From Marcus Aurelius to Diocletian stretches an evil century. The rocks upon which Rome was finally to be shipwrecked began to show their heads. Government again became a prey instead of a service. The “barrack emperors”—“the thirty tyrants” cursed the imperial chair. The German barbarians began to press hard upon the borders of the empire. Pestilence, imported from the East, thinned the already weakened population. The army came to be almost wholly recruited, and in a large degree officered by Germans. It was almost as if Great Britain depended solely for her defense upon Hindoo troops, for lack of men and mettle among the English themselves. Then came the spasm of reform under Aurelian. And meantime the barbarians by scores of thousands at first, and soon by hundreds of thousands, came drifting down from the north and east. Their comings were quiet enough at the first. They simply moved in where Romans had largely died out. We might compare it in some ways to what would happen if our country should allow a free immigration of Orientals into our Pacific slope.
Reorganization.
The fourth century saw the great reforms under Diocletian and Constantine. The empire was reorganized and, for the time being, strengthened. But the new vigor was vicious in type. It was oriental despotism thinly disguised, as shown by the strange new garb of the emperors, no longer great generals and first citizens; and by the horde of office-holders with novel, high-sounding titles fitted to the various grades of the new bureaucracy.
A line of cleavage was developed by the establishment of the double capital and the joint emperors. East and West began to separate. The division was in part dictated by the difficulty of administering the vast empire from one center in a period when communication was incredibly slow as compared with our modern facilities of steam and electricity. And in this division was a double seed. From one kernel was to spring disaster for Italy and the West. From the other was to germinate the Eastern Empire, destined to be the fortunate and stupid conservator of culture and learning throughout the dark ages.
Christianity.
With the fourth century the Christian faith began to assert itself as never before. Its persecution, off and on, for three centuries, and its triumph need a little study. Why was it that the Roman system could tolerate the excesses of the licentious Eleusinian and Bacchic orgies and the foul superstitions of Egypt, but could find no charity for a pure and gentle faith? Because Christianity was itself righteously intolerant. Very early in the history of the empire it became the fashion and then the law that the genius of the emperor should be adored. To the already polytheistic citizen of the empire this was no added hardship. One god more made no difference to him, and the cynical Roman magistrate could not understand why the wretched Christian was so stubborn about a pinch of incense in honor of the emperor. It meant so little to him religiously—but everything to the Christian. And so the Christians died by thousands. Yet the persecuted faith spread apace, drawing into its fold of hope and inward peace the wayworn travelers upon the cruel road of life in those weary years. Then came the conversion of Constantine and the gradual disintegration of paganism. For a study of the brighter side of pagan life and a proof that the whole Roman world, as so often taught, was not thoroughly rotten, read Pater’s “Marius, the Epicurean,” and Dill’s “Roman life in the Fourth Century.”
The Barbarians.
It is surprising to the judicious what can be the effect of a word or phrase. Probably the term “barbarian” has caused as much confusion in the minds of young students of history as any other term. It signifies to him at least a semi-savage. Yet we know that to the Greek it meant only a non-Hellene. In the later Roman times it meant Goth or German. And yet, long before these people finally disrupted the Western Empire, they had ceased to be barbarian in any common conception of the term. If we substitute for the word migration the longer word immigration, it will give a better idea of their earlier comings, to which allusion has already been made. Humbler neighbors from without the pale, they slowly crept into the southern space and glow out of their crowded and unlovely north. With no ideas of conquest at first, but seeking betterment for themselves, as to-day come the peoples from the same Russia; or, pressed out of their own hunting grounds by the atrocious Hun, they poured steadily in. And long before they became a menace, most of them had become at least half civilized by contact with the finer south. Their men had many of them served in the Roman legions. And Christianity had early made way among them. And at length, when the weakness of the West made it an easy prey to their greater vigor, it was not as bands of whooping savages falling upon a peaceful white settlement that they came, but they simply took up the scepter of destiny which nerveless and unworthy hands had let fall. Emerton’s “Introduction to the Middle Ages,” and the early chapters of Adams’ “Civilization during the Middle Ages,” furnish the best of reading for topics like these just suggested.
The Fall of Rome.
There never was such a thing. That is putting it bluntly. But no contemporary historian uses such a phrase. It is another of the fables of history which need correction. To the Italian the sending of the imperial insignia from Rome to Constantinople meant no more than the Rhode Islander understood when Newport ceased to be one of the capitals of his State. There was no longer need for an emperor at Rome; that was all. The Goth who was in control there had been so for a generation, and considered himself just as good a subject of the emperor at Constantinople after the deposition of Augustus as he had been before.