[gothic-l] Rome Turning Into a Sewer

[Bertil Haggman]

My recent contributions on the downfall of the
West Roman empire mainly at the hands of the Goths
has emphasized the cowardness of the Roman soldiers
more interested in running away than fighting.

There were indeed Roman citizens that were soldiers,
but few as the decades rolled on. The Germanics was
quite another matter. These federates
certainly helped Stilicho and Odoacer to win a number
of crucial battles against the invading Goths.

Arthur Ferrill in _The Fall of the Roman Empire: The
Military Explanation_ underlines that the Romans
(not the Federates) lacked discipline. In general the
Romans as fighting force were eliminated. Especially
typical: "Romans could be expected to huddle behind
their screen of shields; Visigoths and Alans would do
the fighting." This pretty well describes the situation of
the Roman army in relation to the Federates. The Roman
army was thus no problem for Attila at Chalons in 451 AD.
Attila told his troops to ignore the huddling Romans and concentrate
on the real danger facing them from the associated Visigoth
and Alan troops.

The truth was that the Roman army (of Romans) was now totally
dependent on foreign mercenaries. The difficulty of raising
Roman (not Federate) troops was acute and even the
minimum height for recruitment had to be lowered from
five foot ten inches to five foot seven inches. Interesting
is the period work _De Rebus Bellicis_ which desribes the
reliance of foreign troops. The urban population of the empire
was also often in reserved occupations debarred from military
service. They sought a professional army that would look
after them. The Goths and other Germanic peoples were in
reality masters of the empire long before it fell.

Sidonius catalogued with pride the different groups that fought
as Federates:

"Bastarnian, Rugian, Burgundian, Visigoth, Ostrogoth have ranged
themselves behind the eagles" (I left out the tribes not migrating
from Scandinavia). It sounds as at the height of the British empire
when the royal broadcast  on Christmas Day sounded off:

"Come in, St. Kitts and Nevis".

But long before Sidonius' list above the Germanics had began to
swamp the imperial border. Dill numbered them at a million. Ferrill
mentions 250,000. They pleaded and were allowed asylum.

The historian Ammianus Marcellinus, who was a soldier of the eastern
emperor, has described 376 AD when the Visigoths poured
across the Danube using boats, rafts, hollowed-out tree trunks and some
swimming, drowning in the process. Ammanius really is sardonic:

"Diligent care was taken that no future destroyer of the Roman
state should be left behind, even if he were smitten with fatal disease. With
such stormy eagerness on the part of insistent men was the ruin of the
Roman world brought on." It couldn't be said in a more accurate way.

But when the refugees had arrived they were exploited by petty Roman
officials, their women assaulted, food made available only in return
for children sold into slavery. In despair the refugees went rampaging,
pillaging the country estates in the vicinity. Forces of law and order
managed to stop them for a time but not subduing them.

Zosimus saw the swamping of the empire as a punishment by the gods for
their abandonment by the Christian emperors (Zosimus was a pagan).

Bertil Haggman




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