The 210 Theories Behind the Fall of Rome, Ranked: Part 7

The last 17 additional entries exploring the causes for Rome's decline and fall according to the academic world, plus some broader conclusions.

A word of note before we get into this last section of Demandt’s recognized theories: the explanation he gives for each of these entries is tacked onto the end of his book. This is about on par with their significance to the larger project; Demandt did not make some grievous error in overlooking a diamond in the rough somewhere, and the ratings will reflect that. What this does mean is that (shock and horror) I had to do a little bit more digging and research to uncover the specifics in each case. Please, hold your applause. There will naturally be less background for most of these, but the conclusion at the end of the piece should more than make up for it.

211. Altersschwäche

     1. Old age

     2. Mikhail Rostovtzeff (#58) proposed something similar to Corrado Gini’s (#183) theory. His take on the whole matter of the fall of Rome was multifaceted, and the way it differs from Gini is more of a problem of attitude than a physical ability to do craftsmanship from my understanding. 2/10.

212. Aufklärung

     1. Enlightenment

     2. It is generally thought that Nikolai Berdyaev belonged to the same schools of thought as Soloviev and Spengler. As of yet I’ve written these articles with the glaring omission of the so-called “inheritors of Rome,” which is a movement that I generally find to be a silly conversation. Berdyaev seems to be a major proponent of the idea that Moscow was the third Rome, though, and this theory requires the understanding that “Rome” is a title more than it is a state. The more “enlightened” Romans moved to Byzantium along with Constantine, and then in turn to Russia when Constantinople fell. 1/10.

213. Conventionelle Erstarrung

     1. Rigid obedience to convention

     2. In the same way that fertile fields can grow weak from over-farming, Victor Hehn proposes that the same sort of thing can happen to a culture if people stay sedentary in the same place for too long. Whereas the zeitgeist generally regards nomadic peoples to be of a lower class of civilization than the ones we live in, it’s undeniably true that their denizens are more deeply connected to their culture than any of us are our own. It’s certainly an interesting perspective, and may indeed be true, but it helps little to explain why Rome fell. 2/10. 

214. Deflationäre Depression

     1. Deflationary depression 

     2. According to Demandt, Paul C. Martin proposed this theory, but Rome underwent many more periods of inflationary economic depressions and not deflationary periods. Demandt does not source this claim, and I cannot find it elsewhere. 1/10.

215. Eliteversagen

     1. Failure of the elites

     2. Alfred Heuß (#35) seemed to believe something similar to entry #177, in that Constantine’s expulsion of the Praetorian guard and replacement with incompetent bureaucrats caused deep problems. There is another problem with accessing sources here, apologies, but I have gleaned as much from this book. 7/10.

216. Entbauerung

     1. Destruction of the peasantry (414)

     2. Ernst Kornemann (#107) believed that the way the Roman caste system had been set up led peasants to become a sort of urban proletariat, and the city lacked another class of people to mold into peasantry. This accounts for the depopulation of the Roman countryside, and helps to explain a few factors in the famines across the empire. 4/10.

217. Entfremdung von Staat und Gesellschaft

     1. Estrangement from state and society

     2. Demandt actually does touch on this factor in his paragraphs on José Ortega y Gasset, but later on Géza Alföldy expands on the same idea. This represents one step on the theory of the cultural cycle where the state as a body ceases to be a useful method of governance in his eyes, and develops more and more into a sort of vestigial organ. I still don’t have much confidence in the culture cycle theorists in general. 2/10.

218. Extensivierung der Landwirtschaft

     1. Extension of agriculture 

     2. As best I can tell Klaus Scholder claimed that Jens Jessen proposed some issue with the structure of the latifundia. Whether he thinks they were bad or good, too few or too many, I have no idea. This is poorly cited in Demandt’s volume, and chasing down any leads would cost more time, money, and energy than this newsletter can spare. 2/10.

219. Geschwächte Persönlichkeit

     1. Weakened persona

     2. In chapter 5 of Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, he claims that modern man and imperial Roman share the characteristic of a weak persona (in the Jungian sense). That is to say, they became observers and watchers rather than the mask-wearing actors of their time. There’s some notion of passivity to this as well. 4/10.

220. Zurückgegangenes Postwesen

     1. Decline of the postal service (634-635)

     2. Bernhard Siegert’s perspective on power throughout history is that the speed at which information can be relayed is paramount. Longtime fans of this newsletter will remember that the protagonist of L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall shared a similar attitude towards the importance of the invention of news. The primary source for this theory comes from a single line in Procopius (HA 30.10) about how Justinian began to use donkeys instead of horses to deliver mail. 2/10.

221. Religionsmischung

     1. Mixing of religion

     2. Friedrich Sieburg wrote a whole book about the Germanic perception of French attitudes, and held that the French viewed themselves as the sole inheritors of the legacy of the Roman Empire. It was, in his mind, their opinion that the erection of statues of the gods written about in the Edda or worshiped in pagodas brought Rome to its knees. This attitude towards outside spiritual influences helps to explain the fervor during the Dreyfus affair, but the premise that the French were in actuality the inheritors of Rome is flawed. 2/10. 

222. Schlechtes Schulsystem

     1. Poor colonial education system

     2. Victor Martin Otto Denk attempts to make a case on behalf of colonialism by initially comparing the lives of Gallic tribes that accepted Roman domination to those who resisted it. In essence, Denk describes how certain provinces were made to assimilate under the late republic and early empire and how those “civilized” tribes became “respectable.” The American continent was once teeming with what we now call residential schools, and we can now see that the loss of human life and cultural history was not worth the price of assimilation. Such a perspective was not readily available at the time that Denk wrote, and though it may have been harder for the Roman government to operate with different languages and cultures inside its borders, it would not have brought the empire down on its own. 1/10.

223. Substanz- und Identitätsverlust

     1. Loss of substance and identity 

     2. Hans-Joachim Diesner¹ put the blame squarely on the shoulders of the Bucellarii. The reorganization of the armed forces caused soldiers to behave less like soldiers and more like armed bodyguards. If the praetorian guard were seen as a corrupting force on Roman politics, then certainly operating among the likes of Stilicho and Aetius would make these forces even worse. 5/10.

224. Technikmangel

     1. Lack of finesse in political science

     2. George Friedrich Nicolai believed that the late empire resembled a series of federated states more than it did a proper empire. In his mind, the saving grace of Rome would have been a proper constitution that enshrined rights to its subjects. Such a concept was centuries too advanced for the leadership at the time, even if they had wanted to make it happen. 3/10.

225. Wirtschaftskriminalität

     1. Economic crimes 

     2. Hans See and Dieter Schenk proposed that what we now recognize under the umbrella of “white collar crime” was ever-present in the late Roman Empire. Just as it may harm unseen victims with poverty and unemployment by robbing the social coffers in our time, so too did they happen in Rome, but without the customary judicial slap on the wrist that we have today. There’s certainly a case to investigate this issue further. 4/10. 

226. Zersetzung

     1. Decomposition (609)

     2. Voltaire’s theory that Christianity caused the fall of the Roman Empire was centered around the idea that the early church was in essence an apocalyptic cult. The common interpretation of the four kingdoms of Daniel (Daniel 2:37-41) was that Rome was to be the last terrestrial kingdom before the whole race of man entered the kingdom of heaven. Those who wished to have a free ticket into the pleasures of the afterlife therefore hastened Rome’s demise. 2/10.  

227. Zwangstaat

     1. Compulsions of the state 

     2. Hermann Aubin (#22) first used this term to describe the way the taxation of the lower classes may have gone to pay for the vices of the wealthy. Alfred Heuß (#35) and Mikhail Rostovtzeff built off these foundations, but they were later opposed by Friedrich Vittinghoff (#24). 4/10.

Wow, what a journey this has been. I understood going into this project that it was akin to a marathon, but I had no idea just what that would entail. Now that I’ve crossed the finish line, I plan to take a nice long break from translating German and return to the language that I love. I think it’s worth putting a few words of reflection down for my readership before I leave this massive project behind me. 

The first thing I’d like to note is that the ambition that launched this project was far beyond my ability at certain points. My level of German is somewhere around A2/ early B1 (mostly depending on whether I’m speaking or reading), and a lot of the vocabulary in this book was niche and specialized, and I haven’t been in a scenario where I would’ve encountered it before. Words like “Niedergangsfaktor” are self-explanatory, but trying to tease out the precise meaning of “Bevölkerungsdruck” from the paragraph of context was an issue. 

That being said, I’m absolutely secure in the fact that I have added something substantial to the English-speaking world of the classics. The rating system I have used was an excuse to insert a little bit of an opinion and give it a Buzzfeed-like spin for the young, inquiring mind. The extant lists of Demandt’s 210 theories are at best incomplete and at worst present wrong information. People further down the line in the proverbial game of Telephone played by content-milling blogs who haven’t read a lick of German may be able to guess at the reasoning behind blaming Christianity or gluttony, but the translation they all copy and paste to their websites gives no additional context to “hothouse culture,”² which means little outside the original German. “Useless diet”³ on the list I have linked above furthermore paints the picture of something wrong with the nutrients in the grain, rather than the actual intended meaning of the theory. The way I’ve structured this piece opens doors for further inquiry into the topic at hand. Each heading has at least one scholar tied to the proposed idea. If I’d had the room in my already-stretched word limit to list them, I would have included the relevant books they wrote as well. Anyone reading this that would desire that level of specificity, on the other hand, is better off picking up a copy of this work for themselves anyway.

As far as valuable outcomes that I took from this piece, I think Demandt’s conclusion that a plurality of the theorists he covered were observing conditions their own culture lacked, rather than necessarily demonstrating a fatal flaw in late Rome is absolutely sound. I made note of a few egregious examples of this happening across the piece as a whole (most notably when it came to politics), but there is an innate desire to see ourselves in our ancestors; if not hereditarily, then culturally in this case. Some historians treat the 5th century empire as a struggle between three contesting parties, with only two able to coexist in harmony at any given time: the senate, the church, and the military. The pagan system avoided this issue altogether because religious activities were subordinate to the government, as priests were elected officials. During the dark ages and through to the modern era, any country’s standing army tends to be under the control of the government, and in a few cases, military juntas control the government, leaving this conflict resolved. In the theories that center this dynamic, there just wasn’t enough power and money to share between all three groups, which obviously left the civilization vulnerable during times of war. Some blame the church or the senate for being too greedy, but others let the fault rest on the army for demanding too much from local governments even in times of peace. As far as who gets blamed for the empire falling into a state of irreversible decline, Diocletian gets blamed the most, but also seems to receive the most praise for enacting policies that extended the length of its existence. Constantine maintains a similarly controversial reputation in the annals of history. I think the emperors I was most surprised to see receive flak were Valerian and Aurelian, both from Ferrero over things that eventually Diocletian took credit for. Stilicho, on the other hand, came up much less often than I would have guessed beforehand.

The greatest difficulty I’ve suffered throughout this entire project has been facing the myriad theories put forward by members of the Nazi party. Even Demandt himself brushes off many of the factors he lists as hogwash (albeit in respectful, dry, academic terms). It was to be expected that those figures would receive a preponderance of attention from the author, given that they share a native language. That’s not to say he didn’t do his due diligence in researching theories from other countries, but I’d imagine that an American given the same task would have found just as many English-speaking fascists to enumerate. There is an incredible temptation to brush off the theories about race and “blood” as Ahnenerbe gobbledygook, but I have more respect for my readership than to take such shortcuts. That being said, I also have to balance that out with the desire to maintain a level of pithiness lest I waste their time. Down the road, once I’ve had a chance to catch my breath, I’d like to explore the topic in a little more detail. This newsletter happens to have a dearth of Nazi-related content coming out, so it’d be more prudent to delay such an article for a while for that reason as well. If any other topic or group of topics seems to you to merit further investigation (and believe me, most of them do), please leave a comment below and we can explore it soon.

1. Sarti, L. (2013). Die identität des kämpfenden nach dem zusammenbruch des römischen Militärwesens in Gallien. https://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/fmi/bereiche/mittelalter/ab_esders/Thyssen-Projekt/_2013_-Identitaet_AfK.pdf

2. #182 on our list.

3. #191.