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Labour was lacking, not only when it came to finding bodies
to serve as pin cushions for javelins, but also for farming
the land and ensuring production in small industries.
Elevated taxes led peasants to abandon fields that were not
sufficiently productive. Selling one's own children into
slavery to pay off one's debts became a widespread practice.
Mobility and the freedom to travel were one of the
advantages of having a single power controlling the entire
Mediterranean basin, but this advantage had by then
disappeared due to the requirements of taxation. Indeed,
Diocletian ordered all of the inhabitants of rural regions
to remain where they were registered in order to simplify
tax collection. The result? "The consequence was that
thousands of men despaired of making an honest living at
all, and went underground to form travelling gangs of
robbers and bandits." (p. 65)
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Administrative centralization |
Greco-Roman civilization, like all great civilizations,
developed first and foremost in the cities. The division of
labour and commercial exchanges required for economic
prosperity, not to mention social and cultural innovations,
can only take place in an urban context. The cities of the
Mediterranean basin remained relatively independent even in
the Hellenistic kingdoms that followed Alexander's conquests,
and even in the early days of the Roman Empire. But as of
the 3rd century, emperors began confiscating city revenues,
reducing their independence, annexing their territories, and
centralizing administration. Stripped of the means required
to maintain their infrastructures, cities entered a period
of economic decline from which they would only emerge a
thousand years later in Europe, beginning in the north of
Italy and in Flanders.
The urban middle class
gradually disappeared, as well as the local leaders of the
city-states who were responsible for the greatness of
earlier ages:
The functions of the city councillors were very
different from what they had been at earlier epochs. At
a time when the growing loss of their cities' autonomy
had caused their actual municipal duties to become
minimal, they instead found themselves virtually
transformed into agents of the central authorities. For
far and away their most important duty nowadays was to
carry out work for the government, and, above all, to
collect its revenues. It was incumbent upon councillors,
and their sons when their turn came, to induce their
fellow-citizens to disgorge the money taxes demanded by
the state, as well as the required levies in kind:
foodstuffs, clothing and the like. Moreover, the
councillors were even required to assist in the
management of imperial mines and estates and to help
call up recruits for the army. (p. 82-83)
Faced with this steadily deteriorating situation, the
government reacted the only way it knew how: with repression.
The state's tyranny expanded, leaders lost their footing,
and the spiral of decadence deepened with every attempt to
end it. In passages like this one, we can see what happens
as any regime comes to an end, in any era:
The outcome of this wildly uncontrollable proliferation
of dishonest bureaucracy was shocking. Administration
was paralysed. Remedies, if applied at all, proved
ludicrously ineffective. Ten years after the death of
Valentinian I, public criticism of these defects had
become so loud that the authorities, in an absurd act of
self-defence, pronounced it an act of sacrilege even to
discuss the merits of anyone chosen by an Emperor to
serve him. For the government was all too clearly aware
of the bureaucrats' corruption, as well as of their
power. It sought to combat such practices by frequent
and strident edicts, regulations and warnings.
Successive rulers threatened their officials with fines,
banishment and torture and even death. In 450
Valentinian III specifically denounced tax collectors
and a wide range of other financial officials. Then
Majorian, too, assailed them in menacing and even
insulting terms. But all this was clearly not of the
slightest avail.
Nor did the principal
administrative remedy to which Emperors resorted prove
any more helpful. This was ever intenser centralization,
which not only slashed personal freedom still further
but harnessed the government with increasing
responsibilities which it was quite unable to carry. (p.
92).
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When the Empire becomes a
military camp |
In a few chapters in the final part of this short book―just
235 pages long―Grant focuses on other social, psychological,
or religious causes that may have aggravated or accelerated
the fall of the Empire. Still, the central pillar of his
argument is excessive statism. An Austrian school economist
would no doubt have elaborated upon the analysis of the
devastating effects of the manipulation of the money supply
on the economy, or upon other aspects of the dreadful
imperial administration. But libertarian historians are not
found on every street corner, and this volume is above all
else intended to serve as an overview of this historical
period for the general public, not as an academic analysis.
This book deserves to be
read by anyone interested in learning about the major
currents of History and in drawing lessons to apply today.
Of its genre, it is also one of the best books for the
libertarian reader interested in Greco-Roman Antiquity, who
usually has to contend with authors who are either
explicitly socialist or who clearly understand nothing about
economics. The following three paragraphs, from the opening
of the chapter entitled "The People against the Bureaucrats",
do an admirable job, all by themselves, of illustrating the
classical liberal perspective on this crucial period of the
history of our civilization:
So throughout the last two centuries of the Roman world
there was a fearful and ever-increasing loss of personal
freedom for all, except the very rich and powerful. Ever
since the arch-regimenter Diocletian declared that 'uncontrolled
activity is an invention of the godless,' each of the
leading rulers in turn hammered the nails in more
fiercely. The Roman Empire had become a prison: or a
military camp in a perpetual state of siege, where each
man was assigned a place he must not desert. And his
descendants must not desert it either.
And so the whole of the
population was in conflict with the government: there
was disunity, or rather a whole series of disunities, on
a colossal scale. The authorities desired and enforced
the very greatest degree of regimentation that it was
possible to obtain―even if this meant servitude for
almost everybody―since this seemed the only way to raise
the money needed to save the Empire.
And yet the result was
just the opposite to what was intended. Paradoxically,
this regimentation did not halt the disintegration of
the Roman world, but accelerated its destructive
progress. The individual spirit of initiative that alone
could have kept the commonwealth alive was stifled and
stamped out by the widespread deprivation of personal
freedom, which thus became one of the most potent
reasons for Rome's collapse. (p. 89)
In short, this is a book whose relevance is beyond question.
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Michael Grant is probably the foremost contemporary populariser of Greco-Roman
history. One can easily find one or another of his twenty or so published
volumes in the History section of any bookstore. His writing does not reveal any
libertarian sympathy, at least not in the four or five books I have read. His
The Twelve Caesars is even rather kind toward the tyrants of the early
Empire. But in The Fall of the Roman Empire
