The Fall of the Roman Empire by Michael Grant Page A

exactions to the increase of their private fortunes and made the tax indictions their opportunity for plunder?
Like wild beasts, instead of governing those put under their power, the officials have devoured them, feeding not only on their belongings as ordinary brigands would do, but even on their torn flesh and their blood. Thus it has come to pass that men who were strangled and half killed by brutal exactions began to be really barbarians, since they were not permitted to be Romans. They were satisfied to become what they were not, since they were no longer allowed to be what they had been; and they were compelled to defend their lives as best they could, since they saw that they had already completely lost their liberty.
    How does our present situation differ from theirs? Those who have not before joined the Bagaudae are now being compelled to join them. The overwhelming injuries poor men suffer compel them to wish to become Bagaudae, but their weakness prevents them. So they are like captives oppressed by the yoke of an enemy, enduring their torture of necessity, not of their own choice; in their hearts they long for freedom, while they suffer the extremes of slavery. Such is the case among almost all the lower classes.
    Far distant, whole aeons past it seemed, was that earlier Imperial golden age when, as Ammianus believed, 'high and low alike with united ardour and in agreement had hastened to a noble death for their country, as if to some quiet and peaceful haven'. Those days were indeed gone and had been succeeded by a fundamental, self-destructive lack of any such united ardour. 'Men fight not as they fought in the brave days of old,' Macaulay makes an earlier Roman say in his poem Horatius. But equally serious, in these later days, was their failure to contribute the sums which were necessary if the army was to exist and fight at all.
    This conflict between the authorities and the mass of the people was one of the principal causes of the downfall of the Empire. Karl Marx used this situation to illustrate his point that the classes have no common interests at all, their struggle against one another being essentially illimitable. But Marx also claimed that the specific reason why the Roman Empire fell was because its social pattern, founded on slavery, gave way to a feudal system, which broke down the Imperial structure. It would perhaps be more exact to say that one of the main reasons why the collapse occurred was because the 'free' population, which had to provide most of the Imperial revenue, was so severely ravaged by these tax demands that it could not pay up any longer and, in consequence, ceased to be free at all, so that scarcely a trace of any viable commonwealth survived; and the empty husk of a community which alone remained could no longer resist the invaders.
    Such was the appalling disunity between the government and the vast bulk of its subjects: and indeed between the rich and the poor in general.

4
 
The Rich against the State

    The last chapter discussed the tragic circumstances which set the Roman government on a course of direct conflict with the impoverished majority of its subjects. An equally unhappy outcome awaits a state, when its governmental authorities are in conflict with its upper class. This situation, too, arose violently in ancient Rome - despite all the privileges which that class possessed - and was another of the disunities which contributed to its collapse.
    In the declining Roman Empire the topmost layer of the population mainly consisted of the men entitled to describe themselves as Senators. Under the earlier Emperors the Senate, that advisory council which formerly guided the decisions of the state, had already become a subordinate and somewhat pitiable body. Yet in these days of Imperial decay, there had been a change: and as far as the Senators were concerned it was a change for the better. For even if the Senate itself, as a body, still did not count for very much, its