SOLIDUS OF LICINIUS I.
SOLIDUS OF LICINIUS II.
DOUBLE SOLIDUS OF CONSTANTINE THE GREAT.
The land tax, of course, was not the only one, for the theory of Imperial finance was that everybody and everything should pay. Constantine did not spare his new aristocracy. Every member of the senatorial order paid a property tax known as “the senatorial purse” (follis senatoria), and another imposition bearing the name of aurum oblaticium, which was none the more palatable because it was supposed to be a voluntary offering. Any senator, moreover, might be summoned to the capital to serve as prætor and provide a costly entertainment—a convenient weapon in the hands of autocracy to clip the wings of an obnoxious ex-official. Another ostensibly voluntary contribution to the Emperor was the aurum coronarium, or its equivalent of a thousand or two thousand pieces of gold, which each city of importance was obliged to offer to the sovereign on festival occasions, such as the celebration of five or ten complete years of rule. Every five years, also, there was a lustralis collatio to be paid by all shopkeepers and usurers, according to their means. This was usually spoken of as “the gold-silver” (chrysargyrum), and, like “the senatorial purse,” is said by some authorities to have been the invention of Constantine himself. Zosimus, in a very bitter attack on the fiscal measures of the Emperor, declares that even the courtesans and the beggars were not exempt from the extortion of the treasury officials, and that whenever the tribute had to be paid, nothing was heard but groaning and lamentation. The scourge was brought into play for the persuasion of reluctant taxpayers; women were driven to sell their sons, and fathers their daughters. Then there were the capitatio humana, a sort of poll-tax on all labourers; the old five per cent. succession duty; an elaborate system of octroi (portoria), and many other indirect taxes. We need not, perhaps, believe the very worst pictures of human misery drawn by the historians, for, in fairness to the Emperors, we must take some note of the roseate accounts of the official rhetoricians. Nazarius, for example, explicitly declares that Constantine had given the Empire “peace abroad, prosperity at home, abundant harvests, and cheap food.”[[148]] Eusebius again and again conjures up a vision of prosperous and contented peoples, living not in fear of the tax-collector, but in the enjoyment of their sovereign’s bounty. But we fear that the sombre view is nearer the truth than the radiant one, and that the subsequent financial ruin, which overtook the western even more than the eastern provinces, was largely due to the oppressive and wasteful fiscal system introduced and developed by Diocletian and Constantine, and to the old standing defect of Roman administration, that the civil governor was also the judge, and thus administrative and judicial functions were combined in the same hands.
Here, indeed, lay one of the strongest elements of disintegration in the reorganised Empire, but there were other powerful solvents at work, at which we may briefly glance. One was slavery, the evil results of which had been steadily accumulating for centuries, and if these were mitigated to some extent by the increasing scarcity of slaves, the degradation of the poor freeman to the position of a colonus more than counterbalanced the resultant good. Population, so far from increasing, was going back, and, in order to fill the gaps, the authorities had recourse to the dangerous expedient of inviting in the barbarian. The land was starving for want of capital and labour, and the barbarian colonus was introduced, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, not, if the authorities are to be trusted, by tens, but by hundreds of thousands, “to lighten the tribute by the fruits of his toil and to relieve the Roman citizens of military service.” This was the principal and certainly the original reason why recourse was had to the barbarian; the idea that the German or the Goth was less dangerous inside than outside the frontier, and would help to bear the brunt of the pressure from his kinsmen, came later. The result, however, of importing a strong Germanic and Gothic element into the Empire was one of active disintegration. Though they occupied but a humble position industrially, as tillers of the soil, they formed the best troops in the Imperial armies. The boast which Tacitus put into the mouth of a Gallic soldier in the first century, that the alien trooper was the backbone of the Roman army,[[149]] was now an undoubted truth, and the spirit which these strangers brought with them was that of freedom, quite antagonistic to the absolutism of the Empire.
There was yet another great solvent at work,—in its cumulative effects the greatest of them all,—the solvent of Christianity, dissociating, as it did, spiritual from temporal authority, and introducing the absolutely novel idea of a divine law that in every particular took precedence of mundane law. The growth of the power of the Church, as a body entirely distinct from the State and claiming a superior moral sanction, was a new force introduced into the Roman Empire, which, beyond question, weakened its powers of resistance to outside enemies, inasmuch as it caused internal dissensions and divisions. The furious hatreds between Christianity and paganism which lasted in the West down to the fall of Rome, and the equally furious hatreds within the Church which continued both in East and West for long centuries, can only be considered a source of serious weakness. No one disputes that the desperate and murderous struggle between Catholic and Huguenot retarded the development of France and weakened her in the face of the enemy, and it stands to reason that a nation which is torn by intestinal quarrel cannot present an effective front to foreign aggression. It wastes against members of its own household part of the energy which should be infused into the blows which it delivers at its foe.
Christianity has always tended to break down distinctions and prejudices of race. It has never done so wholly and never will, but the tendency is forever at work, and, as such, in the days of the Empire, it was opposed both to the Roman and to the Greek spirit. For though there had already sprung up a feeling of cosmopolitanism within the Empire, it cannot be said to have extended to those without the Empire, who were still barbarians in the eyes not only of Greek or Roman, but of the Romanised Celt and Iberian, whose civilisation was no longer a thin veneer. When we say that Christianity was a disintegrating element in this respect, the term is by no means wholly one of reproach. For it also implies that Christianity assisted the partial fusion which took place when at length the frontier barriers gave way and the West was rushed by the Germanic races. These races were themselves Christianised to a certain extent. They, too, worshipped the Cross and the Christ, and this circumstance alone must, to a very considerable degree, have mitigated for the Roman provinces the terrors and disasters of invasion. It is true that the invaders were for the most part Arians,—though it is a manifest absurdity to suppose that the free Germans from beyond the Rhine understood even the elements of a controversy so metaphysical and so purely Greek,—and, when Arian and Catholic fought, they tipped their barbs with poison. “I never yet,” said Ammianus Marcellinus, “found wild beasts so savagely hostile to men, as most of the Christians are to one another.”[[150]] But the fact remains that the German and Gothic conquerors, who settled where they had conquered, accepted the civilisation of the vanquished even though they modified it to their own needs; they did not wipe it out and substitute their own, as did the Turk and the Moor when they appeared, later on, at the head of their devastating hordes. If, therefore, Christianity tended to weaken, it also tended to assimilate, and we are not sure that the latter process was not fully as important as the former. The Roman Empire, as a universal power, had long been doomed; Christianity, in this respect, simply accelerated its pace down the slippery slope.
But other and more specific charges have been brought against Christianity. One is that it contributed largely to the depopulation of the Empire, which, from the point of view of the State, was an evil of the very greatest magnitude. The indictment cannot be refuted wholly. In the name of Christianity extravagant and pernicious doctrines were preached of which it would be difficult to speak with patience, did we not remember that violent disorders need violent remedies. No one can doubt the unutterable depravity and viciousness which were rampant and unashamed in the Roman Empire, especially in the East. If there was a public conscience at all, it was silent. Decent, clean-living people held fastidiously aloof and tolerated the existence of evils which they did nothing to combat. A strong protest was needed; it was supplied by Christianity. But many of those who took upon themselves to denounce the sins of the age felt compelled to school themselves to a rigid asceticism which made few allowances not only for the weaknesses but even for the natural instincts of human nature. The more fanatical among them grudgingly admitted that marriage was honourable, but rose to enthusiastic frenzy in the contemplation of virginity, which, if they dared not command, they could and did commend with all the eloquence of which they were capable. One cannot think without pity of all the self-torture and agonising which this new asceticism—new, at least, in this aggravated form—brought upon hundreds and thousands of men and women, whose services the State needed and would have done well to possess, but who cut themselves off from mundane affairs, and withdrew into solitudes, not to learn there how to help their fellowmen but consumed only with a selfish anxiety to escape from the wrath to come. They thought of nothing but the salvation of their own souls. It is impossible to see how these wild hermits, who peopled the Libyan deserts, were acceptable in the sight either of themselves, their fellows, or their God. Simon Stylites, starving sleepless on his pillar in the posture of prayer for weeks, remains for all time as a monument of grotesque futility. If charity regards him with pity, it can only regard with contempt those who imputed his insane endurance unto him for righteousness. No one can estimate the amount of unnecessary misery and sufferings caused by these extreme fanatics, who broke up homes without remorse, played on the fears and harrowed the minds of impressionable men and women, and debased the human soul in their frantic endeavour to fit it for the presence of its Maker. They stand in the same category as the gaunt skeletons who drag themselves on their knees from end to end of India in the hope of placating a mild but irresponsive god. Man’s first duty may be towards God; but not to the exclusion of his duty towards the State.