On January 2, 2024, the Daily Sceptic featured a post, ‘What Ancient Rome Can Teach Our Fearful Age’.

Guy de la Bédoyère recaps the four centuries after the birth of Christ in the Empire. Most of us will know the main events that led to its downfall, including vice and corruption.

However, there are also other elements to explore.

Crime

Even in the decades following St Paul’s death, crime was a preoccupation with Romans. One of them was spiking with poisoned needles (emphases mine):

During the reign of Domitian (81-96) there had been an outbreak of a sinister new offence, not only in Rome but also elsewhere. The perpetrators’ modus operandi was to spread poison on needles and then prick anyone they could with them. This extraordinary story of the original spikers sounds like something from the Sherlock Holmes stories, but Rome had no celebrated sleuth, fictional or otherwise, to solve the crimes. The result was that many victims died, most of them unaware of what had happened to them.

Some of the needle killers were informed on, caught and punished. The mystery is what the motive was. The historian Dio, who recorded the outbreak, suggests it was some sort of crooked business, but there is no suggestion that the murderers were after money. The wave may have been driven by nothing more than a malicious desire to spread panic. If so, it succeeded.

There was already a lot of crime in Rome by then that made the capital sound like an early version of New York City. The poet Juvenal wrote:

When your house is closed, and your shop locked up with bar and chain, and everything is quiet you’ll be robbed by a burglar, or perhaps a cut-throat will wipe you out quickly with his blade.

Oddly enough, the upper classes comprised the greatest number of brigands:

Lethal violence could erupt without warning, to say nothing of the Roman habit of hurling broken pots out of the window. Oddly, the available evidence suggests that much the most dangerous cutthroats were often young men from aristocratic families.

Juvenal said that there were so many such hazards in Rome that anyone who went out to dinner without making a will first was guilty of sheer negligence. The poet Horace mentioned how easy it was to be taken for a fool by a beggar loitering at any one of Rome’s numerous road junctions pretending to be lame.

Weather

Weather also created a climate of panic:

Pliny the Younger, wrote to a friend after experiencing a terrible storm. “Here [in Rome] we have incessant gales and repeated floods. The Tiber had burst its banks and wrecked homes and many people injured and killed.”

Pliny the Younger finished up, “When disaster is actual or expected, the effect is much the same, except that suffering has its limits but apprehension has none. Suffering is confined to the known event, but apprehension extends to every possibility.”

Here is the lesson for us:

He couldn’t have described the fear and despair promoted at every opportunity in our own time better. The only difference is that now it’s turned into an industry.

Migration

However, what the article did not explore were the reasons for the Western Roman Empire’s decline in the fifth century.

History tells us that Rome depended increasingly on foreign imports into its military, men who did not necessarily share Roman values:

For most of its history, Rome’s military was the envy of the ancient world. But during the decline, the makeup of the once mighty legions began to change. Unable to recruit enough soldiers from the Roman citizenry, emperors like Diocletian and Constantine began hiring foreign mercenaries to prop up their armies. The ranks of the legions eventually swelled with Germanic Goths and other barbarians, so much so that Romans began using the Latin word “barbarus” in place of “soldier.”

While these Germanic soldiers of fortune proved to be fierce warriors, they also had little or no loyalty to the empire, and their power-hungry officers often turned against their Roman employers. In fact, many of the barbarians who sacked the city of Rome and brought down the Western Empire had earned their military stripes while serving in the Roman legions.

This is how it happened:

The Barbarian attacks on Rome partially stemmed from a mass migration caused by the Huns’ invasion of Europe in the late fourth century. When these Eurasian warriors rampaged through northern Europe, they drove many Germanic tribes to the borders of the Roman Empire. The Romans grudgingly allowed members of the Visigoth tribe to cross south of the Danube and into the safety of Roman territory, but they treated them with extreme cruelty.

According to the historian Ammianus Marcellinus, Roman officials even forced the starving Goths to trade their children into slavery in exchange for dog meat. In brutalizing the Goths, the Romans created a dangerous enemy within their own borders. When the oppression became too much to bear, the Goths rose up in revolt and eventually routed a Roman army and killed the Eastern Emperor Valens during the Battle of Adrianople in A.D. 378. The shocked Romans negotiated a flimsy peace with the barbarians, but the truce unraveled in 410, when the Goth King Alaric moved west and sacked Rome. With the Western Empire weakened, Germanic tribes like the Vandals and the Saxons were able to surge across its borders and occupy Britain, Spain and North Africa.

A Free Library review of Oxford historian Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire provides more detail, which also involves food security. While crops failed in what we know of as today’s Italy, further-flung areas of the empire saw much better crop production. The hordes eventually took advantage of this situation:

Some historians have argued … that this was actually a time when agriculture in important areas of the empire, especially in Italy, was failing. To make this claim they point to the fact that tremendous amounts of agricultural produce were brought to Rome from the empire’s North African provinces, rather than grown locally. Moreover, it is historical orthodoxy to hold that the later empire overtaxed its land-owning class, causing a flight from the land that resulted in the infamous Agri Deserti, the phenomenon of the “deserted lands.”

This phenomenon no doubt did occur in some areas. Ancient texts make reference to it, and historians were quick, too quick it seems, to assume this applied to the empire as a whole. Heather cites archaeological evidence to the contrary. Some areas, he points out, experienced rapid and intense agricultural and rural growth. In Roman North Africa, Greece, the Near East and elsewhere, agriculture flourished. In these areas, Heather writes, “the fourth and fifth centuries have emerged as a period of maximum rural development–not minimum, as the orthodoxy would have led us to expect.”

The economy of the Roman Empire was grounded in agriculture; the power of the state, militarily, reflected this economy. If the agricultural sector was strong, the state’s coffers would be full, and the military, largely the only full-scale service provided by the Roman State, would be correspondingly strong. In fact, the military of the Roman Empire in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, just when it was supposedly on the decline according to orthodox historical interpretation, was in reality near its zenith.

It is worth noting that:

at the beginning of the fourth century, at the end of the reign of the Emperor Diocletian, the Romans could field an army of at least 300,000 men. Moreover, this was a well-trained army that could fight a two-front war, and it did so not long after, against the Goths in the West and the Persians in the East.

When the Goths arrived at Rome, although they were mistreated, the Romans needed the manpower:

In a sense, their timing was perfect. The Romans were deeply embroiled in the East with a resurgent Persian empire. The Balkans were, therefore, a bit short on manpower. Under the circumstances, the Emperor Valens was forced to admit the Gothic horde.

However, food security caused an internal war:

All went well until food supplies ran short and tempers flared. There was an attack on the emperor at a banquet and soon there was war, which raged for six years.

From the time of this conflict, known as the Gothic War, until the fall of the Roman Empire, continuous pressure from the Huns would force other barbarians to move en masse across the Western Empire. Throughout the book, Heather examines the empire’s continuing attempts to repel or at least contain the onslaught. More often than not, they were successful in battle, but each success (and sometimes spectacular failure) sapped the strength of the giant. Soon Gaul was overrun, and Spain, too.

Eventually, the hordes invaded North Africa, the empire’s breadbasket:

The real blow came when Goths and Vandals crossed into North Africa and took over the Roman provinces there. Loss of these provinces would mean loss of the West, and the combined forces of all the empire were sent to recover the area. Just before making landfall near Carthage, the Roman fleet was trapped and destroyed by a Vandal fleet.

Conclusions

The Free Library‘s review comes to these conclusions from Peter Heather’s book:

There are two major lessons to be learned from the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, and these are made apparent in Heather’s book. First and foremost is the danger of uncontrolled hostile immigration. That the empire could absorb large groups of immigrants is beyond doubt. It could and did do so over several centuries. But even the Roman Empire, with its vast territory and unprecedented wealth, had a limit to the number of people it could absorb and Romanize.

Eventually, the immigrants grew more powerful than the existing Roman authority and, maintaining to some degree their independence of spirit and character, were unwilling to relinquish their own culture and adopt the Roman. Vast blocs of once-Roman territory eventually became foreign and even the preexisting Roman population, eventually outnumbered, had to make peace with the newcomers.

As for Christianity being to blame, as Edward Gibbon wrote in the 18th century:

it has been the norm to see in the fall of the empire the supposedly pernicious role of the new Christian religion. Heather’s book, taken as a whole, is a marvelous corrective for this mistaken position. There can be no doubt, after reading Heather, that the West, at the height of its power, succumbed to successive waves of hostile immigrants.

Heather also makes the point that if Christianity were to blame, then the empire in the East, based at Constantinople, should not have continued for almost a millennium after the fall of the West. After all, the Eastern Empire was just as Christian as the West, and was even closer to the scene of the many early doctrinal controversies. And yet the sun did not set on the Eastern Empire of the Romans until 1453.

Lessons for us

We are seeing parallels to empathetic immigration in all Western countries, including Australia, as Patrick Christys featured on his GB News programme on Thursday, January 5:

Christys’s intro is about the Archbishop of Canterbury, who has just come into an inheritance of £2.4m from his late mother’s estate. As Britons know, Archbishop Welby wants compassion to be extended to all coming across the Channel in small boats. Christys suggests that Welby use his inheritance to personally house these economic migrants, known for tossing their papers and mobile phones overboard into the Channel before arriving on our shores.

At the 20:00 point, Christys interviews The Spectator Australia‘s Alexandra Marshall who wonders why immigrants are occupying such a large swathe of the nation’s cities and nearby suburbs while indigenous Australians have been pushed out to the exurbs in the past decade. Alexandra Marshall knows, because she lives in a nearby suburb of Sydney in a largely immigrant neighbourhood. An associate professor at the University of Queensland, Dr Dorina Pojani, said that it was because of the pandemic. Marshall counters that she herself had been living in that neighbourhood for several years before the pandemic and saw it change. She also does not think that Australians who have lived all their lives near Sydney should be priced out of the housing market.

Pojani brushed away Marshall’s experience in a rather dismissive tone. It should be noted that Dr Pojani is Albanian and, interestingly enough, lectures on Urban Planning.

Hmm.

Food for thought.