The fall of the Roman Empire: the military explanation.

The Fall of the Roman Empire:

The Military Explanation

by Arther Ferrill(Thames and Hudson, 192 pp., $22.50)

IT IS A shame that our children arenot taught classical history any more (being subjected instead to something called "social studies'), because if they were, they would learn many important lessons. Among them, that progress is not inevitable.

Unlike most people before or since, untilvery recent times, the inhabitants of the Roman Empire had ample supplies of fresh water for drinking and bathing, often transported hundreds of miles in the famous systems of aqueducts. The reader should not pass lightly over the word "bathing.' The fact is that the Romans did bathe, in elaborate, publicly supported, heated baths, found all over the Roman Empire from Hadrian's Wall to the Greek East. That alone makes them nearly unique in Western history. Furthermore their cities were serviced by sewers, and there were public facilities for the elimination of bodily wastes that were unmatched anywhere until the nineteenth century. The ruins of a flushing latrine for Roman legionaries still stand at Housesteads on Hadrian's Wall.

Baths, sewers, and latrines are the perfectway to grab a child's attention and the perfect way to make an important point.

It is too bad too that we no longerhave politicians who aspire to be statesmen with a knowledge of classical history, rather than just party hacks. If we did, the Vietnam War might have been much more entertaining. When dealing with draft-card burners, our politicians might have adopted the policy of the Emperor Valentinian I, who ordered all draft-dodgers "who cut off their thumbs to escape service in the army to be burnt alive.'

The history of the Roman Empireis, in fact, an ever fascinating and instructive study that should haunt everyone who cares about preserving the American Republic. The spectacle of a great and glorious civilization founded in sobriety, military prowess, and noble virtue being overwhelmed--because of internal disabilities and decay--by ravening hordes of ferocious barbarians is something that should make all of us wary of politicians who want to cut the defense budget and encourage moral lassitude.

Arther Ferrill's book The Fall ofthe Roman Empire: The Military Explanation is a splendidly written account in favor of traditional interpretations of Rome's fall, with one twist. Ferrill does not subscribe to Gibbon's famous argument that Rome fell because of "the triumph of barbarism and religion,' but shows that straightforward military failures contributed to Rome's decline. The case he puts forth, however, is not quite as straightforward as he makes out, for behind the military failures lay political error, and much of that political error was the result of declining Roman public spirit.

But Ferrill does do a salutary jobof debunking the new breed of classicists who push a Marxist version of Roman history that views the barbarians as oppressed minorities engaging in justifiable wars of "national liberation' and that argues that men and battles do not much matter and that all history is some sort of inevitable process governed by the class struggle or some other such nonsense. Ferrill rightly points out that men and battles matter very much and that the barbarians were just that and not worthy of much sympathy.

The military explanation Ferrill offersfor the fall of the Roman Empire can be summarized by two points. Rome's first failing, according to Ferrill, was the adoption of the idea of defense-in-depth, which involved creating a mobile reserve that was meant to supplant Rome's traditional reliance on "preclusive security,' or troops based at forts along the frontier. As Ferrill notes,

Although the emperor might be comfortedby the nearby presence of a mobile army, the inhabitants of the frontier provinces, through which invaders were expected to pour, understandably failed to appreciate his position. Obviously, the worst feature of defense-in-depth is that inevitably the central mobile army will become an elite force and frontier defenders merely second-rate actors in defense policy. Troops that are not expected to defeat the enemy can hardly be blamed for wanting to avoid him altogether. Indeed as time went by, the frontier troops of the Roman Empire (the so-called limitanei and ripenses) became virtually worthless while the mobile army (comitatenses) was expected to do all the fighting.

Rome's second failing was the adoptionof barbarian allies who were allowed federated status within the empire, who kept their own rulers and maintained their own arms, and who "began immediately to demand great rewards for their service and to show an independence that in drill, discipline, and organization meant catastrophe. They fought under their own commanders, and the barbaric system of discipline was in no way as severe as the Roman. Eventually Roman soldiers saw no reason to do what barbarian troops in Roman service were rewarded heavily for not doing.'

After the inclusion of the barbariansin the Roman army, Rome was plunged into a self-defeating balancing act of trying to buy various barbarian allies, appease them, and pit them against each other--in short, divide and rule. In the end, the Romans merely became objects of barbarian contempt.

The failed politics of appeasement;the decline of a unifying patriotism and the rise of a perpetual and corrosive competition for power among generals and members of the ruling elite who thought not of the greater glory of Rome but only of glory for themselves and who were willing to deal with the enemy to achieve it; and the fading away of Roman will and moral courage--these made all efforts to save the empire futile. As Ferrill says, "Lax troops in a lax age are the most difficult to reform, and there are political costs of various kinds connected with the effort, not the least of which is open rebellion.' The fact that this once-proud people had fallen to such a state illustrates that it had already surrendered to an ignoble end. That it was not prepared to bear the costs of reforming itself, facing down rebellion, and restoring the empire merely sealed its fate.

Arther Ferrill's The Fall of the RomanEmpire: The Military Explanation is a book that parents should read themselves, give to their children (to make up for the time they waste in school), and send to their congressmen. Eternal vigilance is not just the price of liberty, it is the price of survival.