Rome, Constantinople, and the Barbarians - Constantine the Great

Rome, Constantinople, and the Barbarians 289
The danger here is not so much that the argument circularly infers cause
from effect but that the notion of impoverishment, unless it is meant as a vague
metaphor, focuses upon the passive condition of imperial wealth rather than
upon the desire and determination of the state to mobilize such wealth as there
was. The resources of the Roman world in any age are bound to look paltry in
modern eyes, but that impression is irrelevant. In view of the domestic and ex-
ternal shocks suffered by the third-century empire, especially in the later 200s,
its aggregate resources could hardly have exceeded those available for mobiliza-
tion after Adrianople, yet they had sufficed for clearing the provinces of barbar-
ian intruders. For lack of convincing proof to the contrary, we may only assume
that the wherewithal for war was at least adequate in the fourth and early fifth
centuries. Growing knowledge of the later empire tends to confirm this view.
Not even the evocation of corrupt bureaucrats and greedy noblemen, often en-
countered in modern scholarship, quite suffices to explain why strenuous defen-
sive exertions were avoided.43 Any profiteer from the regime risked-and would
endure-greater losses than small farmers from the dismemberment of the em-
pire.
There is much, to be sure, that we still do not know about the economic his-
tory of the fourth century. A. H. M. Jones summed up a few important and
well-established facts about its course: in the late 200s and early 300s, prolonged
inflation imposed the need for radical remedies upon "the imperial government,
whose fiscal system was so rigid that the tribute ... could not be raised to coun-
terbalance the decreasing value of the currency. The state was thus forced back
onto an economy in kind, paying its soldiers and civil servants mainly in food
and clothing, and making levies in kind to supply its needs.... By the early fifth
century [however] the Empire was on a gold economy, nearly all taxes, salaries
and rents being paid in solidi, and all important economic transactions being
conducted in solidi."44 Cheerful conclusions are usually drawn from this return
to the economic normality of major transactions in sound currency. But is that
favorable assessment altogether adequate? The Roman state that had requisi-
tioned goods and issued rations to its employees had also been the one that
strenuously cleared the provinces of barbarians, whereas the state of the early
400s, which collected and dispensed gold solidi, took the soft option of quarter-
ing autonomous aliens in its lands. The gradual reconversion of public finance
from levies in kind to taxes in gold quite possibly built such rigidities into the
economic fabric of the empire that the government was denied the choice of ex-
traordinary defense. Nevertheless, an economic determinism of even this limited
kind has yet to be confirmed. The terrain is promising but its harvest is still in
doubt.
43George R. Monks, "The Administration of the Privy Purse: An Inquiry into Official Corruption and the
Fall of the Roman Empire," Speculum, 32 (1957): 748-79. On selfish magnates, after the work of Johannes Sundwall
and Ernst Stein, see M. T. W. Arnheim, The Senatorial Aristocracy in the Later Roman Empire (Oxford, 1972).
4Jones, in Third International Confcrcnce of Economic History, Munich, 1965 (Paris, 1969), 104. Most general accounts
of the economic decline of the empire seem still to derive, directly or indirectly, from an essay by Max
Weber that was superb when originally published in 1896; see his "The Social Causes of the Decay of Ancient
Civilization," trans. C. Mackauer in Journal of General Education, 5 (1950-51): 75-88.