The obsequies of Rome were carried out in mournful silence. We find in contemporary historians no accent either of regret or joy, no declamations either in prose or verse; just a few dates and a bare record of facts, that is all. It might almost be believed that nothing of importance took place in the year 476. Jordanes alone, a little later, sounds his barbarian trumpet over the grave of the empire, but only to celebrate the coming of the Goths.
BREYSIG’S OBSERVATIONS ON THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE IN THE WEST
It is of the death of a great nation that we have here to speak. For it is not the physical, nor the spiritual, nor certainly a merely formal political continuance—like that of Byzantium—which determines the historical existence of the nations, but a political independence at once material and powerful, and containing the essentials of civilisation. And if we inquire once again into the reason of such a death of nations, in the end we shall not venture to assign as a cause some form of political or social organisation; some condition of sexual morality; the invasion of Christianity (as Nietzsche thought), and still less the cessation of mechanical inventions, as the folly of some natural philosophers dabbling in history, has assumed: but solely the waning of the nation’s vigour. We shall be compelled to consider not a few of the political, social, moral, and intellectual phenomena towards the end of the period as symptoms of this decay, as, for example, the degeneration of Cæsarism and its hierarchy of officials, the social reaction of the romancists of guilds and castes, the extravagant luxury, the complete torpor of economical activity, and still more the decay of intellectual life. But all these cannot have been the causes, but only tokens and effects of the same disease of the innermost core.
But who shall say to what last final causes are to be referred the rotting and crumbling of this nation which in the days of the flower of its youth and manhood seemed to be possessed of eternal vigour. The Roman nation was certainly not as short-lived as the Greek. If we measure the periods of their development, one against the other, which is the only possible form of comparison, we shall find that from the beginning of their later middle age down to the loss of their political independence, the Greeks are granted not quite half and the Romans almost the whole of a millennium of autonomous history. Perhaps the compact and more continental conformation of the Italian peninsula essentially contributed to this duration; the connecting links between the two facts of the great longevity of the Roman people and the broad surface and less broken outline of their country might be represented by their far less rapid economical and especially commercial development, and their much more phlegmatic intellectual growth, and, in the sphere of politics, by the far wider extent of the domains of the state, which consequently afforded a much firmer base.
But, indeed, if it is permissible to enlarge further upon these anthropogeographical conjectures, the sea was not here able to exercise its animating, but also agitating and therefore strength-consuming effects to the same extent as in Hellas, although it may nevertheless have exercised sufficient influence. The fact that on the soil of Greece there flourished an extraordinary wealth of intellectual growth and an over-refined political civilisation, is just as explicable as that Italy produced such a tardy, intellectual, and at the same time such a powerful and yet carefully planned political, organisation. Italy was, to speak in entirely hypothetical language, narrow and washed by the sea,—but it was also sunny, and yet not too much split up into small sections to allow of its bringing forth political institutions which were not only sound but also really permeated with intellectual thought, and to permit it to produce its art of government and its law. In other words, this peninsula everywhere offered so wide a surface that it was able to produce a state more extensive, stronger, more full of life, and, above all, less threatened by natural separation of interests. But it was not so continental as to permit of the formation of a despotically governed state, stretching over a wide plain as in the vast countries of the East. The sea had been able to exercise its invigorating effects in so far that Italy attained a form of government, strong indeed, but also free. And if no such finely organised intellectual culture was assigned to it, at least its political institutions were intellectually elaborated to a singular degree. For in all essentials they were as much the peculiar product of her otherwise less remarkable intellectual culture as of her political civilisation.
On the other hand Italy shares equally with Greece a life-giving but also life-shortening effect of her geographical position: a mild climate. Perhaps its effects in accelerating her bloom but also her decay have been here somewhat arrested by other territorial conditions, yet perhaps they too finally succeeded in making their influence felt. Else why have Germans and Slavs, that is to say the only civilised peoples of the north alone on the globe maintained themselves so much longer in their strength, and why have they, and perhaps they only, still to-day a prospect of millenniums of an equally robust life of political and intellectual activity?[h]
FOOTNOTES
[69] [“The charges made by Gibbon … rest on no solid basis of evidence; … except for a vague and feebly supported charge of ‘luxury,’ the moral character of Avitus is without a stain.” Hodgkin.[g]]
[70] [The manner in which Majorian met his death is in dispute. While Gibbon[c] gives credence to the report that he died from dysentery, Samuel Dill,
i who speaks of Majorian as “that great soldier and far-sighted statesman,” says: “Majorian, the ‘young Marcellus’ of the last years of the Western Empire, with all his old Roman spirit and statesmanlike insight, failed in his mission and was treacherously slain by Ricimer.” J. B. Bury,