CHAPTER 12.—BARBARIANS EVERYWHERE.

Throughout the long span of its existence, the Roman Empire was surrounded by barbarians. This was not so much a misfortune as a matter of terminology: it was pretty much inevitable once you defined everyone who did not speak Greek or Latin as a “barbarian.”

Some of these barbarians were harmless; but most of them were hostile, because the Roman Empire had a strong tendency to absorb any neighbor that lacked an inclination to fight vigorously. In practice, that meant that civilized nations with something to lose became Roman, whereas nomadic or half-settled tribes whose few possessions were portable were more inclined to pick a fight. Only in the east, where Parthians or Persians (depending on the era) maintained a substantial empire of their own, did the Roman Empire face equally civilized neighbors, which is to say neighbors who also had a large and expensive bureaucracy to support.

The Romans and Parthians (or Persians) had an ideal relationship from the point of view of both governments. There was usually some sort of fight going on between them, but it always ended with a treaty that put the borders back where they had been before the fight started, or at least pretty close. Both sides had cities they would rather not see destroyed and crops they were hoping to harvest, so there was a natural limit to the risks they were willing to take. Thus the various Persian (or Parthian) wars provided constant employment for the military on both sides without creating too much inconvenience for the average citizen. War of that sort is the engine of civilization: it keeps the citizens just fearful enough that they do not question the need for a large and expensive government, but it does not kill or impoverish enough of them to make a serious dent in the tax revenues.

On the other hand, the less civilized tribes that hovered on the northern borders of the Roman Empire had no governments to speak of, no tax base to protect; they were always in a good position to risk everything, because, if they lost, they could simply retreat and find somebody weaker to beat up on.

One of the differences between barbarism and civilization is that civilized peoples generally feel compelled to manufacture some excuse for war, whereas barbarians think it inexcusable not to be at war. This difference gives the barbarians a certain flexibility that the civilized nations lack. When a civilized nation decides to attack a neighbor whose destruction might prove profitable, it is necessary first to send embassies to the proposed enemy to tell him how rotten he’s been and to give him an opportunity to avert his own destruction by complying with certain conditions that have been deliberately made intolerable. The enemy’s refusal must then be received before the attack can be made with a clear conscience. Barbarians, on the other hand, need no other excuse than boredom to attack the nearest target. The fact that a neighbor exists is reason enough to fight him.

Thus the barbarians on the borders of the Roman Empire were always sweeping into unsuspecting provinces and killing everyone who had committed the dreadful crime of being there. Having made off with all the portable possessions of the provincials, as well as the cattle, women, children, and other livestock, they would sweep back into their impenetrable forests and get drunk. When they woke up a few days later with a rotten hangover, they would feel exceptionally grumpy and immediately start planning their next outrage against the Roman provincials.

In the time of Augustus, and for some considerable period thereafter, the barbarians knew that, if they tried any of those tricks, they would be soundly thrashed and sent to bed without supper by the invincible Roman legions. Natural selection therefore tended to favor the barbarians who attacked their barbarian neighbors rather than the Roman provinces. But during the Age of the Revolving Door, the legions were more often employed in propping up the latest would-be emperor than in thrashing the barbarians on the frontier. Meanwhile, the Roman citizens themselves lost their appetite for incessant civil war long before the imperial usurpers did, and service in the legions began to seem less an honor than an intolerable burden. So, on the one hand, the frontiers were often left unguarded as the legions went gallivanting off with some ephemeral emperor; and, on the other hand, the Roman provinces were depopulated by incessant civil war and its disastrous economic effects; and, on the third hand, the recalcitrant Roman citizens left gaps in the army that had to be filled with paid barbarian mercenaries. After a while, the barbarians outside the empire began to notice—for they were not entirely dim—that many desirable lands within the empire were nearly uninhabited, and that the provinces that were still wealthy and well populated were scarcely guarded, and that the parts that were still guarded were guarded by hired barbarians who might well be cousins or old school chums of the barbarians they were supposed to be keeping out. Thus a monotonous catalogue of barbarian invaders began to pour through the leaky frontiers, sometimes to plunder, but sometimes to stay.

Constantine brought some stability to the empire, which was bad luck for barbarians; but his successors were less stable than he was, giving the barbarians more and more opportunities to chip away at the empire. Theodosius—whose moderate competence was so refreshing that it earned him the title “the Great”—came up with a rather clever scheme for dealing with the more intransigent barbarian invaders: he declared them “foederati,” or allies, and pretended to have invited them to settle on the lands they had already seized anyway. In return for a certain annual payment of protection money, the barbarians agreed to pretend that the emperor had some authority over them; the emperor, for his part, agreed not to try to exercise that authority.

Theodosius was the last emperor to rule the whole Roman Empire. On his death it was divided between his two sons, Arcadius in the east and Honorius in the west. Of Arcadius there is little to say: he was merely another in a long line of moderately incompetent Eastern emperors. But Honorius is one of the most important figures in history. In fact, he is a great gaping black hole in history, one that nearly succeeded in sucking history itself into the depths of its inky nothingness. At the beginning of his reign, Honorius controlled the whole western half of the Roman Empire; by the end of his reign, the Roman Empire in the West had been reduced to the imperial palace at Ravenna and its associated parking lots. No other figure in history has ever made quite so little out of so much.

The key to Honorius’ personality is that he was a bit of a poultry fancier. He had no real interest in administering an empire, but he did sincerely love his fancy chickens. The city of Rome held no appeal for him, but he had a chicken named Rome of which he thought a great deal. Thus when Alaric led his great horde of barbarians into Italy and threatened to attack Rome itself, Honorius stayed in Ravenna and played with his chickens. When Alaric’s horde sacked Rome, someone brought Honorius the news: “Rome is destroyed!” “What?” the emperor sputtered. “She was just eating out of my hand an hour ago!” How relieved he was to learn that it was only Rome the city and not Rome the chicken!

Allowing Rome to be sacked was the career-topper in a long string of memorable accomplishments for Honorius. No other Roman emperor had ever managed it: the city had not been entered by a foreign foe for eight hundred years. We could hardly find another emperor who had had such an important effect on the history of the world: in fact, anyone who looks at the matter objectively would have to put Honorius near the top of the list of most important world leaders of all time.

After Alaric had sacked Rome, every barbarian and his dog wanted in on the action. Barbarian hordes washed across the landscape from east to west and from west to east again, sometimes splashing into each other. For a while Attila the Hun, so called because he was a Hun, cowed most of the other barbarian chiefs enough to make himself the master of an enormous barbarian empire. Attila ravaged provinces whenever he got bored, and demanded enormous payments from the Roman emperors for the privilege of having their provinces ravaged. Emperors cowered before him; or, rather, they cowered from a safe distance, sending disposable ambassadors whenever any more direct cowering was required. When Attila set his sights on the city of Rome, the emperor Valentinian III politely stepped out of the way; but the Bishop of Rome, Leo, paid a visit to Attila and whispered something in his ear that made him turn around and gallop back home. No one knows exactly what Leo said; but some historians, pointing out that Huns, unlike Romans, wore trousers, suggest that it may have been “Your fly is undone.” At any rate, it was clear to the general population, or what was left of it, that a bishop was now worth a great deal more than an emperor when it came to getting things done.

Attila died of a hangnail shortly after that, but the barbarians were everywhere, both inside and outside the empire. The Roman army was almost entirely barbarian, and the barbarian general Ricimer was placed in charge of the increasingly irrelevant business of choosing the Emperor of the West. Although in many respects a skillful general, Ricimer was indecisive when it came to emperors: his favorite today was a headless corpse tomorrow, and not one of his candidates lasted long enough to do anything memorable—nor would Ricimer have tolerated a memorable emperor. After Ricimer was killed, other barbarian chiefs took on the duty of nominating and executing emperors, until the only emperor left was a little boy with the impossibly ironic name of Romulus. In the year 476, the latest successful barbarian, a fellow called Odoacer or Odovakar (the man couldn’t spell his own name to save his life), decided he could do without an emperor altogether and offered Romulus an early retirement package.

This is the event that generations of schoolchildren have learned to call the Fall of the Roman Empire. But it did not appear to be any sort of fall at the time: it was merely another minor shuffling in the management structure. Instead of two ineffectual emperors, there would be only one ineffectual emperor now, the one in Constantinople. Odoacer put the face of the Eastern emperor on his coins and ruled Italy in his name. It was true that the emperor did not effectively control the West, but no emperor had effectively controlled the West for almost a century.

Nor was this “Fall of Rome” the beginning of the Dark Ages, as schoolchildren have also learned for generations. The Dark Ages began, not when the Roman Empire lost control of Rome, but when she gained it back.

—

Next: Civilization Destroys Civilization.

On this day in 1982, the first computer virus was launched into the wild in the southern suburbs of Pittsburgh. This was part of a long effort by people in the Pittsburgh area to destroy Western civilization, a campaign whose innovations also included the drive-in gas station, the movie theater, bingo, talk radio, the pull-tab beer can, and the Big Mac.

…that Richard Nixon refused to release his golf scores to a Senate committee in 1974, instead sending an audio tape of Henry Kissinger reading from the allegedly original scorecards?

…that the saxophone was invented as an agricultural implement?

…that King Alfred the Great wrote a three-volume novel entitled Miss Whorple’s Confession, but it was rejected by his publisher as being not commercial enough?

…that the Internet was originally designed to make sure the Department of Defense had access to the national strategic stockpile of cat pictures even in the event of a nuclear war?

…that up to six crows are called a “murder,” but seven or more are called a “strategic interdiction”?

Production of certain other books having taken priority, this project was suspended for a short time. It is now resumed. Links to the previous chapters follow at the end of this one.

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CHAPTER 11.—THE ROMAN EMPIRE DECLINES AND FALLS FOR 1500 YEARS STRAIGHT.

To understand how civilization overcame the threat of Christianity and in fact triumphed against all odds, it will be necessary to go back a little and look at the history of the Roman Empire after the time of Augustus. It is regrettably impossible to make a strictly chronological history, because the people of the world have steadfastly refused to do one thing at a time in a tidy and organized manner. Perhaps in the future, when the leaders of the civilized world are making their plans, they will remember the convenience of historians, and will be sure to bring one trend or movement to a satisfactory conclusion before beginning another. Until that happy day, however, the historian is forced to leap back and forth like a square dancer.

Augustus left an empire at peace to his successors, along with a healthily inefficient bureaucracy and an atmosphere of snarling suspicion in the imperial household. The wisdom of the government he established is proved by the fact that he was succeeded by a line of alternating imbeciles and madmen, yet—outside of the imperial household and the very upper crust of the social soufflé—the empire continued to hum along in peace and prosperity. The Christians were not yet numerous enough to be a serious nuisance, and the bureaucracy was lazy and intransigent enough that no madness in the palace could trickle down more than a layer or two without being hopelessly diluted.

Thus begins the period known to history as the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as described in one of the most celebrated historical works ever written, Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. According to Gibbon, the Empire began to decline and fall with its establishment in 33 b.c., and continued its uninterrupted decline until 1453 a.d., when the Turks finally captured Constantinople. The Romans, who did everything on a grand scale, still hold the record for longest continuous decline and fall in history.

After a brief experiment with wise emperors, including Marcus Aurelius, who spent most of his reign polishing aphorisms, the empire entered a period known to historians as the Age of the Revolving Door, when new emperors entered the palace at noon, and their mangled corpses were tossed out the door by tea time. The lack of stability at the top seeped through even into the lower levels of the Roman bureaucracy, and the treasury was deplete by the lavish donatives each fresh emperor distributed to buy the loyalty of the soldiers. The soldiers, being no fools, quickly learned that a high turnover rate meant high profits, and made sure to keep the door revolving.

At last a strong emperor entered the palace and stayed there for a while: his name was Diocletian, and he was one of those politicians with a plan that cannot possibly fail. His idea was to divide the Roman Empire into two main parts,west and east, with an Augustus for each half. Each Augustus would pick some bright young man to be his understudy, the Caesar. After a certain number of years, the Augusti would retire, and the Caesars would take their places, appointing Caesars of their own. Clearly such a system was flawlessly conceived and would give the empire centuries of stability. In practice, of course, it all fell apart as soon as Diocletian retired. Soon there were six Augusti running around; and that (as you have read in the previous chapter) was when Constantine decided to seize the opportunity presented by the hitherto untapped Christian demographic.

There is every reason to believe that Constantine actually believed the creed he professed. The surest indication is that he postponed his baptism until the end of his life: he was counting on baptism to wash away his sins, but he was also counting on getting in many productive years of sinning first. There were wars to be fought, rivals to eliminate, and family members to murder in the middle of the night. It might have scored some points with his Christian supporters if he had been baptized at once, but it was not worth the risk.

Here we see already how the forces of civilization were cleverly mounting their campaign to neutralize the Christian menace. Constantine had accepted the teachings of Christ, but Civilization whispered in his ear that Christian doctrine was not compatible with effective government. An emperor had a certain responsibility to see to it that the public thing (the Romans still had not thought of a name for it) was not troubled by rivalry for the throne, and the only effective way to prevent rivalry was to destroy potential rivals. Yes, it was against the teachings of Christ; but baptism will wash away those sins, and really it is almost an act of Christian charity to make sure that the ordinary people of the empire can go about their ordinary lives without being haunted by the specter of civil war.

When it came time to confront Constantine’s heirs, the forces of civilization moved on to the next stage of their campaign. You need not trouble yourself with fruitless scruples, they told the emperor. The governing powers are instituted by God, and it is therefore the emperor’s religious duty to take effective measures to keep himself in power. Rivals must be eliminated, because their wicked plots run counter to the divine will that placed you on the throne. You may be confident that, when you are most ruthless in rooting out these plots and destroying their perpetrators, even when they are members of your own family, that is when you show yourself as truly Christian.

Thus it took civilization only two generations to bring Christianity around to its own side, making the dangerous faith a willing collaborator in maintaining that constant state of terror that makes effective government possible. The most revolutionary teachings of Christ—love your enemies, turn the other cheek, and all those provocative sayings about rich people—turned out to be absolutely compatible with civilization, once they were properly interpreted. Torture, murder, and massacre were part of an emperor’s Christian duty to govern the subjects whom God had placed in his charge. Looked at this way, Christianity was actually good for civilization. Would it be showing genuine love for one’s enemies to allow them to continue in sin by defying God’s anointed authority? Was it not necessary for the good of their own souls that they should be brought back to the straight and narrow path by the threat of torture or death? And would those threats not lose all their good effects if it were known that they would not be carried out? In fact, would one not have borne false witness if one failed to carry them out? And was it not necessary to accumulate an enormous stock of earthly treasure in order to be able to carry out those threats when it became necessary?

Not content with going down in history as the man who reconciled Christianity with civilization, Constantine made one more drastic innovation: he moved the capital of his empire to Byzantium, a little Greek city that had the advantage of a nearly impregnable natural position. Constantine, who had Alexander’s taste in names, called his new capital Constantinople, and built it up into a magnificent new Rome.

But where did that leave the old Rome? It was still a big city, but it was not the city anymore. In fact, the time was soon coming when it would be perfectly possible to be a Roman emperor without ever having seen Rome. Even when the empire was divided into eastern and western halves, the western emperors preferred to make Milan or Ravenna their capital. Rome found itself condemned to a fate worse than decline: it was lapsing into irrelevance. Decades could pass without an emperor setting foot in the city. And if part of the empire had to be sacrificed to an invader—well, thought the emperors, better Rome than Ravenna.

—

The chapters previously published:

Chapter 1.

FROM THE CREATION OF THE UNIVERSE TO THE DAWN OF CIVILIZATION.

Chapter 2.

THE DEFINITION AND CHARACTER OF CIVILIZATION.

Chapter 3.

THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS, FURNISHING AND DECORATING THE AFTERLIFE SINCE 3150 B.C.

Chapter 4.

THE LESS MARKETABLE ANCIENT CIVILIZATIONS.

Chapter 5.

THE ISRAELITES DISCOVER MONOTHEISM AND SPEND MOST OF THE REST OF THEIR HISTORY TRYING TO BACK OUT OF IT.

Chapter 6.

THE ANCIENT GREEKS LIVE THE EXAMINED LIFE.

Chapter 7.

THE ANCIENT GREEKS INVENT HISTORY.

Chapter 8.

ALEXANDER RUNS OUT OF WORLDS TO CONQUER.

Chapter 9.

WHILE ROME CONQUERS THE WORLD, GREECE CONQUERS ROME.

Chapter 10.

CHRISTIANITY RUINS EVERYTHING.

The young Duke of Blythering, when he was about eight years of age, used to throw servants at his mother until she gave him sultana pudding.

Eva and Ivy Blunt, twin sisters in Roanoke, have made more than five hundred prank calls to the same tobacconist. It is because of their activities that the shop has stopped carrying Prince Albert tobacco entirely.

Famous child star Biffy Spindle has had three of her make-up artists drawn and quartered.

King Ethelred II, who was ten years old when he became King of England, delayed getting dressed for his coronation so long that he had to be crowned in his pajamas, and was ever afterward known as “Ethelred the Unready.”

Candace Shiras Wenzell-Neeld, heir to the Neeld confetti fortune, calls everyone she meets “Shirley.”

Two children with a homemade brigantine conquered Canada some years ago and ruled as absolute dictators for most of the summer.

Ruby Pontchartrain Wrack, a student in Miss Pander’s fourth-grade English class, wilfully and persistently reads at a seventh-grade level, in spite of her teacher’s best efforts to stop her.

Having come across this little amusement in a French book, Dr. Boli thought he might translate it for the benefit of readers to whom French is a difficult subject.

During the time when, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the Protestants in France who would not abjure their faith were under persecution, an English ambassador asked Louis XIV for the liberty of those who were detained because of their religion.

The monarch responded, “What would the King of England say if I asked him for the prisoners held at Newgate?” (Newgate is a prison in London where common criminals are incarcerated.)

“Sire,” replied the ambassador, “the king my master would hand them over to Your Majesty, if you claimed them as your brothers.”

——Eugène Muller, Curiosités Historiques et Littéraires. This new translation is explicitly released into the public domain.

It is a curious fact of Roman imperial history that, whenever a man named Germanicus seemed poised to assume the purple, he came to a bad end.

Germanicus Julius Caesar, the wildly popular adopted son of Tiberius, died in suspicious circumstances in Asia, probably assassinated on the orders of his own adoptive father. As if that were not bad enough, his son was Caligula and his grandson was Nero.

Marcus Julius Publius Flavius Germanicus took poison when his name was misspelled on the pedestal of a statue erected to him by order of the Senate.

Marcus Flavius Publius Julius Constantinus Germanicus was murdered by his own mother during a heated dispute over the etymology of the word epistasis.

Flavius Julius Marcus Sabbatius Trajanus Frigidarius Germanicus was found strangled to death with the Empress Theodora’s apron strings.

Silvio P. Germanico, “The Last of the Augusti,” declared himself Emperor of the Romans during the celebrations after a victory of A. C. Milan over Perugia, attracting several dozen loudly enthusiastic followers. He was arrested for obstructing traffic and fined 18 euros. He is now employed in the telephone-sales division of a Milanese company that manufactures inferior ballpoint pens for the American 99¢-store market.

ON THIS DAY in 1979, Iranian students took over the United States embassy in Tehran and held the occupants hostage for more than a year. This was the beginning of a very successful work-study program in which Iranian students spent their time learning vital life skills in real-world situations rather than memorizing dates and formulas in a drab and sterile classroom.

Once upon a time there was a pleasant little celebration called Halloween, which occurred on the evening of October 31. Children would dress in improvised costumes as ghosts or witches and parade from door to door, receiving apples or homemade cookies from the delighted neighbors, and returning home to popcorn and hot chocolate with the family.

But somehow, through the unspeakable influence of the almighty dollar, the demons of capitalism turned the homey one-night celebration into a commercial extravaganza occupying two months of the calendar and second only to Christmas in the filthy lucre it brings into the pockets of the robber barons. Now Halloween costumes are sold in vast emporia that spring up all over the suburbs like poisonous mushrooms, and children are warned by television and newspapers never to accept fruit or homemade treats, the warnings reinforced by horror stories straight out of the Brothers Grimm involving children who were injured or poisoned by wicked ogres with delicious-looking apples and brownies. These stories, if one follows them back to their source, inevitably turn out to have been supplied to the media by associations of packaged-candy manufacturers.

This is without qualification the scariest story Dr. Boli has ever heard.