179- The End

Okay,

23?

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Expera la salam

aquí que nitos gugando, but cor el zotano.

Oya wo eson 23 degua.

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The end

about five years ago, I got it into my head to start a podcast.

After hearing 12 Byzantine rulers and loving it, I tried to find a podcast on Roman history, because surely there must be one, but I came up empty.

I was in the middle of reading The War with Hannibal by Livy, and thought that, man, there is a lot of really cool stories buried in here that never see the light of day, because my God, this reading is so dry.

So I started to think that maybe I should start a podcast about Roman history.

I went and snagged my copy of The Early History of Rome by Livy and used it to outline the first dozen or so episodes, The Seven Kings, the Twelve Tables, the Sack of Rome.

Then I googled how-to podcast.

Then I fought bitterly with technology for about a week.

Then I got it all straightened out.

And on July 27th, 2007, I published the first episode of the cleverly titled History of Rome.

Then I settled into a nice routine of publishing every Sunday night.

We went through the early quasi-mythical period of half-remembered legend because Brennus and the Gauls burned Rome to the ground in 390 BC.

We went from the kings through the establishment of the Republic, the conflict of the Orders, Roman expansion out into Italy, wars with the Etruscans and Latins and the Samnites, and history started to become less mythical and more concrete.

Finally, we got into the bits that I really wanted to get into from the beginning, the Punic Wars, Hannibal, Scipio, the great struggle that left Rome the strongest power in the Mediterranean world.

Then we started running into problems with with hosting because, amazingly, too many people were listening to the show, and it was crashing archive.org.

Then we ran into problems with episode limits on the blogging service I was using, but we kept going and made it into the 100s BC and the conquest of Greece, the civil unrest let loose by the Graci brothers, the rise of Marius, and the rise of Sulla.

Then, for those of you who have been around that long, you'll remember that the show went on hiatus for seven months because I completely burned out.

For those of you who discovered the show later, just know that the whole thing almost died at episode 33, Marius and Sulla.

But it only almost died.

I bought a new laptop and decided that I would hate myself forever if I didn't finish the job.

I had planned to do about 75 episodes, and I was all ready to the breakdown of the Republic, so I didn't want to be the guy who swam two-thirds of the English channel, got tired, and swam back.

So then we went through the civil wars of Marius and Sulla, the rise of Crassus and Pompey, and then finally to the rise of Julius Caesar.

It was at about episode 40 that I realized I was in big trouble.

An entire episode was dedicated to a single year.

But there was too much information, too much that we needed to understand, so progress grounded to a complete halt.

The fall of the Republic set the pace for the whole rest of the series.

It took about 50 episodes to cover the 700 years from 753 to 60 BC,

and it would take 140 more episodes to cover the remaining 500 years.

But I didn't care.

I was blissing out and loving every minute that I got to spend toiling away on my never-ending project.

When the Julio-Claudian dynasty fell, I got married and we moved from Portland, Oregon to Austin, Texas.

With the the new headquarters established, we plowed through the Flavians and the Antonines and started running into bad trouble, like the Markomani Wars and Commodus.

Then the Severns came along, everything became a lot more militant and a lot more sinister.

And then in the middle of the third century, the Roman Empire really should have ended.

And in many ways, it did.

That crisis period has since become one of my favorite periods in Roman history, mostly because no one ever talks about it.

No one ever goes into detail about it.

It's always, well, the Severin dynasty fell apart, and things were really super crazy for 50 years.

Okay, on to Diocletian and Constantine.

But the crisis of the third century is fascinating.

It is utterly fascinating.

It took us 16 episodes to get through that 50-year period alone.

I think it was totally worth it.

When we emerged from the crisis years, it was on to Diocletian and the Tetrarchy, and then the rise of Constantine and Christianity.

Constantinople was founded while I was in Italy, enjoying the first of three Roman history tours, which was just an awesome, awesome time.

Historyofrometour.com.

Yes, even though the show is ending, we want to keep doing them, but I will get to that.

When I got back, we rolled into the breakdown of the Constantinian dynasty, Julian the Apostate, then on to Valentinian and Valens.

Then we found out that Miss's history of Rome was pregnant.

Then it was on to the Battle of Adrianople and the rise of Theodosius.

Things started to get really bad now.

The barbarians were coming, but they were not going away.

The Empire split into East and West, but not really.

The legions became almost entirely mercenary.

Germanic generals were pulling the strings, but that wasn't a bad thing at all because the emperors were just terrible buffoons at this point.

Stilico gave way to Aetius just as I went back to school because yes, I've been attending UT for the last four months and still putting out the show every week because I have no life.

Then Gaul was overrun and Spain was overrun and North Africa was seized by the vandals.

Attila the Hun arrived just as I was heading off for the fourth History of Rome tour, which was another awesome, awesome time.

Aetius gave way to Rickomer, the West began circling the drain, the final shadow emperors came and went.

Romulus Augustalus was crowned, and then he was exiled.

Our baby boy is due any day now.

I am ready.

Mrs.

The History of Rome, I can promise you, is really ready.

And so the history of Rome is over.

Five years of work, 675,000 words, 189 episodes, 74 hours of content.

Good lord, what a hell of a damn thing.

Since we are at the end, it is worth taking a moment to wonder why this is the end.

I mean, of the Roman Empire, not of the podcast.

Now, as I already discussed, there are lots of arbitrary lines in the sand we can draw to say before this, Rome, after this, no more Rome.

And I'm stopping at 476 out of a vague sense of historical convention.

I don't really want to get into the debate about the superiority of this arbitrary line versus that arbitrary line, especially since one of the strongest arguments out there is that no one should talk about the fall of the Roman Empire until the Turks start blasting a hole in the side of the Theodosian walls in 1453, and that is just too, too far in the future for me to deal with.

And besides, by that time, the descendants of Rome ruled a Greek-speaking, Orthodox Christian-believing empire,

which is, really, a wholly different cultural construction than the Latin-speaking pagans we began our journey with.

So something clearly had changed.

Something had broken down.

Is the political, economic, and cultural makeup of Italy, for example, different in 800 AD than it was during the age of the Antonines?

Clearly, yes.

Was that makeup different in 600 than it was during the age of Constantine?

I would say they were getting closer, but still, yes.

What about 500 and 400?

Well,

much less so, but a few important things had changed.

Strong emperors had been replaced by puppet emperors, who had been replaced by no emperors.

Tight borders had given way to porous borders, had given way to no borders.

So something pretty important happened in the fifth and sixth centuries.

And though it was a gradual transition, that does not mean we can't still talk about the fall of the Roman Empire.

The Roman Empire fell at some point.

That much at least I think we can all agree on.

So the question is, why did Rome fall when it did?

Or more precisely, why did the western half of the empire fall?

Well, I have joked that there are 256 different reasons why the Western Empire fell, and though I am obviously exaggerating, it is not that much of an exaggeration.

The decline and fall of something as monumentally complex as the Roman Empire is not going to be able to be explained away by one or two simple causes.

Now, everyone has a pet theory, something they want to highlight over everything else, and Lord knows I've got my own suspicions.

But the basic fact is that all of these theories are likely correct to some degree, and each played off each other in a synergistic orgy of destruction.

In his nice little summation, The Fall of the Roman Empire, for example, Michael Grant offers fourteen interacting tensions that led to the fall of the West.

And just to give you a sense of the scope and flavor of what we're talking about, here they are the generals against the state, the people against the army, the poor against the state, the rich against the state, the middle class against the state, the people against the bureaucrats, the people against the emperor, ally against ally, race against race, dropouts against society, the state against free belief, complacency against self-help, the other world against this world.

Now I tend to break all of this down into six broad categories, which I'd like to run through briefly with you now:

political factors, economic factors, military factors, social factors, religious factors, and environmental factors.

Though we are not going to land on a definitive answer for why the Western Empire fell, it will still be fun to walk through each of these to give you an idea of what Rome was really up against in the late 400s.

First, there are the political factors.

By 476 AD, the governing apparatus of the Western Empire had become a brittle farce.

The centralized regimentation introduced by Diocletian, which had perhaps given the Empire a new lease on life during the 300s, was now killing it.

The quality of the emperors, as you may have noticed, declined precipitously after the death of Theodosius.

So the very center of this strict regimentation had become rotten.

The emperors had all the theoretical power in the world, but that power was being wielded by cloistered fools, totally disconnected from the empire they allegedly ran.

Plus, given that the communication networks of the day were falling apart along with everything else, even a great emperor couldn't hope to achieve what his propaganda and his edicts promised that he could.

Local autonomy had thus become simultaneously dead and more important than ever, a contradictory circle that had become more difficult to square with each passing day.

The bureaucracy was hopelessly corrupt.

The best educated declined to enter state service because it was rightly viewed as a corrupt and dangerous occupation.

The political apparatus, in other words, was broke and getting broker.

Then there are the economic factors.

We have already discussed at length the debilitating inflation that plagued the Western Empire in its final years.

This inflation essentially destroyed the middle class and left the West divided between a few super wealthy landowners and the uncountable poor masses.

Adding to the dilemma was a system of imperial taxation which ground those poor masses even deeper into the dirt.

The super wealthy were able to defer tax payments until one of those moments of debt cancellation, or else they were able to use their influence to win tax exemptions.

This left the poor classes, who had no such influence, to shoulder the burdens of state, burdens that far outweighed their ability to pay.

So increasingly they turned to the wealthy patrons for relief, essentially becoming indentured servants in exchange for the wealthy estate owner covering their tax bills, which laid the groundwork for the feudal system that would rule Europe for the next thousand years.

This broken economic system also completely severed the bonds of patriotic loyalty that had once upon a time kept the political system functioning.

The poor saw the state as a predator to be avoided at all cost.

The rich saw it as a petty annoyance to be ignored at all cost.

By the late 400s, the Western economy was disintegrating and the central government was starved of funds.

And then, of course, there are the military factors.

The legions had been the backbone of the empire for a millennium, but by the four hundreds, the legions, as we had once known them, were essentially dead.

Service in the army was seen by the free citizens as slavery by another name, hard, dirty, and dangerous work that offered few rewards.

The rich and poor alike conspired to hide potential conscripts from the state forces so that they could stay and work the large estates that were fast becoming the backbone of the new political and economic order.

As a consequence, the imperial authorities turned increasingly to Germanic mercenaries who were all too happy to do the Romans' fighting for them.

But of course, after Adrianople, these forces ceased even fighting under Roman officers, and instead joined as whole national armies, fighting under their own kings.

Though the emperors had little choice, and these barbarian forces fought hard for Rome, there is no getting around the fact that the objectives of Rome and the objectives of the barbarian mercenaries were never going to line up completely, because each viewed the other as an other.

In effect, the Empire was no longer able to raise a national army.

It could only pay for protection.

And this, I can assure you, is an unsustainable model of self-defense.

Which brings us to the social factors and my own personal hobby horse when it comes to explaining the decline of the Western Empire: the failure of the Western Empire to integrate their new Germanic inhabitants

One of the great geniuses of Rome had always been its ability to instantly incorporate new ideas and new peoples and new technologies into their empire without being weighed down by prejudice.

It's what allowed them to own and operate one of the most ethnically diverse empires in history for hundreds and hundreds of years.

When the Roman system began to fail in the third century, for example, it was not senators on the Palatine Hill who led the rebirth of Rome.

It was a group of Illyrian officers, mostly peasant born Illyrian officers at that.

Were it not for Claudius Gothicus, Aurelian, Probus, Diocletian, the emperor would have collapsed.

Of that I am quite sure.

But as Rome reached a new crisis point, the ruling aristocracy suddenly became obsessed with racial prejudices.

The most capable men of the age, Ostilico, Alaric, Aetius, Genseric, Theodoric, were all kept at arms' distance from access to real imperial power by an Italian aristocracy that suddenly began asserting the necessity of ethnic separation.

The quote-unquote barbarians of the fifth century were flatly denied the respect of Rome.

Their nations were settled in Roman territory as separate nations, nations, their leaders kept out of the imperial structure and forced to live either as antagonists like Genseric or Alaric or as protagonists like Stilico and Aetius who were treated as second class leaders.

And if they weren't second class leaders, then why aren't we talking about Emperor Stilico and Emperor Aetius?

Mostly, it's because the senators of the West refused to consider the possibility of a German-born emperor.

In another parallel universe, the leadership of the West allows for the full social, moral, and political integration of the Germanic people into their empire in the 5th century, setting the stage for the rise of the German emperors, who, like the Illyrian emperors before them, revived the Roman name.

These social forces were exacerbated by the religious factors.

I will tread lightly on this subject and want to begin by saying that I do not accept Gibbon's argument that Christianity led to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.

But that said, the introduction of Christianity into the Roman bloodstream did lead to constant religious feuding that had been previously unknown to the Romans.

Religious tolerance had always been one of the hallmarks of Roman rule and Roman unity.

But by the 400s, there had been a transition to increasing religious intolerance, Christianity versus paganism, Nicene versus Aryans, Orthodoxy versus heresy.

How many able administrators were caught up in the cycles of religious purges and counterpurges?

How much time, energy, and resources were spent trying to bend the empire to one particular version of Christianity and then bend it back when another version rose to prominence?

It would be impossible to calculate, but I can't help but think that everyone would have been better served if they have just left religion alone and focused their collective attention on the daily challenges of operating the empire instead.

I am not prepared to say that religion was the main reason Rome fell, or even one of the most important reasons.

But at a moment when the empire needed unity, religious intolerance acted as a disuniting force.

Finally, there are the environmental factors.

We are only just now beginning to pay attention to these sorts of conditional elements, but there is some evidence that between two hundred fifty and five fifty AD the climate of Europe began to fluctuate wildly.

And this was not just a matter of gradual shifting, where the land that had once been good was now bad, but that from season to season there were crazy variations, undermining the kind of predictability an agricultural society requires to remain stable.

We certainly see in later years far more sudden famines than we saw previously, and far less ability to absorb those famines when they came.

You throw into this mix other underlying environmental factors like plague, and you get increasing depopulation, leading to abandoned land and more famine.

I think as we move forward, we will begin to understand more and more the role that climate shifts have played in the rise and fall of civilizations over the course of world history.

Or maybe we won't.

At the very least, it will be an interesting topic to keep an eye on.

All of this, of course, raises one obvious question.

If this is all true, then why didn't the East fall?

There are again again no easy answers here, but there are a few broad things to keep in mind.

First, there is the question of geography.

The West had an incredibly long Rhine frontier and an incredibly long Danube frontier to contend with.

And once any portion of those frontiers was breached, our barbarian horde could pretty much go wherever it wanted within the empire Gaul, Spain, Italy, wherever.

And after the invasion of four 405, hundred

this is exactly what happened.

In the east, however, once the Huns or Goths or whoever went over the river, they were confined to Thrace and Macedonia.

Any attempt to cross the Hellespont, and they'd run smack into Constantinople and its impenetrable walls.

Thus, the far eastern provinces of Syria and Egypt, the economic lifeblood of the Eastern Empire, were shielded from any such attack.

On their eastern flank, the East dealt only with the Sasanids, a stable and civilized empire that was interested in maintaining peaceful coexistence.

This allowed them to avoid the kinds of territorial sheddings that the West was forced to endure throughout the 400s, at least until the Arabs show up.

Second, there is the question of relative wealth, both of the imperial government itself and the East as a whole.

The military shocks that hit the West in the 400s rapidly depleted its economic output, and as barbarian nations set up autonomous zones and wealthy nobles withdrew to their estates, the central government was cut off more and more from what little wealth was available.

This simply did not happen in the East.

And one can never discount the vital trade link to India and China that the Eastern Empire enjoyed, a trade link that was largely severed for the West by the time the Acts finally fell.

In terms of its ability to support itself then, the court at Constantinople was much, much richer than the court of Ravenna.

Finally, there is the question of the imperial apparatus itself.

Just as the West's middle class was being killed by a combination of inflation and overtaxation, the eastern middle class was thriving as it found itself running the now famous Byzantine bureaucracy.

Whereas in the West the super elite had withdrawn its support and resources from the government, in the East this really did not happen, leaving imperial service as a lucrative and honorable career choice.

In the West, you get the feeling that what was left of the bureaucracy was staffed by sadistic gangsters, creating a vicious cycle of disloyalty, greed, and hatred between the people and the government.

Though no one ever likes a tax collector, the Eastern bureaucracy just seemed to function a whole lot better, likely because it was staffed by better paid and more talented men.

In the end, this is all so much food for thought,

and it will remain impossible to conclusively pinpoint the exact exact set of reasons why the Western Empire fell apart when it did and why the Eastern Empire did not.

Every author you read will have his or own take, and every generation will produce new evidence that discredits old theories, and then future generations will come along and discredit the even newer theories, and at some point someone will find new evidence that supports the old theories.

History is being constantly rewritten, and frankly, that is the one thing that will remain constant.

Which brings me back to the present and a few thoughts on the future.

First of all, just let me again express my deep, deep appreciation to everyone who has listened to the history of Rome over the years.

I always tend to think of it as you guys letting me do this thing week in and week out.

No audience, and I would have quit being able to justify justify spending so much time reading and writing and thinking about Roman history a long time ago.

But you hung around in fairly large numbers, and so I got to keep doing it week after week after week.

Thank you very, very much.

It has been an honor and a privilege to be your guide through the endlessly fascinating history of Rome.

If you've enjoyed this trip as much as I've enjoyed putting it together and think it worth your while, I will note that there is a handy donation button at thehistoryofro.typad dot com.

It will let you quantify your appreciation in dollars and cents.

Those of you who have already donated are kind of blowing my mind with your generosity, and thank you very, very much.

There is no suggested donation.

Give whatever you feel is right or don't.

The History of Rome is free for all, no strings attached.

But if every single person who heard this episode went and donated $10,

well, let's just say that it would go a long way towards relieving the financial stresses of having a newborn right at the moment when you're walking away from a project that provides a goodly chunk of your monthly income.

Obviously, I am going to spend the next few months focused on the fact that, holy crap, we're having a baby.

But you will be happy to hear, at least I think you'll be happy to hear.

If you're not happy to hear hear this, then why in the world did you just spend 74 hours listening to me blabber at you about Roman history?

But my plan is to return to podcasting in the not too distant future.

I even know what the next show is going to be about, and I have to tell you that I'm really, really excited about it.

I'm not going to tell you what it is yet because I haven't ironed out all the details in my head, but I think it's going to be really cool, and I think you'll really dig it.

The only things I'll leak is that it's not going to be ancient history, and it's not going to be American history.

It's going to be something else.

So, what you should all do is keep your subscription to the history of Rome going.

And if you're not subscribed, go ahead and get subscribed because I'll use this feed to update you about future details.

And we'll maybe just run the new show through that feed too, rather than trying to force everyone to jump subscriptions.

I don't know.

We'll see.

Like I say, I haven't ironed out all the details yet.

I will also keep you updated with information about any future History of Rome tour, which, like I say, are really fun, and we really want to keep doing them.

So, there will be no next week because there is no next week.

Next time will be sometime down the road, and we'll be talking about something completely different.

I wish you all the best of luck out there, and look forward to blathering in your ears about history again sometime soon.

Goodbye.

This has been the history of Rome.

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