I am a big Roman history buff, and the question of why the western Roman empire in particular came to an end has been of big interest to me. I thought I'd share my thoughts here and see what others think.
There are a lot of theories as to why Rome fell. Gibbon blamed the decline in civic virtue and the empire's conversion to Christianity (although he was never able to adequately explain how or why the Byzantines, who were even more Christian, survived and prospered for another millennium after the fall of Rome). Richta blamed it on the superior technological innovations of barbarians. Bark and Heather suggest the empire basically died due to the toll wrought by the effort to keep it alive -- the former because of doomed reforms that ushered in the initial trappings of the feudalist system, the latter because of the disastrous toll wrought by the Romans' attempt to confront the rise of the Sassanids in the east. Pirenne and his imitators argue Rome never really fell, it just evolved into feudal Europe, although obviously Rome ceased to exist as a coherent imperial entity and so the Pirrenean thesis is not a valid explanation for why.
I have always tended to favor Arnold Toynbee's reasoning behind the fall of Rome: that the imperial system itself was unworkable, and that the whole of the imperial period was marked by the steady decay of republican-era institutions, virtues, and strengths. The fact that Rome's plunder economy effectively dried up after conquests reached their greatest extent under Trajan did not help.
Lately I've been reading The Roman Emperors by Michael Grant, and one of the things that struck me was how pathetically small most of Rome's emperors were. They were utterly pygmy; I could count the number of actually good, worthwhile rulers on my hands. The system may well have collapsed from the moment of its inception if not for the stewardship of Augustus. Things only got worse as the empire aged and its need for strong leadership grew: Honorius in particular strikes me as among the most flagrantly worthless men in recorded history, and I am convinced that his reign marked the point of no return beyond which nothing short of divine intervention could salvage the empire.
With serious reforms and competent military leadership, the empire may well have survived the economic stagnation and barbarian invasions that ultimately wrecked it (Diocletian's reforms may well have allowed the empire to survive another century). But without a capable emperor to do so -- and by the end, there never was one -- Rome had no hope of continued survival in the face of the hardships that rocked her.
One of the benefits of the republic, as with any heavily-balanced system, is that the worst excesses of its leaders are constrained by the power of other leaders. This was not true in the case of Rome. The closest thing to a check on the power of the emperor was the threat of assassination, and even that rarely served its purpose because there was a good chance the next emperor would be worst than the last. Where victories were won, they were often won by talented generals acting alone -- Aetius and Stilicho -- and not the emperors themselves.
I need to do some more research into the nature of the Byzantine empire to see if they suffered under similarly worthless rulers, but I think this thesis largely holds up.
There are a lot of theories as to why Rome fell. Gibbon blamed the decline in civic virtue and the empire's conversion to Christianity (although he was never able to adequately explain how or why the Byzantines, who were even more Christian, survived and prospered for another millennium after the fall of Rome). Richta blamed it on the superior technological innovations of barbarians. Bark and Heather suggest the empire basically died due to the toll wrought by the effort to keep it alive -- the former because of doomed reforms that ushered in the initial trappings of the feudalist system, the latter because of the disastrous toll wrought by the Romans' attempt to confront the rise of the Sassanids in the east. Pirenne and his imitators argue Rome never really fell, it just evolved into feudal Europe, although obviously Rome ceased to exist as a coherent imperial entity and so the Pirrenean thesis is not a valid explanation for why.
I have always tended to favor Arnold Toynbee's reasoning behind the fall of Rome: that the imperial system itself was unworkable, and that the whole of the imperial period was marked by the steady decay of republican-era institutions, virtues, and strengths. The fact that Rome's plunder economy effectively dried up after conquests reached their greatest extent under Trajan did not help.
Lately I've been reading The Roman Emperors by Michael Grant, and one of the things that struck me was how pathetically small most of Rome's emperors were. They were utterly pygmy; I could count the number of actually good, worthwhile rulers on my hands. The system may well have collapsed from the moment of its inception if not for the stewardship of Augustus. Things only got worse as the empire aged and its need for strong leadership grew: Honorius in particular strikes me as among the most flagrantly worthless men in recorded history, and I am convinced that his reign marked the point of no return beyond which nothing short of divine intervention could salvage the empire.
With serious reforms and competent military leadership, the empire may well have survived the economic stagnation and barbarian invasions that ultimately wrecked it (Diocletian's reforms may well have allowed the empire to survive another century). But without a capable emperor to do so -- and by the end, there never was one -- Rome had no hope of continued survival in the face of the hardships that rocked her.
One of the benefits of the republic, as with any heavily-balanced system, is that the worst excesses of its leaders are constrained by the power of other leaders. This was not true in the case of Rome. The closest thing to a check on the power of the emperor was the threat of assassination, and even that rarely served its purpose because there was a good chance the next emperor would be worst than the last. Where victories were won, they were often won by talented generals acting alone -- Aetius and Stilicho -- and not the emperors themselves.
I need to do some more research into the nature of the Byzantine empire to see if they suffered under similarly worthless rulers, but I think this thesis largely holds up.
