortably than did our ancestors on this little globe, we are not, therefore, justified in altering the moral values and virtues to suit our pleasures. The vices, the faults, the depraved inclinations of twenty centuries ago remain the same to-day and modern civilisation would be guilty of the gravest of errors if, deaf to the great lesson preached by the ruins of Rome, she boasted of those very defects which destroyed in the ancient world one of the greatest works of human brain and energy that history has to offer.