Question
Why did the roman empire decline?
Answer
The answers so far mostly cover the phenomenology of the fall (and I am talking here about Rome proper, not Byzantium). This is rather like noting that at 8:15 PM the patient's liver failed and that at 8:19AM he received a blood transfusion.
There is a lot more phenomenology (there's a reason Gibbon's Decline and Fall is 6 volumes; I've gotten halfway through volume 1). Some of the things that haven't been mentioned include the influence of the Praetorian guard, the practice of each new emperor promising the army a big bonus if elected, the fact that Augustus did some very fundamental things to rig the balance of power in his favor when he set the republic aside, etc.
We could go on and on, and people do. The Romans were nothing if not unbelievably verbose in documenting their own history and leaving stuff all over the place. Data is not lacking, unlike in the case of say, the Hittite empire of the 2nd Millennium BC, which we are only just beginning to understand.
There's a lot of data in fact. So I like to ask a synthesis/holistic theory question rather than a biography question about the specifics. Assuming Rome was an organic entity, how did it die, not how did it fall? Which of the following death analogies is most appropriate?
See where I am going with this? You can finish the list of permutations and combinations. My answer: something between 9 and 10.
Why? You have to zoom out a little bit more and place Rome in the context of the evolutionary history of empires. Let's look at the trajectory in roughly the same region (Near East, North Africa and SE Europe as center)
The oldest so-called empires were nothing of the sort. They were merely the pillage routes of large raiding parties that went on looting sprees. Their catchment area of looting, during the time it took to recover, was called an "empire."
This is a theoretical construct. We know almost nothing about this era of empires. I suspect things like this existed pre-5000 BC.
The next oldest were the gang territory empires. Again, defined by the locus of looting sprees, but these looting sprees were regular, and the loot was taken to a centralized location, where the ganglords built palaces and things. Threat of violence replaced actual violence. Protection money. Violence was like gang warfare. Crips and bloods. Again, theoretical.
The 3rd generation empires are the ones where we actually have historical examples, such as Egyptian and Hittite. They used some of the protection money to actually do things their subjects could not do for themselves. Like provide justice services. This was the first move away from a predatory state to one that actually provided a modicum of welfare value in return. It was still a pretty lousy deal, but at least it was a deal, not theft. Call it an evolution from violently predatory to parasitic with a hint of symbiosis.
The 4th generation empires took this a little further still: Achamedian and Greek (Cyrus, Darius, Alexander). They indulged in state-sponsored knowledge and art creation, which benefited even the slaves of those states.
But until this point, you still basically had a completely predatory-parasitic state that looted, threw a few table scraps off by way of giving back, and occasionally did things for itself (art and knowledge, providing law so it had to do less work enforcing order through violence) that had accidental minor symbiotic benefits for the people. They rarely even set out to "do good for the people" and when they did, they lacked the consent of the governed or the apparatus and institutions of governance (i.e. executive, beyond legislative and judiciary) to do anything significant.
So until this point, states rose and fell, but the host populations largely went about their lives uninterrupted. It was a matter of "pay the reigning gangster, keep your head down during gang wars, grab something for yourself when possible, try to avoid getting conscripted, jump on the gravy-train entourage if you have the stomach for predation."
The rise and fall of states was basically the rise and fall of individual gangsters and their entourages.
Rome changed this equation, and this was its amazing achievement. It was the first state to actually govern in the modern sense of the word, through the consent of the governed and via an apparatus capable of significant governance.
Yeah, the Greeks had lab-experiment democracy, but it was basically for show and theory. Their system was built on top of slavery and predation/parasitism like every other empire that came before.
Rome by contrast, had some states at its borders begging to be absorbed. Even if they couldn't get full citizenship, they wanted to at least be Roman protectorates. Why?
For the first time in history, a state's main focus went beyond looking out for itself to improving (rather than just protecting) the lot of the host population. Sure, the senators and emperors helped themselves to lavish lifestyles. But they also provided free bread and baths for all. Even slaves could have pretty fantastic lives (which could of course end abruptly as well; during one bloody takeover, the entire household of a senator who got in the way of the takeover guys, including some 4000 slaves, was slaughtered).
The consent of the governed may have been acquired through a ponzi scheme, and bread-bribery and bloody gladiatorial spectacles, but the point is, it was acquired. The state thought it important to do so.
The state also created a governance apparatus that was capable of doing what we would today call "deliberately trying to foster macro-economic growth." In other words, Rome didn't just to carve up the pie (redistribute wealth). It tried to grow the pie faster than the unintegrated host populations could on their own (create wealth). Chief among the mechanisms was the system of Roman roads, and the establishment of urban centers with Roman lifestyles all over, to democratize consumption of the bounty that comparative-advantage economics trade could provide.
The effect of this was that localized economics gave way to large scale comparative-advantage economics. Regions could start to specialize and trade. Sure, international trade goes back to the Bronze Age trade in tin, but the scale of participation in an empire-scale internal economy was unprecedented.
Within the Roman empire, it actually meant something to be inside, beyond being looted periodically. It meant you could go to different corners of the world in safety and do different things based on your talents rather than where you were born. Young and restless men could join the legions, see the world, and hope to retire after a couple of decades in a nice little Roman colonial town.
Read the Asterix comics to get a surprisingly accurate sense of what "Rome" meant. Try in particular "Asterix and the Mansions of the Gods," "Asterix and Caeser's Gift" and "Asterix and the Golden Sickle" to get a sense of the globalized world Rome created (the comics are highly anachronistic and mix up 4-5 centuries worth of cultural references within Julius Caesar's reign, but are very revealing nevertheless).
Sure, they didn't get it fully right:
They didn't understand debasement and inflation well, as others have mentioned.
When the later emperors decided to stop growing the empire, they didn't quite appreciate the extent of the effect it would have on their Ponzi-scheme economic model.
One failure particularly interests me, since it links up to the history of India in an interesting way. The Romans didn't quite know how to manage the balance of trade with the rest of the world. They complained, for instance, about the massive trade deficit with India (and to a lesser extent China, which wasn't as integrated into the global economy at that point) which sucked away gold and silver through unbalanced trade because Rome hadn't thought through an export strategy based on the comparative advantage of the empire as a whole, that could influence the foreign trade away from its natural structure.
It wasn't till the British empire created an unholy trade network that Europe finally figured out how to trade with Asia on favorable terms. The first "balancing" solution was, very roughly speaking: grow opium in India to sell to China, use that silver to buy textiles in Bengal, use the textiles to buy slaves in West Africa to send off on the middle passage, return with profits to England. The Romans were actually properly positioned to orchestrate something like this, since they owned Indian-ocean facing ports, but they never properly realized they needed to, as a matter of survival.
But the failures aside, the BIG point here is the successes. Rome was the first empire that managed to do two things:
But of course there were fatal flaws, most of them traceable to mechanisms Augustus put in place right at the birth of the empire.
Hence my "death by birth defect" theory. The defects were strong enough, and the governance mechanisms rudimentary enough, that you might even call it a Frankenstein state that never got to "living" at all, but I think that is too harsh a judgment. During the brief heyday of Pax Romana, this was a legitimate, organic state, not a Frankenstein's monster state.
Empires have continued to evolve since then, but the evolution is still not done. We've eliminated most "birth defects" in modern empires, but we still haven't conquered imperial infectious diseases, let alone imperial diseases of old age. Japan though, might be the first example of a state that will die purely out of old age, along with its aging citizens. So we've come a long way in figuring out governance.
Sadly, America, the dominant empire of today, is still making governance mistakes of the Roman variety. Mistakes that even the British empire managed to avoid. From entitlement Ponzi schemes to drastic underestimation of the effect of the value of the slavery-and-smallpox trust fund on today's macroeconomics, America has both diseases and birth defects. Still, we've come a long way, and I have hope.
The miracle of Rome is not that it died, but that it managed to actually live well for at least a couple of centuries.
There is a lot more phenomenology (there's a reason Gibbon's Decline and Fall is 6 volumes; I've gotten halfway through volume 1). Some of the things that haven't been mentioned include the influence of the Praetorian guard, the practice of each new emperor promising the army a big bonus if elected, the fact that Augustus did some very fundamental things to rig the balance of power in his favor when he set the republic aside, etc.
We could go on and on, and people do. The Romans were nothing if not unbelievably verbose in documenting their own history and leaving stuff all over the place. Data is not lacking, unlike in the case of say, the Hittite empire of the 2nd Millennium BC, which we are only just beginning to understand.
There's a lot of data in fact. So I like to ask a synthesis/holistic theory question rather than a biography question about the specifics. Assuming Rome was an organic entity, how did it die, not how did it fall? Which of the following death analogies is most appropriate?
- It died of old age
- It died of a specific old age disease, like cancer
- It died of a fatal birth defect which eventually caught up with it
- It was murdered
- It was killed in an accident
- It was killed by an enemy in a fight
- It was killed by an enemy in a fight, when it was enfeebled by old age
- It was killed by an enemy in a fight, when it had been weakened by disease
- It was killed by an enemy in a fight, when the consequences of a fatal birth defect made it incapable of resisting
- It was a brittle, un-dead, assembled Frankenstein's monster, never really living in the first place
See where I am going with this? You can finish the list of permutations and combinations. My answer: something between 9 and 10.
Why? You have to zoom out a little bit more and place Rome in the context of the evolutionary history of empires. Let's look at the trajectory in roughly the same region (Near East, North Africa and SE Europe as center)
The oldest so-called empires were nothing of the sort. They were merely the pillage routes of large raiding parties that went on looting sprees. Their catchment area of looting, during the time it took to recover, was called an "empire."
This is a theoretical construct. We know almost nothing about this era of empires. I suspect things like this existed pre-5000 BC.
The next oldest were the gang territory empires. Again, defined by the locus of looting sprees, but these looting sprees were regular, and the loot was taken to a centralized location, where the ganglords built palaces and things. Threat of violence replaced actual violence. Protection money. Violence was like gang warfare. Crips and bloods. Again, theoretical.
The 3rd generation empires are the ones where we actually have historical examples, such as Egyptian and Hittite. They used some of the protection money to actually do things their subjects could not do for themselves. Like provide justice services. This was the first move away from a predatory state to one that actually provided a modicum of welfare value in return. It was still a pretty lousy deal, but at least it was a deal, not theft. Call it an evolution from violently predatory to parasitic with a hint of symbiosis.
The 4th generation empires took this a little further still: Achamedian and Greek (Cyrus, Darius, Alexander). They indulged in state-sponsored knowledge and art creation, which benefited even the slaves of those states.
But until this point, you still basically had a completely predatory-parasitic state that looted, threw a few table scraps off by way of giving back, and occasionally did things for itself (art and knowledge, providing law so it had to do less work enforcing order through violence) that had accidental minor symbiotic benefits for the people. They rarely even set out to "do good for the people" and when they did, they lacked the consent of the governed or the apparatus and institutions of governance (i.e. executive, beyond legislative and judiciary) to do anything significant.
So until this point, states rose and fell, but the host populations largely went about their lives uninterrupted. It was a matter of "pay the reigning gangster, keep your head down during gang wars, grab something for yourself when possible, try to avoid getting conscripted, jump on the gravy-train entourage if you have the stomach for predation."
The rise and fall of states was basically the rise and fall of individual gangsters and their entourages.
Rome changed this equation, and this was its amazing achievement. It was the first state to actually govern in the modern sense of the word, through the consent of the governed and via an apparatus capable of significant governance.
Yeah, the Greeks had lab-experiment democracy, but it was basically for show and theory. Their system was built on top of slavery and predation/parasitism like every other empire that came before.
Rome by contrast, had some states at its borders begging to be absorbed. Even if they couldn't get full citizenship, they wanted to at least be Roman protectorates. Why?
For the first time in history, a state's main focus went beyond looking out for itself to improving (rather than just protecting) the lot of the host population. Sure, the senators and emperors helped themselves to lavish lifestyles. But they also provided free bread and baths for all. Even slaves could have pretty fantastic lives (which could of course end abruptly as well; during one bloody takeover, the entire household of a senator who got in the way of the takeover guys, including some 4000 slaves, was slaughtered).
The consent of the governed may have been acquired through a ponzi scheme, and bread-bribery and bloody gladiatorial spectacles, but the point is, it was acquired. The state thought it important to do so.
The state also created a governance apparatus that was capable of doing what we would today call "deliberately trying to foster macro-economic growth." In other words, Rome didn't just to carve up the pie (redistribute wealth). It tried to grow the pie faster than the unintegrated host populations could on their own (create wealth). Chief among the mechanisms was the system of Roman roads, and the establishment of urban centers with Roman lifestyles all over, to democratize consumption of the bounty that comparative-advantage economics trade could provide.
The effect of this was that localized economics gave way to large scale comparative-advantage economics. Regions could start to specialize and trade. Sure, international trade goes back to the Bronze Age trade in tin, but the scale of participation in an empire-scale internal economy was unprecedented.
Within the Roman empire, it actually meant something to be inside, beyond being looted periodically. It meant you could go to different corners of the world in safety and do different things based on your talents rather than where you were born. Young and restless men could join the legions, see the world, and hope to retire after a couple of decades in a nice little Roman colonial town.
Read the Asterix comics to get a surprisingly accurate sense of what "Rome" meant. Try in particular "Asterix and the Mansions of the Gods," "Asterix and Caeser's Gift" and "Asterix and the Golden Sickle" to get a sense of the globalized world Rome created (the comics are highly anachronistic and mix up 4-5 centuries worth of cultural references within Julius Caesar's reign, but are very revealing nevertheless).
Sure, they didn't get it fully right:
They didn't understand debasement and inflation well, as others have mentioned.
When the later emperors decided to stop growing the empire, they didn't quite appreciate the extent of the effect it would have on their Ponzi-scheme economic model.
One failure particularly interests me, since it links up to the history of India in an interesting way. The Romans didn't quite know how to manage the balance of trade with the rest of the world. They complained, for instance, about the massive trade deficit with India (and to a lesser extent China, which wasn't as integrated into the global economy at that point) which sucked away gold and silver through unbalanced trade because Rome hadn't thought through an export strategy based on the comparative advantage of the empire as a whole, that could influence the foreign trade away from its natural structure.
It wasn't till the British empire created an unholy trade network that Europe finally figured out how to trade with Asia on favorable terms. The first "balancing" solution was, very roughly speaking: grow opium in India to sell to China, use that silver to buy textiles in Bengal, use the textiles to buy slaves in West Africa to send off on the middle passage, return with profits to England. The Romans were actually properly positioned to orchestrate something like this, since they owned Indian-ocean facing ports, but they never properly realized they needed to, as a matter of survival.
But the failures aside, the BIG point here is the successes. Rome was the first empire that managed to do two things:
- Really base governance of a substantive and provable 'consent of the governed' principle that extended well beyond the nominal voting citizenry, rather than 'fear of the gangster'
- Really add enough value through governance to grow beyond being a predatory/parasitic state, with value added at least temporarily exceeding value extracted. A grow-pie/divide-pie state instead of a pure divide-pie state.
But of course there were fatal flaws, most of them traceable to mechanisms Augustus put in place right at the birth of the empire.
Hence my "death by birth defect" theory. The defects were strong enough, and the governance mechanisms rudimentary enough, that you might even call it a Frankenstein state that never got to "living" at all, but I think that is too harsh a judgment. During the brief heyday of Pax Romana, this was a legitimate, organic state, not a Frankenstein's monster state.
Empires have continued to evolve since then, but the evolution is still not done. We've eliminated most "birth defects" in modern empires, but we still haven't conquered imperial infectious diseases, let alone imperial diseases of old age. Japan though, might be the first example of a state that will die purely out of old age, along with its aging citizens. So we've come a long way in figuring out governance.
Sadly, America, the dominant empire of today, is still making governance mistakes of the Roman variety. Mistakes that even the British empire managed to avoid. From entitlement Ponzi schemes to drastic underestimation of the effect of the value of the slavery-and-smallpox trust fund on today's macroeconomics, America has both diseases and birth defects. Still, we've come a long way, and I have hope.
The miracle of Rome is not that it died, but that it managed to actually live well for at least a couple of centuries.