The Fall of the Roman Empire (14 page)

Nor did the principal administrative remedy to which Emperors resorted prove any more helpful. This was ever intenser
centralization,
which not only slashed personal freedom still further but harnessed the government with increasing responsibilities which it was quite unable to carry.

The organization of the Empire was much more complicated than it had been in earlier times. Since the beginning of the fourth century AD, the West and East together comprised one hundred provinces, just twice as many as there had been before. The increase had been intended to guarantee that no minutiae of administration were over-looked by the provincial governors. And it was also designed to ensure that no governor should feel himself strong enough to try to grab the throne for himself.

In neither of those aims was the reorganization successful. Fearing that this might prove the case, and realizing that it was beyond their capacity to supervise every governor personally, Emperors employed no less than two sets of intermediary officials to help them with the task.

First, there were the heads (vicars) of thirteen 'dioceses', among which the hundred provinces were divided. Second, these thirteen dioceses were distributed among three, later four, praetorian prefectures, each under a separate prefect.

In the days of the earlier Empire, the praetorian prefect had been the commander of the Emperor's military bodyguard and, at times, his chief of staff as well. But now there was a complete change. For although the prefectures were still of enormous importance, they had assumed, for the most part, a civilian character. The prefects of the later Empire were the magnificent personages who, under the immediate direction of the ruler himself and in constant touch with his inner cabinet or Consistory, controlled the government of the Imperial territories. 'To their wisdom', as Gibbon observed, 'was committed the supreme administration of justice and of the finances, the two objects which, in a state of peace, comprehend almost all the respective duties of the sovereign and of the people.'

Two of these prefects belonged to the West. One was in control of Italy, North Africa, and Illyricum (central Europe as far as the Danube, and, for a period, the Balkans as far as the Black Sea hinterland). His colleague was the prefect of the Gauls, who controlled Gaul, the Rhine provinces, Britain and Spain. Mauretania, in north-western Africa, was divided between these two Western prefectures.

As in any vast state, the standard of efficiency and integrity maintained by these various grades of officials was neither uniformly good nor bad. For example the legislation of successive Emperors reflects the strenuous efforts of at least a number of Administrative Structure of the later Roman Empire

Western            Eastern

Roman Empire          Roman Empire

Milan
and
later          Constantinople

Ravenna

* later four 'Vicars' of Dioceses

----------- 1------------

Governors of Provinces

praetorian prefects to check the rapidly accelerating slide into chaos. Yet it was unfortunate that Valentinian I'S prefect of Italy, Africa and Illyricum - who occupied the post no less than four times, under three successive rulers - was Petronius Probus. For it is impossible to ignore Ammianus' account of Petronius as a person who, although careful never to order an illegal act, nevertheless was a suspicious, merciless and sinister hypocrite, eaten up by anxiety and jealousy.

Moreover, there is evidence that provincial governors, too, had fallen below the high levels of early Imperial times. It was hardly to be expected, in such a difficult and exacting age, that every one of the hundred governors at any one time should be entirely respectable characters; and the weakness of city councils was a positive encouragement to these officials to interfere right and left. The writer
On Matters of Warfare
paints a deeply depressing picture. 'The appalling greed of the provincial governors', he asserts, 'is ruinous to the taxpayers' interests. . . . The buying of recruits, the purchase of horses and grain, the monies intended for city walls - all these are regular sources of profit for them, and are the pillage for which they long.' It was the brutal cynicism of governors and their henchmen that caused the Visigoths the hardships which impelled them, in desperation, to attack the Romans in 378. Orators declared in the presence of Emperors that the conduct of such administrators made the provincials actually long for barbarians to occupy their territories.

Salvian found governors venal and cruel - men who subjected the poorer communities to virtual devastation. A severe judgment from so censorious a writer was only to be expected, but the much more conservative Sidonius, too, felt that the abuses committed by Roman functionaries in Gaul had gone to intolerable lengths. One fifth-century official, Seronatus, behaved with such brutality that he drove many of the population into the woods.

After all this, it would be funny, if it was not sad, to read an Imperial edict which declares it better for a governor not to frequent fascinating houses of ill-repute
(non deverticula deliciosa sectetur).

A special word of condemnation must be reserved for the lawyers of the later Empire. One of our outstanding documents for the period is the Theodosian Code which was drawn up in 438 on the orders of the Eastern monarch Theodosius II, and was accepted by the West. The Code consists of sixteen books, containing a collection of Imperial enactments extending back for a hundred years and more.

It was intended to eliminate the many notorious ambiguities, inconsistencies and contradictions of which the existing laws were full. Although exercising an influence upon subsequent German legislation, it was largely superseded in the sixth century by the Code of Justinian I.

As a source of historical information, however, it remains highly significant. The measures it records tell us a tremendous amount about conditions in the two Empires, Eastern and Western alike. And equally informative are certain further edicts by Western Emperors of the same period and later, notably Valentinian in and Majorian.

But these regulations are particularly instructive for reasons which it would not have pleased their compilers to hear. For many of the documents in question, especially as the Western Empire drew towards its end, display an almost hysterical violence, revealing emotional confusions between sin and crime that would have been quite alien to the classical Roman law of earlier times. Sir Samuel Dill, who wrote feelingly on the hardships suffered by these later Romans, was convinced, with some justice, that this prolonged repressive legislation was not only a symptom of the Roman collapse, but helped decisively to bring it about.

Above all else, the Imperial pronouncements are intensely, monotonously repetitive. Such constant repetitions suggest that these successive measures, emerging in a continuous torrent, were circumvented, disobeyed and ignored with equally continuous impunity. Their endless reiteration shows that the government, while alive to what it ought to be doing, was overwhelmed by the situation, and quite impotent to improve it. Never has there been such a futile spate of over-legislation. And its futility seems to be underlined by a curiously baroque and wordy style of drafting, with many flowery references to the potency of evil and the need to remould those citizens who were ignorant and liable to be deceived by depraved persuasion.

Some legislation, it is true, was both humane and enlightened.

There were laws, for instance, alleviating the lot of slaves, and granting assistance to needy debtors and forbidding infanticide. However, there was also a terrifying amount of bloodthirsty judicial inhumanity. Besides, there was not even a pretence of equality before the law. Not only were noblemen entitled to have their lawsuits heard in a specially constituted court, but, with the explicit approval of Symmachus, the privileges and punishments of rich and poor were entirely different. 'If a man be poor,' declared the theologian Theodoret, 'his terror of the judge and law-courts is doubled.'

Certainly, there were brief moments when this trend was reversed, for example under Valentinian I, who dealt sternly with the upper class. All the same, Valentinian himself was a poor advertisement for judicial balance. For even if we do not believe Ammianus' assurance that he fed victims to pet bears, he was evidently liable to terrible fits of anger, one of which caused his death. And the ferocity with which he ordered summary executions was notorious. 'Shift his block!' he would cry. And Theodosius i, too, for all his religious principles, often behaved with the grimmest cynicism and brutality.

Such were the character defects of hard-pressed Emperors. But worse still was the savagery with which, throughout the Empire, the law was administered and enforced by the courts. True, they were only reflecting the Codes which continually menaced floggings and burnings alive - or perhaps the Codes were reflecting the practice of the courts. When landowners, too, took matters into their own hands and dispensed justice themselves (as a Carthage mosaic shows one of them doing) the results were no less harsh. The veto of Theodosius i on their private prisons proved ineffective. And even the cultured Sidonius, after coffin-bearers had inadvertently left their tools on the ground covering his grandfather's grave, tells us how he acted on his own responsibility to have them flogged or tortured on the site of their offence.

But by far the most serious problem affecting the operation of the laws was the defect already noted in the civil service as well. For the administration of justice, like the operations of the bureaucracy, was riddled through and through with corruption. Many lawyers behaved quite abominably. The writer
On Matters of Warfare
selects this particular theme as the culmination and climax of his essay.

. . . Most Sacred Emperor, when the defences of the state have been properly provided both at home and abroad through the operation of divine Providence, one remedy designed to cure our civilian woes awaits Your Serene Majesty. Throw light upon the confused and contradictory rulings of the laws by a pronouncement of Your August Dignity. And put a stop to dishonest litigation!

The Code of Theodosius n was intended to tidy up the contradictory rulings. But for the dishonest litigation it did not begin to find a remedy. An anxious awareness that there was corruption in the very centre of the legal scene was openly voiced at a curious ceremony in the Emperor's presence, when the Senators chanted a series of ritual incantations, one of which, repeated no less than twenty-five times in succession, took the form of an appeal 'that, to prevent the edicts being interpolated, all the Codes should be written in longhand'. Dishonest interpolations, that is to say, were not only feared, but fully expected.

The envoy Priscus of Panium (Barbaros) in Thrace, visiting Attila's court, tried to persuade the disaffected Greek merchant he met there, in an oration which even in his own account sounds wooden and unconvincing, that Roman justice was still a fine thing. The Greek replied that the system might be all right, but that the men in charge of it were appalling.

But much the most damning indictment of the lawyers comes from Ammianus. Not content, he says, with promoting utterly useless legislation, they employed their audacious, windy eloquence for criminal frauds, procrastinated by creating hopeless legal tangles, deliberately raised deadly hatreds between one member of a family and another, and 'laid siege to the doors of the widows and childless'. The coarse-mouthed offensiveness of their speeches, he added, was only equalled by their lamentable ignorance of the law.

Perhaps Ammianus was indulging in some rhetorical overstatement, in the spirit of the satirists of old. But he is a responsible historian, and much of what he says must have been true. Indeed, the Imperial edicts themselves stress the existence of precisely such abuses. The lawyers, almost as much as the civil servants, caused Rome's administration to grind gradually to its paralysed halt. Between them, the jurists and bureaucrats bequeathed to the barbarians an Empire which, in the words of the German philosopher Johann von Herder, was 'already dead, an exhausted body, a corpse stretched out in its own blood'.