The fall of the West
Simon Raven
The Fall of the Roman Empire A Reappraisal Michael Grant (Thomas Nelson £6.95) The Emperor Julian Robert Browning (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £6.95)
In 330 AD the Emperor Constantine removed the seat of the imperial Roman government to Byzantium, which was renamed as Constantinople. The new capital, though well placed to command the Eastern part of the Empire, was too remote to retain control of the West; and so subordinate Augusti or Caesares were appointed to govern the territories from Britain to Dalmatia. Thereafter the Roman Empire in the West, which still had its capital in Italy (though Rome itself was superseded by Ravenna and Milan), became increasingly careless and even contemptuous of directives issued from the East, until finally there were two independent if nominally allied Emperors, each of whom reigned over his respective portion of the now divided Empire.
The Roman (or the Byzantine) Empire in the East, as chronicled by Gibbon, endured until 1453; but the Empire in the West—the Roman Empire, as most of us would regard it—collapsed nearly 1000 Years earlier, well before the close of the fifth century, smashed to pieces by the barbarians from the North.
Why such a difference in their fates ? It is this question which engages Michael Giant. His story (unlike that of Gibbon, whom he in no way claims to emulate) ends with the deposition of the last Roman Emperor in the West, Romulus Augustus, by the German Odoacer in 476. `A hundred years before this happened,' writes Professor Grant, '[the Western Empire] was an immense power defended by an immense army. A hundred years later. ... its territory was occupied by a group of German kingdoms.' While the Eastern Empire flourished from Macedonia to the Caucasus, the West disintegrated into a chaos of brutal illiteracy and petty feudal vendetta. What had gone Wrong?
First, the West had fecklessly alienated itself from Constantinople, its natural and only ally against the menace from the North, while Constantinople, sick of the West's intransigence, had concentrated on securing its own interests. Secondly, the West, faced by the massed barbarians withOut, had destroyed its capacity for selfdefence by aggravating and indulging its dissensions within. Thus the People hated both the Army which bullied it and the State which extorted the ruinous taxes needed to maintain the bullies. The Army, not content with harassing the People, harassed the State by foisting spurious and short-lived Emperors upon it. The Emperors, whether spurious or legitimate, were too remote from the People to win its affection or its trust, and too uncertain of themselves (and the Army) to dispense with the hordes of bureaucrats, whose venality and conceit made them loathsome to all other orders.
And then, of course, there was Christianity. Long since the official religion of the Empire and fiercely exclusive of all others, Christianity demanded the persecution not only of pagans (many of them farmers who fed the Empire) but also of 'heretics', which term comprehended all men, no matter how loyal to the Empire, who deviated by so much as a hair's breadth from whatever theological absurdity was current among the ecclesiarchs. The ecclesiarchs, finally, who deprecated all concern with the affairs of this world, never ceased to discommode the few honest soldiers and statesmen who still guarded it by bidding them turn their attentions to the next. Those who did so no longer cared what happened to the Empire; the rest anaesthetised themselves with elaborate vices out of sheer desperation at their hopeless predicament.
In one word, the trouble with the West was disunity; disunited internally, and disunited from its one possible ally, it fell apart before the invading Vandals, Huns, Visigoths, Franks and whatnot as easily as a rotten corpse beneath the beaks of vultures.
And now, says Professor Grant, let us all take heed: once again Western Europe is a prey ripe for the barbarians, and once again for much the same reasons. We have snubbed and repudiated our natural ally, this time the USA, until the USA is sickened by our folly and ingratitude. We are internally riven and wasted, just as was the ancient Empire in the West, by swollen and often corrupt bureaucracies, by disillusionment with the lofty remoteness of our rulers from our day to day concerns, by hatred of taxes which are inequitably exacted and then prodigally expended, by the bigoted self-righteousness of those who preach the state religion (Socialism), by official denigration of good men who speak 'unacceptable' truths, by the official obstruction of able men who could actually help us out of our grotesque muddle, and finally by the popular stampede to indulge in debilitating pleasures which we can not afford, this stampede having been set off by the general belief that the sky will soon fall on us and there is nothing we can do to stop it or should do even if we could.
And what is Professor Grant's answer to this disastrous state of affairs ? That 'we must all hang together', in the words of Benjamin Franklin, 'or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately'. Quite how Professor Grant would set about implementing this somewhat sanguine formula, he does not say. But this is perhaps not to be expected in a book of this kind, the title of which is—after all— The Fall of the Roman Empire.
However, there had been one Roman Emperor who tried to operate rather along these lines at the outset of the ancient crisis, and it is instructive to see how he fared. The Emperor Julian the Apostate, the subject of a shrewd and plausible new book by Robert Browning, realised that the strength of Rome had always lain in her tolerance. Rome, in her great days, had put up with anybody or anything as long as he, she or it was prepared to put up with Rome. Out of permitted variety had come good-humoured unity . . . until Christianity had taken over as the official religion and turned everything sour by insisting on its monopoly of truth and rectitude.
To Julian, then, the answer was to restore the blessings of paganism, and among them its universal tolerance and the unity which this engendered. It was a good idea which seemed in a fair way to working; but unfortunately the Christians refused to join in. For whereas they were mot courteously tolerated under the new scheme, they still refused to tolerate anyone else; and even though their religion had now ceased to be paramount, they were still able to make themselves very disagreeable. So of course there was only one thing for Julian to do: compel the Christians to be tolerant, which, given their obstinacy, eventually entailed their persecution and hence his own retaliatory assassination, after which Christianity was rapidly restored to its former dominance and with it the disunity of the Roman Empire so much deplored by Professor Grant.
Now, Professor Grant's panacea for the modern West is `to hang together', ie to put up with each other (and with the Americans) as an essential preliminary to putting down our common enemies. But as we see from the story of Julian, such a course can only be successful if everyone in the West agrees to join in. The intolerant Christians spoilt Julian's plan: have they their modern equivalents who will spoil Professor Grant's ? Indeed they have, and we have already remarked on them: they are the rancorous, self-righteous, preaching, prying and for ever interfering Socialists, intolerant of all others even when all others are tolerant of them, obstructive of all action which is not precisely regulated by their doctrine, hostile to superior merit even when it is found in their own midst, and clamorous to confiscate its reward. Try 'hanging together' with that lot around, Professor Grant; myself I'd far sooner hang separately.
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