Attila (62 page)

First, the frontiers. The West, with its extremely long frontier – the whole of the Rhine and upper Danube – was far more exposed to barbarian inroads than the East, which only had the lower Danube to worry about. (Persia, on its eastern border – potentially a far greater threat than any barbarian federation – was a civilized power which on the whole kept its treaties.) Unlike the East, whose poorer Balkan provinces could serve as a buffer zone to absorb barbarian attacks, leaving the richer eastern and southern provinces inviolate behind an impregnable Constantinople, the whole Western Empire, bar Africa, could easily be penetrated by barbarians once they had crossed the boundaries. Also, the East
became adept at passing on invaders to the West, once they had tired of plundering the Balkans. (Vide Alaric and the Visigoths.)

Second, the economy. The East was far wealthier and more productive than the West, which still had great tracts of forest and undrained bottom land. Moreover, wealth in the East (with its generally fair tax system, and well-to-do land-owning peasantry) was much more evenly distributed than in the West. Here, an immensely rich senatorial aristocracy lived lives of luxury in contrast to the great mass of the population, who existed dangerously close to subsistence level. Yet it was the poor – mostly agricultural labourers or smallholders – who had to shoulder an unfairly high proportion of the tax burden, in addition to paying rent to the great landowners from whom they leased their plots. Much territory in the West was lost to German invaders who, though most eventually settled down as federates, paid no tax. A shrinking tax base, difficulty in recruiting, and massive losses incurred in barbarian wars, made the task of putting a strong Roman army into the field increasingly difficult for the Western government. Signs of the growing disparity between the two halves of the empire were: in the West, disaffection and decline in patriotism, with many driven by poverty into flight to the estate of a powerful lord (relief from the tax-collectors traded for serfdom), outlawry, or open rebellion as in the ‘Peasants' Revolt' of the Bagaudae; in the East, a much more homogeneous, prosperous, and stable population.

Third, the government. In the West, Rome's curse of usurpation by ambitious generals or politicians lingered on: Firmus, Magnus Maximus, Eugenius, Gildo, Constantine III, Constans, Attalus, Jovinus, John (Iohannes) Petronius Maximus. Compare this with the situation in the East, where in the whole of the same period, 364–476, there were only
two
attempts at usurpation – by Procopius at the very beginning and Basilius at the very end – both of which were easily put down. In the East the civil service was staffed by efficient middle-class professionals, much less prone to graft than their Western counterparts. In the West, the sale of offices (
suffragium
) was endemic, tending to create a corrupt bureaucracy more concerned with lining its pockets than with serving the state. And the curial class, once the backbone of Western administration, had been demoralized and decimated by an ever-increasing workload imposed on it
from Ravenna. In the East, all power was concentrated in Constantinople (like the status of Paris in France until very recently), with the civil service mandarinate, Senate (a service aristocracy, as opposed to the Western club of ‘grands seigneurs'), army, patriarchate, Emperor, and Consistory, combining to form a smooth-working administrative whole. Being forced to work in close proximity to each other, and thus able to establish a system of mutual checks and balances, none of the above entities could become dis-proportionately powerful. Instead, accountability, and co-operation between all state departments, received strong reinforcement. In the West, where the machinery of government was weaker and more fragmented, this did not happen.

Given the above differences, it is not difficult to see why the West – afflicted by administrative, economic, and social breakdown, and militarily too weak to stem barbarian encroachment – collapsed in 476, while the more prosperous and stable East was able to survive for another thousand years.

11
‘The year of the consuls Asclepiodotus and Marinianus, IV Ides Oct.' The Romans dated important events ‘from the founding of the city –
ab urbe condita
' or AUC (753
BC
), but for most dating purposes the names of the consuls for any given year were used, one from Rome, the other from Constantinople. Dating from the birth of Christ was introduced by one Dionysius Exiguus, only in 527. Dates within any given month were calculated by counting the number of days occurring
before
the next of the three fixed days dividing the Roman month: Kalends, the first day of the month, the Nones on the 5th or 7th, and the Ides on the 13th or 15th. (In March, May, July, and October, the Nones fell on the 7th and the Ides on the 15th, in the remaining months on the 5th and 13th respectively.) Thus, the Ides of January happening on the 13th of that month, the next day would be termed by a Roman not the 14th, but the 19th
before the Kalends of February
, reckoning inclusively, i.e., taking in both the 14th of January and the 1st of February; and so on to the last day of the month which was termed
pridie Kalendas
.

19
‘ridge helmets'. These had replaced the classic ‘Attic' helmet (familiar to all from every Hollywood Roman epic ever made) in about 300, except in the Eastern, more Hellenic half of the Empire where (from representational evidence) Attic-style helmets continued to be worn until at least the time of Justinian (527–65). For convenience, and speed of construction, the bowl was made in two sections, joined by a central strip or ‘ridge'. The vastly increased army under Diocletian must have called for ‘assembly-line' techniques in the state arms factories (
fabricae
) in order to meet production targets.

23
‘Jordanes,
Gothic History
'. The
Gothic History
was a summary of a much fuller work (unfortunately lost),
De rebus Geticis
, by a Roman, Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus, 468–
c
. 568 (
sic
). Cassiodorus – historian, statesman, and adviser to Theoderic, the Ostrogothic king of Italy – whose very long life encompassed both the fall of the Western Empire in 476 and its partial recovery by Justinian – may in his youth have consulted veterans of the Catalaunian Plains. If so, he would have incorporated the knowledge gained into his great work. In 551 he commissioned Jordanes, a Romanized Goth, to make a summary version of his work:
Gothic History
.

30
‘Augustine, the saintly Bishop of Hippo'. The influence of Augustine (354–430) on Western thought has been profound, especially regarding Catholic belief, from late Roman times to the present. His doctrine of predestination (with its corollary of ‘the Elect') has helped to shape the mindset of many, from Calvin and Wittgenstein to the ‘acid murderer' Haig. It was mined, to brilliant effect, by James Hogg in his seminal novel
The Confessions of a Justified Sinner
.

32
‘
ludus latrunculorum
'. A board game not dissimilar to chess, in which one piece was taken by being trapped by two enemy pieces. The player who captured most opposing pieces won.

34
‘the chain of forts established by Diocletian'. Their well-preserved remains can still be seen today.

35
‘seen service at the Milvian Bridge'. The Milvian Bridge outside Rome was the scene of Constantine's victory over his rival Maxentius in 312, and of his vision which brought about his conversion to Christianity. The bridge is still in use.

36
‘drawers'. It used to be thought that Roman soldiers – like men in Highland regiments, did not wear underpants. However, the recently discovered ‘Vindolanda tablets' at Hadrian's Wall, contain evidence that they sometimes did.

38
‘a Blemmye, judging by his tribal markings'. The Blemmyes' homeland was Nubia, to the south of Egypt. They were a part-Semitic, part-African people.

44
‘The
cursus velox
'. The
Cursus Publicus,
or Imperial Post, covering some 54,000 miles of road, was an amazing feat of organization
and efficiency. While its primary function was the delivery of government and military dispatches, it also catered for the transport of imperial freight and the conveyance of official personnel. If the news was urgent, it could reach its destination very rapidly, by means of a special dispensation within the system – the
cursus velox
or express post. Changing horses every 8–12 miles, a good rider could cover 240 miles in one day. The system reached its peak in the fourth century, but began to break down in the fifth with the disruption caused by barbarian invasions.

44
‘it was all built underground'. The well-preserved remains of this villa, known today as ‘Maison d'Amphitrite', can still be seen – as can those of several more of these remarkable underground buildings.

46
‘who might almost have stepped down from the Arch of Constantine'. As an artistic convention, representations of soldiers on the Arch are mostly shown wearing classical armour and helmets (obsolete by this time in the West, though retained in the East for many more years). Some of the panels on the Arch were filched from Trajanic monuments.

54
‘He had failed'. It is recorded that Augustine spoke for over two and a half hours at Carthage, against the Feast of the Kalends – in vain. The Feast continued in the West as long as urban life survived; when the Arabs conquered Roman Africa in the seventh century, they found the Kalends still celebrated.

66
‘scale armour or chain mail'. Most book illustrations (and, unfortunately, films and TV programmes) depicting Roman soldiers of any period from 200
BC
to
AD
400, show them wearing ubiquitous ‘hoop armour',
lorica segmentata
, along with (naturally) classical helmets and curved rectangular shields. This efficient type of body-armour was in use by the early first century (specimens have recently been discovered at Kalkriese, the probable site of Varus' military disaster in 9
AD
) and is last seen (in a carving) c.
AD
230 in the time of Alexander Severus – a good run, but of only perhaps 250 years as opposed to 600. It was superseded by scale armour (
lorica squamata
), chain mail (
lorica hamata
), and lamellar armour (small vertical iron plates) –
possibly because of its weight, and the fact that its complex construction made it relatively slow and expensive to produce.