WHAT was the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire?

That after a few centuries a fabric so artificial should fall to pieces is not in itself surprising. Great empires seldom last long; they are by their very nature liable to special evils to which in time they succumb, and so the process of their downfall is commonly the same. Rome was by no means exempt from these special causes of weakness, but we shall find that Rome did not, like other empires, succumb to them. We shall find that she weathered these most obvious dangers, and that the history of her fall is as unique as that of her greatness.

The difficulty which has been found insurmountable in most great empires is their unwieldy size, and the obstinate antipathy of the conquered nationalities to their conquerors. Government must necessarily become difficult in proportion to the extent of the territory governed and the disloyalty of the inhabitants. It follows that in a great empire founded upon conquest the difficulties of government are the greatest possible. To cope with them it is found necessary to create pashas or viceroys of particular provinces, with full monarchical power. Sooner or later government breaks down, overborne partly by its insurgent subjects, partly by these viceroys shaking off its authority. No. 118.-VOL. XX.

This, then, is the regular process of dissolution in empires. Subject nationalities succeed at last in recovering their independence, and subordinate governors throw off their allegiance and become kings. Sometimes the two solvents help each other, as Ali Pasha of Janina helped the early attempts of the Greek patriots. Let us take some of the more conspicuous examples which history affords. Alexander's empire was dissolved by his officers making themselves kings, and the kingdom of Pontus was formed out of it by the effort of one of the conquered nationalities. The Saracen Empire split into three independent chalifates. The Seljukian Empire of Malek Shah was divided in a few generations among independent sultans of Persia, Syria, Roum, &c. The Great Mogul lost his dominion partly to the insurgent Mahrattas, partly to his own viceroys of the Deccan and of Bengal. The German Empire became a nullity when the electors began to raise themselves to the rank of kings. the Ottoman Empire the process of dissolution shows itself in Greece and Servia recovering their independence, and the Egyptian viceroy making himself a sovereign.

In

If we look for similar symptoms in the dissolution of the Roman Empire we are disappointed. The subject nation

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The

alities do not recover their independence. It is true that they make their separate influence felt long after they have been politically merged. The Greeks, for example, maintained, not only the independence, but the superiority of their language and their culture. Although the greatest writers of this period are Roman, yet, within half a century after the death of Tacitus and Juvenal, Greek not only prevailed in the eastern half of the Empire, but had so far superseded Latin in Rome itself, that the Emperor Aurelius uses it in meditations intended for his own private use. Asiatic part of the Empire preserved its peculiar ways of thinking. Its religions entered into a competition both with the religions of the West and with Greek philosophy, the religion of the cultivated classes among the Romans. In this contest between the Western conquerors and the Eastern subjects the conquered races had at last the better, and imposed a religion upon their masters. Nor were the African nationalities without their influence. They gave to the Empire, in Severus, the master who first gave unlimited power to the army; and they contributed to the religious reformation its greatest rhetorician, Tertullian; its most influential politician, Cyprian; and, later, its greatest theologian, Augustine.

But though the nationalities retained so much intellectual independence, they never became dangerous to the Empire. There were indeed, in the first century, four considerable wars of independence -the rising of the Germans under Arminius, that of the Britons under Boadicea, that of the Germans and Gauls under Civilis, and that of the Jews. But the first two were not rebellions of nations already conquered, but of nations. in the process of being conquered. In the case of the Germans it was the effort by which they saved their independence; in the case of the Britons it was the last convulsion of despair. The other two revolts were, no doubt, precisely of the kind which occur so frequently in great empires, and are so frequently fatal to them.

But to the Roman Empire they

were not fatal, and can hardly be said to have seriously endangered it. It was owing to the confusion of a revolutionary time that Civilis was able for a moment to sever the Rhenish provinces from Rome, but his success only made it more evident that his appeal to national feeling came too late, and was addressed to that which had no existence. As soon as the vigour of the central government revived, a single army, not very well commanded, extinguished the feeble spark. Far different, certainly, was the vigour and enthusiasm with which the Jews took arms. But the result was not different. The rebellious nationality only earned by the fierceness of its rising a more overwhelming ruin. If we reckon the Jewish war of the reign of Vespasian and that of the reign of Hadrian as constituting together one great national rebellion, then the history of the Empire affords no other considerable example besides those I have mentioned of the rising of a conquered nationality. There appear, indeed, in the third and fourth centuries, some phenomena not altogether different. The third century was an age of revolution. I have spoken already of the great Roman Revolution which began with the tribunate of Gracchus and ended with the battle of Actium. It would be a convenient thing if we could accustom ourselves to the notion of a second Roman Revolution, beginning with the death of Marcus Aurelius, in A.D. 180, and ending with the accession of Diocletian, in A.D. 285. During this period the Imperial system struggled for its life, and suffered a transformation of character which enabled it to support itself over the whole extent of the Empire for more than another century, and in the eastern half for many centuries. In the fearful convulsions of this revolutionary period we are able to discern the difficulties with which the Imperial system had to cope. And among these difficulties is certainly to be reckoned the unlikeness of the nations composing the Empire. The Empire shows a constant tendency to break into large fragments, each held. together internally by national sympa

thies, and separated from the others by national differences. The Greek-speaking world tends to separate itself from the Latin-speaking world. Gaul, Britain, and Spain tend to separate themselves from Italy and Africa. These tendencies were recognised when the revolutionary period closed in Diocletian's partition of the Empire between two Augusti and two Cæsars, and, afterwards, in the four great præfectures of Constantine. The division between East and West, after being several times drawn and again effaced, was permanently recognised in the time of the sons of Theodosius, and is written in large characters in the history of the modern world.

The tendency then to division certainly existed, and might at times be dangerous. But it is not to be confounded with that working of the spirit of nationality which I have spoken of as the commonest cause of the ruin of great empires. In most great empires the subject nations have not only a want of sympathy, or it may be a positive antipathy, towards each other; they are influenced still more by an undying hostility towards their conquerors, and an undying recollection of the independence they have lost. Out of these feelings springs a fixed determination, handed down through successive generations, and shared by every individual member of the conquered race, to throw off the yoke at the first opportunity. Where this fixed determination exists, the conquerors have in the long run but a poor chance of retaining their conquest; for their energy is more likely to be corrupted by success than their victims' fixed hatred to be extinguished by delay. And this was the difficulty which, almost alone among conquering nations, the Romans were not called upon to meet. By some means or other they succeeded in destroying in the mind of Gaul, African, and Greek the remembrance of their past independence and the remembrance of the relentless cruelty with which they had been enslaved. Rome destroyed patriotism in its subject races, though it left in them a certain blind instinct of kindred. When the Empire grew weak, the atoms showed

a tendency to crystallize again in the old forms, but while it continued vigorous it satisfied the nationalities that it had absorbed. Whether by its imposing grandeur, or the material happiness it bestowed, or the free career it offered, particularly to military merit, or the hopelessness of resistance, or more particularly in the West-by the civilization it brought with it; by some of these means, or by some combination of them, the Roman Empire succeeded in giving an equivalent to those who had been deprived of everything by its relentless sword. As Tecmessa to Ajax, the world said to Rome

σὺ γάρ μοι πατρίδ ̓ ἤστωσας δόρει καὶ μητέρ' ἀλαὴ μοῖρα τὸν φύσαντά τε καθεῖλεν Αΐδου θανασίμους οικήτορας τίς δῆτ ̓ ἐμοὶ γένοιτ ̓ ἂν ἀντὶ σοῦ πατρίς ; τίς πλοῦτος ; ἐν σοὶ πᾶσ ̓ ἐγώγε σώζομαι. "Thou didst destroy my country with thy

spear;

My mother and begetter eyeless Fate

Took to be tenants of the house of death. Now then what country can I find but thee, What household? on thee all my fortune hangs."

Of all the conquered nations, that which had the noblest past was Greece. It is a striking fact that even a hundred years ago there existed among the Greeks no proud remembrance of their heroic ancestors. Leonidas and Miltiades were names which had no magic sound to them. But they were proud of two things, of their religious orthodoxy and of their being the legitimate representatives of the Roman Empire.

The Roman Empire, then, did not fall as, for example, the Parthian Empire fell, by the rebellion of the conquered nationalities. But neither again did it fall by the rebellion of its great officers and viceroys, as the empire of Alexander. It was, indeed, constantly exposed to this danger. It felt, as other empires have felt, the necessity of creating these great officers. The Legati of the Rhine and Danube, the Legatus of Syria, possessed the power of independent sovereigns. They often seemed likely to use, and sometimes did use, this power against the government. In the first two centuries, Galba, Vitellius, Vespasian, Severus,