Free The Fall of the Roman Empire by Michael Grant

been exercises in concerted self-help. It was soon afterwards, in 410, that Honorius wrote to Britain instructing the authorities there to arrange their own protection; and the British once again received a similar message thirty years later. In Italy, when Gaiseric and his Vandals threatened the country, its citizens were authorized to carry arms. In Gaul, too, in 471-5, the people of the Arverni (Auvergne), inspired by their bishop Sidonius, defended their capital Arverna (formerly Augustonemetum, now Clermont-Ferrand) against the Visigoths.
    Yet such efforts at local self-defence are only worth mentioning because they were so exceptional. They played no substantial part in military events. And as for the Roman army itself, apart from the unruly federates, its end was indeed now at hand. A ' legal pronouncement of Valentinian in in 444 scarcely contrived or attempted to conceal the desperate situation, since the Emperor openly admitted that his military plans had been totally frustrated.
    There was collapse on every side. Britain, despite all exhortations, was completely lost. Along extensive stretches of the Danube, the troops had already been disbanded at the beginning of the century, while the frontier crumbled around them and no one paid their wages any more. Only the strip of the river that lay closest to Italy remained in Roman hands until the end.
    A certain Eugippius, in his biography of a local monk, wrote about this Danube garrison's last days in about 482. He told how the frontier forces and the frontier itself finally disintegrated, and recorded how the ultimate surviving unit at Castra Batava (Passau) sent some men back to Italy to draw the last instalment of pay that they would ever receive. Meanwhile in Italy itself there were no longer any Roman troops whatever. The country's ultimate Roman army, the army of Odoacer which forced the last Western Emperor to resign, consisted entirely of federates.
    If the Romans had been able to maintain an army, they might well have saved themselves from destruction. Their failure to raise the troops any longer was one of the principal causes of their downfall. In later Rome too, there had been a total lack of mutual sympathy between army and civilians; and this discrepancy between defence needs and the people's willingness to fulfil them contributed materially to the downfall of the Roman West.
    But why did such a discrepancy ever reach these catastrophic proportions? The answer lies a little below the surface, in the deep cleavages which shattered the structure of late Roman society. And it is these cleavages which must now be investigated.

II

    THE GULFS BETWEEN THE CLASSES

The Poor against the State

    The principal reason why the civil population would not maintain the army and fill its ranks was the massive burden of taxation demanded for this purpose - a gigantic imposition which alienated the poor from the states for ever, in a disunity of fatal proportions. The perilous situation into which oppressive tax policy had plunged the Western Roman world was correctly analysed by the unknown writer On Matters of Warfare. As he expressed the matter, in the cautious terms appropriate to a memorandum designed for the Imperial bureau, 'the vast expenditure on the army must be checked, for that is what has thrown the entire system of tax payments into difficulties'.
    In one sense, this was unfair; or at least it only dealt with part of the problem. For huge expenditure on the army was necessary, if the Empire was going to be able to survive at all. The expense of defending the frontiers had become truly colossal. In 360, when the state treasurer Ursulus happened to visit the ruined site of Amida, now Diyarbakir in southern Turkey - which the Romans had been forced to abandon - his bitter comment concentrated on the financial aspect: 'Behold with what courage the cities are defended by our soldiers, for whose abundance of pay the wealth of the Empire is already becoming