Was the fall of Rome necessary for western development?

[Maty]

Might I suggest that the main criticism being directed at the Romans here seems to be that they lacked the mindset of 21st century westerners? It is a sort of back-handed compliment to Rome that no-one criticizes contemporary Germans, Africans or Persians for not having the get-up-and-go to invent windmills, steam engines or emancipated voters. Is it that the Romans were close enough to us to be considered 'civilized' so they ought to have done it properly?

 

The fact is that human innovation does not come as a steady incremental process, but in waves. After each wave things slow down again. The waves come more much more frequently in the modern era, but after the Greek intellectual revolution a quiet period should be expected to follow. That's why the Egyptians in the two thousand years before Caesar did not progress steadily from pyramids and irrigation systems to nuclear physics.

 

I'd argue that the fourth century Roman discovery of deep-ploughing techniques - e.g. wheeled mouldboards, heavy ploughs - allowed for the first time proper grain cultivation in the heavy clays of north-western Europe. This planted the seeds (ahem) for power in Europe to move north-west over the following centuries. That one development alone over 400 years counts as significant progress for any period of human history other than the post-renaissance era.

[wryobserver]

Might I suggest that the main criticism being directed at the Romans here seems to be that they lacked the mindset of 21st century westerners? It is a sort of back-handed compliment to Rome that no-one criticizes contemporary Germans, Africans or Persians for not having the get-up-and-go to invent windmills, steam engines or emancipated voters. Is it that the Romans were close enough to us to be considered 'civilized' so they ought to have done it properly?

 

No, I think thats an unfair characterisation. The argument is not that they weren't 21st century enough in their ambitions and innovation. That would be historicism. I wouldn't expect them to think like us or have our culture.

 

The point is that the roman empire was perhaps much more technologically and culturally sterile than we have given it credit for. It was a force for technological stagnancy rather than invention, and if it hadn't fallen we'd have been stuck at much the same level. They had nearly 1000 years and didn't really change a great deal.

 

The political system did not create conditions for technological growth, except in very limited areas. Where were the great roman writers and thinkers even? Had they been more innovative they might have found solutions for the Hunnic invasions and the Teutonic tribes that they had to face.

 

I see it as a great big military and administrative machine. But not one that seemed to grow and adapt a great deal during its history.

[DecimusCaesar]

I've often thought about this myself, and I always tend to think of the Ottoman Empire and the various Chinese Empires that, like Rome, brought a reasonable amount of stability and peace to a region for a long period of time, but stagnated in many other ways.

 

If you compare that with the fracticious states in late medieval/early renaissance Europe you see a different picture. Medieval Europeans supposedly fought against each other all the time, which lead to increased technological development as different factions attempted to outwit each other. I'm reminded somewhat of Renaissance Italy, where men like Leonardo Da Vinci were paid to develop war machines (many of which were useless or impractical). Supposedly war fuelled scientific and technological development in Europe, while political stability, long peace, and a isolationist policy led to the stagnation of Asian empires. Perhaps this applies to Rome too, but I can't help but think that this is a very simplistic view. What's to say that Rome might not have had a social, intellectual and political revolution on the scale of the 18th century Enlightenment? Who knows, perhaps without the dark ages that might have occured much earlier in Western history. Then again Rome could very well have died a long slow death like the Ottoman Empire, which entered into decline in the mid 17th century but didn't fall until the 1920's.

[caldrail]

The persistence of empire as a political structure reflects the dymanism of the politics within it. In situations where the leadership becomes moribund, we see increasing instability and inaction in the face of threat. Thus the Roman Republic fails to obstruct the rise of dictatorial individuals and eventually submits to autcratic rule. We see both Parthia and Persia falling apart because they cannot obstruct the rise in power of their nobles (in much the same way that King John would later bow down to pressure and sign the Magna Carta in England eight hundred years ago). Nor for that matter is Egypt able to do more than make token resistance against Roman annexation.

[barca]

Caesar wiped all that away at a stroke though, basing his political power on his military force. His armies were loyal to him and were prepared to kill and wipe out other roman armies to protect him. The strong man won. A few senators were no match for him.

 

Well, they certainly got the better of them on the ides of March. Caesar's main downfall was that he was concilliatory towards his former enemies, never thinking that they would exact revenge. He was honest about the fact that he wanted to be in charge. Augustus on the other hand was more of a plotter and a schemer, maintaining that veneer of a republic, pretending that others had some say, but ultimatelly he was an uncompromising despot.

[barca]

 

 

I would suggest that the break up of the roman empire allowed divergent social and political communities to emerge, competing with each other, which had to adapt and change to survive. In that fall were the seeds of the rebirth of western civilisation - which didn't truely kick off until the renaissance.

 

I understand your point, but why did it have to take so long for Europe to emerge from the so-called "dark ages"?

 

There was no dark age when the Hellenistic Empires fell to the Romans. In fact Roman rule gave them a political stability that the Greeks never experienced before. There were certainly advances in philosophy, literature, art, and medicine (Galen) under Roman rule.

 

The Germanic tribes lived side by side with the Romans for hundeds of years. You would think that they would have acquired some Romaness, just as the Romans aquired Greekness, but when the Germans finally took over the Western side of the empire they didn't have the same effect that the Romans had on the Greeks.

 

What legacy did the Germans leave us? Well finally in the 19th century Germany became a world class power thanks to Bismark. What did this lead to? 2 world wars and a lot of death and destruction.

Edited May 3, 2012 by barca

[caldrail]

Plutarch was rewarded by the Caesar of his day (I forget which one it was) for his work in settling differences between greece and its Roman masters.

[barca]

Plutarch was rewarded by the Caesar of his day (I forget which one it was) for his work in settling differences between greece and its Roman masters.

 

Why wasn't there another Plutarch in the Middle Ages? Someone to write parallel lives comparing great Romans to their eventual germanic masters. Were any of the germanic warlords worthy of such comparisons? Theodoric the Ostrogoth? Charlemagne the Frank? Or should we look to the modern era and compare Caesar to Frederick the Great, Bismarck, or even Hitler?

[wryobserver]

I've often thought about this myself, and I always tend to think of the Ottoman Empire and the various Chinese Empires that, like Rome, brought a reasonable amount of stability and peace to a region for a long period of time, but stagnated in many other ways.

 

What's to say that Rome might not have had a social, intellectual and political revolution on the scale of the 18th century Enlightenment? Who knows, perhaps without the dark ages that might have occured much earlier in Western history. Then again Rome could very well have died a long slow death like the Ottoman Empire, which entered into decline in the mid 17th century but didn't fall until the 1920's.

 

Hi Decimus,

 

Yes, I agree with your first point. Re the second I guess my point is that the stability and sameness of the 900 + years of roman rule in the western empire is an indication that they wouldn't, that and the fact that the seeds of radical new innovation were just not there in the social and political life of the empire.

 

My view would be that something like a political and social revolution would have been required to change that, which admitedly is theoretically possible, but it hadn't happened in 900 + years.

 

I don't see the Roman empire as an adaptive society.

[barca]

...my point is that the stability and sameness of the 900 + years of roman rule in the western empire is an indication that they wouldn't, that and the fact that the seeds of radical new innovation were just not there in the social and political life of the empire.

 

My view would be that something like a political and social revolution would have been required to change that, which admitedly is theoretically possible, but it hadn't happened in 900 + years.

 

I don't see the Roman empire as an adaptive society.

 

 

There wasn't much innovation during the early middle ages. It was only as the West gradually rediscovered its Classical heritage in the high middle ages and culminating in the Renaissance that significant advances began to occur. First Western Europe became more Greco-Roman again. Rediscovering the ancient scholars led to a more critical form of thinking which eventually led to scientific thinking. For example Skeptic Philosophy of Sextus Empiricus gave individuals willingness to question previously held truths and search for new answers. Individuals such as Francis Bacon changed the way that people looked at the world, eventually resulting in a period of major scientific advancements.

 

We also should not discount the increased communication between East and West. How successful would the West have been without acquiring gunpowder from China?

[Bryaxis Hecatee]

When you read the excellent book "Soldiers and Ghosts" by J.-F. Lendon you see that maybe this technological mindset was due to cultural bias which needed to be completely wiped out in order for massive progress to come. Lendon only studies the warmaking technologies, but shows rather convincingly in my opinion that it was in large part driven by cultural concepts (Homer for the Greeks, Virtus and Disciplina for the Romans) which, by dictating a thought framework, limited, if not inventions, at least implementation of inovations.

 

With war-making taking such importance in ancient cultures, I'd be most surprised if the same was not true, in parte or in toto, for other technological realms.

 

Lendon thinks the final failure of the Western Empire was in part due to a wrong outlook from the elites of the time on the past : they tried to copy the past instead of looking toward it in order to reinterprate things in their own way. For Lendon, Arrian's fascination with Alexander or Julian's Alexander like behaviour shows that the past was no longer an inspiration for change but a model to be reached despite the widely different conditions of the period. If we follow this vision, we can say that this phenomenon grew worse after Julian because they were no longer cultural elites such as there had been in the Constantinian era, especially none that would use pagan texts as basis. So we had a sclerosis of an unfinished model and a christian elite who did not want to think of war, and indeed did not want to think about the world anymore.

 

So the fall of Rome was both a consequence of it's technological and cultural level and a necessary step in order to insure technology could start from a clean mindset. The so-called Carolingian Renaissance of the 9th century will then appear as a false start because it was, in many ways, too close to ancient models it sought to re-take where they had been left by the Romans instead of starting anew. It would take the world of Renaissance, with people able to take distance from the ancient texts and with also the agregated evolutions of the Byzantine Empire brought to the West, to have this new start in an environnement where competition between states was such that the need for evolution was important.

 

We all know where it led the West.

[wryobserver]

 

I understand your point, but why did it have to take so long for Europe to emerge from the so-called "dark ages"?

 

There was no dark age when the Hellenistic Empires fell to the Romans. In fact Roman rule gave them a political stability that the Greeks never experienced before. There were certainly advances in philosophy, literature, art, and medicine (Galen) under Roman rule.

 

The Germanic tribes lived side by side with the Romans for hundeds of years. You would think that they would have acquired some Romaness, just as the Romans aquired Greekness, but when the Germans finally took over the Western side of the empire they didn't have the same effect that the Romans had on the Greeks.

 

What legacy did the Germans leave us? Well finally in the 19th century Germany became a world class power thanks to Bismark. What did this lead to? 2 world wars and a lot of death and destruction.

 

I think the reason why the Germanic tribes didn't establish a stable new order in Europe is because they were just a bunch of large disperate competing tribal groups with tribal leaders. Their leadership structure evolved into kings, and nobles, which was never a stable concoction. The romans has establishes a strong governance structure that was largely uniform across the western empire.

 

It is true that they seemed to depart from romanness and form their own unique style of governance and culture. What can you expect from barbarians???

 

I expect that the germanic tribes were utterly unroman in culture, and any alliances they had were very uneasy political alliances. Romans never really accepted these Barbarians even when they became significant roman leaders and generals.

[wryobserver]

Thanks Bryaxis Hecatee,

 

Awesome post. Really interesting points. I'll have to read that book. Many thanks.

[abvgd]

I don't think that the fall of Rome was necessary for Western development, although I don't think that the fall of Rome necessarily needed to be an impediment for development either. What is an undisputable fact, is that Rome was superior to any other Western European entity at the time of the Roman conquests. With the Roman conquest followed the spread of Roman civilization and technological know-how. Archaeology is pretty much firm on these benefits for Western Europe. OTOH, it's hard to deny that the Late Roman Empire was in an overall state of stagnation or decline (inflation, decline of monumental buildings, less mobility/trade, etc). Yet, at the same time during the Late Roman Empire we see more urban centers develop in the West, and some of these urban centers such as Trier get an unprecedented status of importance. We also see many Roman villas popping up throughout the Roman West during the Late Roman Empire. The few references we have of waterpowered industrial machines in the West are also from the Late Roman Empire (the watermill complex at Barbegal, the watermill-powered stone saws along the Moselle river). During the Late Roman Empire, we also see an increasing political and cultural influence of people from places such as Gaul and Britain. Not only the typical run-of-the-mill military leaders, but also poets, rhetoricians and religious authorities (Ausonius and Pelagius, to name just two), which testifies to the increasing acculturation of the Western populus. Given a century or two more, the West might well have overtaken the cultural primacy within the Roman Empire from the East and this might have given the whole empire a new and fresh impetus, without the need for 500 years of post-Roman chaos and decline. Consequently, I don't see that there was any obvious necessity or benefit for the West to suddenly break free from Rome, given the fragility of state institutions and urban life as a whole in the West. A gradual loosening of the ties would have been a far better outcome in any case than the rapid dissolution that occured in the 5th century. The lights didn't fortunately go out completely, but it did get far too close for comfort to something that could have been the end of civilization.

 

Anyway, this is a highly speculative issue with a lot of if's and but's. For instance, when talking about the "fall of Rome" we usually limit ourselves to the disintegration of the Roman West, but we ignore the fall of the Roman East which came about through the Arab conquests and which put an end to much of Mediterranean trade on which the West also depended. The Arab conquests hit the hardest the most developed parts of the West, namely southern Gaul, Italy, Iberia and Greece (Greece belonging to the common notion of "the West", although being a part of the Eastern Roman Empire). Events such as this need to be taken into account as well. One could also put the issue of Rome's fall into a wider time-frame and consequently argue that the years between 500-1000 were not wasted years but were instead a period of "fermentation" of the new civilization that Europe was about to become and which would eventually bring us to modernity. Maybe it's better to be safe than sorry, given that we now know that we got a "happy ending". If history had taken an alternative route, that might have gotten us to the Moon by the year 1500 but it might (in accordance with the law of unforeseen consequences) just as well have led us nowhere at all or in circles for centuries to come. In the end, the break with Rome wasn't complete and this fact was in itself very crucial to Europe's eventual rise out of the "Dark Ages". Some rudimentary literacy and law survived the fall of Rome in the West and maintained an illusion of continuity. The Church was the most important Roman institution to survive the fall/disintegration and through it the Roman legacy was maintained. As for technology, apart from watermills and possibly the heavy plough, glass production for instance also continued into the Early Middle Ages, so former Roman subjects didn't regress completely back to their ancestral ways.

 

So, to sum it up... Clearly, the dramatic way that Rome fell wasn't necessary or necessarily beneficial in any obvious way for the eventual rise of the West, but neither was the continuation of the Roman Empire necessary in any obvious way. Rome was in many ways little more than the sum total of the cities and provinces that it constituted. Within Rome's borders there were many local coinages and many local tax policies in place and Roman rule was very pragmatic and adapative to the local circumstances that it encountered. The big benefit of having Rome in place was simply as a unifying and pacifying factor for peoples that otherwise never would have interacted with each other or only would have interacted through petty local/tribal wars and raids. In that sense, I think that the idea that Roman central rule somehow stifled progress is an overstated case. Rome wasn't by any means centralized in the modern sense, it was more a collection of city states ruled by a common ideology than anything else. Roman mismanagement could of course be quite bad at times, but I think that any common rule of law and any common culture was in terms of potential progress better than no such common rule of law or common culture in place. The biggest inhibitor for progress would, at times when long-distance travel was rare and perilous, have been the large distances needed for ideas and technologies to travel, not the purported conformity to the iron fist of an emperor in Rome that you only would see on the occasional coin or statue. I think that this common rule of law and culture could have been maintained with or without Rome, once it had taken root. it's also obvious that it did take root to a certain degree in the West through the Latin (spoken and written) language, through Roman law (and its later Romano-Germanic derivatives) and through the Church. However, if I had to speculate, I think that given a century or two more of Roman rule, the Roman West would have been in a far better position to go about its own way, since urban life would have continued to develop, despite the general stagnancy of the Late Roman Empire. The West wasn't completely ready at the time the breakup occured to fend for itself, which is why we got the quite drastical drop in urban life throughout the West following Rome's fall.

Edited May 12, 2012 by abvgd

[wryobserver]

Thanks abvgd for that facinating and analytical reflection on the question. You sound like someone who has studied the roman period academically, and know more about the social history of the latter period than I do.

 

Your thesis that there was a growing western acculturation is interesting and indicates some growth and development that may have been promising if given enough time.

 

What do you think though were the major drivers of technological progress in the West, do you see evidence of them in Roman Europe? My reading of the empire was that the main drivers for technological progress in Rome were patronage by the emperor or local civic authorities. This seemed to wane and rise on the individual emperor. Even their universities didn't focus too much more than training the ruling elite to read and write immaculate latin.

 

Conversly, the way western civilisation grew and developed in the end was through economic and political competition, vying military power and ambitions, social change creating a merchantile class, and a wealthy nobility which favoured patronage of artists and thinkers, as well as improved communication (printing press). Interestingly the reanaissance grew up in Italy itself, which was the ground of those early Roman ancestors, but not in anyway resembling the political and social and economic world of Rome. For me the clue is right there.

 

Had Roman rule remained in place and not radically changed its formation, I see very limited scope for the kind of growth that we saw in the 1400s. Perhaps some incremental improvement, but no major revolution.