The Historians' History of the World 06

According to the most generally received chronology, Rome had passed the middle of the eleventh century when Alaric took and burned it. One might almost think the augury accomplished—allowing for a difference of a few years. After the departure of the Goths, hope revived and calculation recommenced. After the second sack of Rome by Genseric, in the twelve hundred and seventh year from its foundation (455 A.D.) the fatal and definite hour was declared to have arrived. “The twelfth vulture has finished his flight. Now, O Rome, thou knowest thy destiny,” wrote Sidonius Apollinaris, a firm Christian, but imbued, like every Roman subject, with the superstitious traditions of the city of the Seven Hills. Thenceforward began the real death throes of the empire, as it passed to barbarian masters—from Ricimer to Gundobald, from Gundobald to Odoacer, ever growing weaker, more despised, more crushed. When names were heard, long strange to the nomenclature of the Cæsars—names such as Julius and Augustus, coming from the grave of history like so many spectres announcing the last day, and that of Romulus expiring in a child—public consternation knew no bounds. These fortuitous combinations presented in their fantastic aspect something of the supernatural, and troubled the strongest minds. Men bowed their heads and were silent.

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.