A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe

One of the more unpredictable ways of learning in my job is to pay attention to what turns up in the footnotes of my students’ written work. I work quite hard at putting together reading lists of recommended material, and there is no doubt at all that my good students’ researches beyond that have broadened my awareness of such material considerably. But not everything that my students find is so useful. There has often been a general tendency among the lower achievers not to use, or to assume that they must go beyond, the reading list, which I blame partly on A-Level (though without really knowing), and this comes in two forms, one less pernicious than the other. The less pernicious form goes beyond the reading list by searching JSTOR, or sometimes our own Library catalogue; that is usually safe enough, though quite vulnerable to not noticing when something was written a century or more ago (or, more dangerously, originally published then but recently reprinted).

The most dangerous form of this research technique, however, just searches the web, and it is sometimes amazing what they find. One such find made me stub this post in May 2021. I think if you teach the Roman Empire, especially maybe the late Roman Empire, you may be especially vulnerable to this happening because of how very ready people who know little about the Roman Empire still are to use it in parallels. I could cite you some stuff…¹ But this is a classic case. What the student found was a lecture originally given in 1979 to the Michigan Association of Timbermen, goodness knows why, whose author, Lawrence E. Reed, as Interim President of a body called the Foundation for Economic Education, had put it online as a thinkpiece on their site.² I don’t know exactly when he did that, as he posted it under the original lecture date and the site doesn’t honour last-modified dates, but the bio note at the end says that he ceased to be the FEE’s actual President in 2019, so presumably this went up in 2019 or after. So a first problem is that it was already fifty years out of date at point of publication, but there’s much more to find problematic.

Perhaps the first necessary piece of background is what the FEE is and does. Their site helpfully explains:

"The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) is a 501(c)3 educational foundation and has been trusted by parents and teachers since 1946 to captivate and inspire tomorrow’s leaders with sound economic principles and the entrepreneurial spirit…"

Now, I have nothing against that mission, but it is possible that Professor Reed (he was, at time of posting, identifying as Assistant Professor of Economics at the Northwood Institute, Midland, Michigan, now Northwood University, and he may still be though their website has no notice of him) represents a certain strand within the Foundation, as his essay is basically determined to show that excessive charity brought down the Roman Empire. Using a folk argument that no-one will work if they can get their living for free, he tries to show that the Roman Welfare State (always with capitals) completely rotted Rome’s political power and more or less forced the repeated sale of the Empire to the imperial candidate who would promise the biggest handouts. Early on, he summarises:

"When Romans abandoned self-responsibility and self-reliance, and began to vote themselves benefits, to use government to rob Peter and pay Paul, to put their hands into other people’s pockets, to envy and covet the productive and their wealth, their fate was sealed."

The fact that the men he names in his metaphor were put to death by the Empire is an irony that seems to escape Professor Reed. Three moralising quotes from all over the temporal map follow, anyway, and then he concludes:

"Nothing but evil can come from a society bent upon coercion, the confiscation of property, and the degradation of the productive."

You might ask how all this is being argued, and from what. Well, I count a total of six actual facts in this essay, as opposed to baggy assertions about the behaviours of whole societies, so let’s list them. None of them are sourced, I should say – and to be fair, it’s a society lecture, not an article, so why would it be? – so the notional fact is all we get. They are these:

1. "In 49 B.C., Julius Caesar trimmed the sails of the Welfare State by cutting the welfare rolls from 320,000 to 200,000. But forty-five years later, the rolls were back up to well over 300,000."

   I have to say that I’ve no idea where this is recorded but I have no reason to suppose it’s not, and there are certainly sources in which I might go and look, like Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Cæsars or Cicero’s letters.

2. "Emperor Aurelian, wishing to provide cradle-to-grave care for the citizenry, declared the right to relief to be hereditary. Those whose parents received government benefits were entitled as a matter of right to benefits as well. And, Aurelian gave welfare recipients government-baked bread (instead of the old practice of giving them wheat and letting them bake their own bread) and added free salt, pork, and olive oil."

   This, I have seen, and I think it must be in Aurelius Victor, who is not always right about the third century, when Aurelian ruled.³ But I believe this fact to be on record.

3. Then, a good chunk of fact with an actual source:
   

   "The Roman coin, the denarius, was cheapened and debased by one emperor after another to pay for the expensive programs. Once 94% silver, the denarius, by 268 A.D., was little more than a piece of junk containing only .02% silver. Flooding the economy with all this new and cheapened money had predictable results: prices skyrocketed, savings were eroded, and the people became angry and frustrated. Businessmen were often blamed for the rising prices even as government continued its spendthrift ways.
   
   "In the year 301, Emperor Diocletian responded with his famous ‘Edict of 301.’ This law established a system of comprehensive wage and price controls, to be enforced by a penalty of death. The chaos that ensued inspired the historian Lactantius to write in 314 A.D.: ‘After the many oppressions which he put in practice had brought a general dearth upon the empire, he then set himself to regulate the prices of all vendible things. There was much bloodshed upon very slight and trifling accounts; and the people brought provisions no more to markets, since they could not get a reasonable price for them; and this increased the dearth so much that at last after many had died by it, the law itself was laid aside.’"

   Here my inner, indeed my outer, numismatist wants to point out that by 268 you’d have been hard pressed to find a denarius as they’d been replaced by the larger coin we call an antoninianus, but since its value had fallen similarly, I don’t suppose Professor Reed would see this as an argument against and indeed he’d be right.⁴ And the Edict of Prices, as it’s more usually known, is a thing, and Lactantius does say what he is said to here. Of course, the Edict makes no mention of the dole or any trouble meeting it; its concern is expressly and exclusively for soldiers’ pay and how far it was currently going. The army was the state expense that was actually giving the state difficulties. But that wouldn’t make Reed’s argument work, so he slips away from it. This is the point at which he begins to unstick from documentable reality.

4. Another chunk:
   

   "The Christians were the last to resist the tyranny of the Roman Welfare State. Until 313 A.D., they had been persecuted because of their unwillingness to worship the emperor. But in that year they struck a deal with Emperor Constantine, who granted them toleration in exchange for their acquiescence to his authority. In the year 380, a sadly-perverted Christianity became the official state religion under Emperor Theodosius."

   The bit about toleration in exchange for acquiescence is a bit odd here – the Edict of Milan which legalised Christianity, alongside all other religions as is often forgotten, makes no such demand – but the rest is true enough. It doesn’t seem actually to form part of the argument, though, even in its original context. I read this mainly as something Reed has internalised from Gibbon that he didn’t feel could be left out.

5. "In 410, Alaric the Goth and his primitive Germanic tribesmen assaulted the city and sacked its treasures. The once-proud Roman army, which had always repelled the barbarians before, now wilted in the face of opposition."

   Really quite a few problems here, starting with the words "Germanic", "primitive", "tribesmen" and "always", and going on to omit the numerous victories by Roman forces against "barbarian" groups both shortly before and for a while after this, but also the fact that in 410 the army was not even sent against Alaric, as Rome was expected to hold out. Admittedly, the city was indeed sacked, and had not previously been for seven hundred years, except of course by numerous Roman armies with their variously ethnic auxiliary troops, but that never counts for some reason. There’s still something here, but it’s not all what it is said to be.

6. "The end came, rather anti-climactically, in 476, when the German chieftain, Odovacer, pushed aside the Roman emperor and made himself the new authority."

   Here we could take issue with the fact that the Roman emperor in question had himself pushed aside his still-living predecessor, but actually what Reed has done here is a bigger rhetorical play, and it offers purchase to stick a wedge in the whole log, so, let’s step out and analyse.

What has happened here, of course, is that what had been a story of the whole Roman Empire has shrunk to become a story of the collapse of Roman rule in central Italy alone. It’s not as if Reed is the first person to do this and he wasn’t going to be the last either, but it does rather ignore the entire surviving Empire beyond that area. When Odoacer took power in the city of Rome in 476, what was his first move? (Admittedly, this is according to Procopius, but hey, no worse than Lactantius amirite, so let’s go on.⁵) Odoacer wrote to the Emperor. Yes, that’s right, Emperor Zeno, in Constantinople, who was still ultimately in charge. Odoacer wrote that he didn’t think they needed another emperor here in Rome given how small its territory now was and that he would be happy to be King of Italy under Zeno. And Zeno, fairly new on the throne with problems of his own, nonetheless told Odoacer to get stuffed, as there was still a ruling emperor in the West too in the person of the displaced Julius Nepos, then ruling from Diocletian’s old palace in Split where he would die four years later. And subsequently Ostrogothic troops who were being a nuisance around Constantinople were given the task of removing Odoacer, which they duly did under their leader Theodoric, about whom much has been written and much claimed but whom one author has called "the barbarian who might have saved [the Empire]" because of his rôle in bringing the various kingdoms of the West back into a single network more or less recognizant of imperial authority, albeit in a mostly symbolic way.⁶

But this is basically now the debate about whether Rome really fell or not. All I’m trying to show here is that the basic political and economic structure of the Empire can’t have been the decisive problem that Reed thinks it was, as it continued working from Constantinople for at least another 750 years, despite some very substantial challenges.⁷ If charity and welfare killed Rome, it should also have killed Constantinople, but it didn’t. Why not?

Well, because it’s not what killed Rome either, is it? Reed plays a trick here, knowingly or not, and again it’s this trick of shrinkage. As far as I can see, from the whole essay, what he means by charity and the "Welfare State" is the food dole to which citizens of Rome (and Constantinople) were entitled. That was indeed pretty big! But even in Rome it was restricted to people above a certain economic level; it wasn’t poor relief, or welfare as we’d usually understand it, but instead a species of subsidy for economic activity, something a lot more like the "London allowance" academic jobs in the UK’s capital get added to their salary to deal with how expensive it is to try and exist in London.⁸ And secondly, it didn’t really exist outside the two capitals. The vast majority of the Empire’s citizenry were not chowing down on imperially-provided pork every day. They were, in some loose way, paying to keep these two megalopoloi running, even though by 410 Rome wasn’t itself a capital any more. But it’s hard to construct from this enshrined privilege of the urban lower-middle class in only the Empire’s two biggest cities, huge though they were, a picture of an entire continental society sapped of enterprise and vigour by government handouts. And indeed, Reed is going for bigger than the European continent: for him, when it all went wrong at Rome in the 5th century, "the world was plunged into darkness and despair, slavery and poverty". By this point, one social bracket in one Mediterranean city has become the barometer of the history of the entire globe and we can easily see that at this extent it’s ridiculous.

There are alternative arguments one could make, of course. One could – people have – say that the real problem, or at least a really big one, was in fact handouts to the peoples beyond the borders, who were thus taught to see the Empire as the source of their wealth and of the status symbols which constructed their social hierarchies.⁹ Even that, it’s hard to see as a problem as long as the Empire could in fact pay those subsidies, but the relationships it created obviously did play into subsequent developments.¹⁰ Or there’s the one I tried above about continuity in the East. But for Reed’s purposes none of this would answer because the article isn’t really about the Roman Empire at all. You may already have guessed where it finishes up…

"History does seem to have an uncanny knack of repeating itself. If there’s one thing we can learn from history, it is that people never seem to learn from history! America is making some of the same mistakes today that Rome made centuries ago.

"In many ways, the American Welfare State parallels the Roman Welfare State. We have our legions of beneficiaries, our confiscatory taxation, our burdensome regulation, and of course, our inflation."

And from there it’s three paragraphs on increase in the money supply and three more blaming this on the ballooning demands of the USA’s welfare system. You may have heard this tune before.

So what we have here is a piece of a long tradition of writing about the Roman Empire which is not actually about the Roman Empire. Edward Gibbon (remember him?), who constructed the original "Decline and Fall" argument but with Christianity in the rôle that Reed here gives "Welfare", was arguably talking about Georgian England at least as much as about Roman history, but he did do so through seven to eight volumes of copiously evidenced historiography based on Roman sources, so it’s hard to keep him in the same box as Reed here even if Reed is consciously or unconsciously borrowing the strategy.¹¹ But in recent decades, it’s been very much more usual for these arguments to be broken out about the modern-day USA instead.

Now of course there would be rather less point to doing history if you couldn’t try and draw lessons for the present from it. But if you start with the lesson you want to teach and then go looking for support in the past, of course you find it. In fact, that conditions what you find. No-one sets out to write a piece like this, or like Murphy’s book above, unless they already think something is rotten in the state of Denmarkthe Union. There is therefore zero chance that such an author will go back to what history they know or look up and conclude, "actually, the past suggests that it’ll probably turn out fine", or at least, since they then wouldn’t have a thesis, zero chance that anything we see on these themes presents anything but echoes of doom from their sounding of fathomless antiquity. But sometimes, as here, you can find weak links in the chain that links their metaphorical diving bell to the present surface, and have at it.

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1. I mean, you get some odd studies using the Roman Empire as their base. To pick but three, how about: Fred Parkinson, "Cohabitation between Barbarians and Romans, A.D. 400–800: The crystallising process in European public international law" in Diplomacy & Statecraft Vol. 1 (London 1990), pp. 71–83, an example of that ‘We Are Rome’ tendency that will return to focus towards the end of this post; Joseph Homer Saleh, "Statistical reliability analysis for a most dangerous occupation: Roman emperor" in Palgrave Communications Vol. 5 (London 2019), no. 155, DOI: 10.1057/s41599-019-0366-y, historically accurate but why do it? or Nicholas Lyall, Dmitry Brizhinev and Roger Bradbury, "Rome as a Hegemon: A Portrayal and Database of its Power Projection over Seven Hundred Years" in Cliodynamics Vol. 11 (Riverside CA 2020), pp. 59–71, DOI: 10.21237/C7clio11248308, validating a model for something else by measuring the unmeasurable, and therefore of course finding the figures which work.

2. We should probably make clear that Reed has continued making these same points, in Lawrence W. Reed and Marc Hyden, "Rome: Money, Mischief and Minted Crises" in Foundation for Economic Education (21st May 2015), online here, and eidem, "The Slow-Motion Financial Suicide of the Roman Empire" in Foundation for Economic Education (17th August 2015), online here, so I don’t think we need worry that his views have changed much since 1979.

3. He is, apart from anything else, the source for the idea that the Emperor Gallienus forbade military command to members of the Senate, which is not true as far as we can tell and has thus become one of those tells for me for when an author has been lazy in their research. For evaluation of that issue, see Inge Mennen, Power and Status in the Roman Empire, AD 193-284, Impact of Empire 12 (Leiden 2011), pp. 193-240 and esp. pp. 238-240, who concludes that there was no prohibition required as senators had been more or less isolated from military influence in a process going on for more than a generation; the few who may still have held such office were not normal or significant.

4. For my money – er, sorry – the best treatment of this issue may still be Andrew Burnett, Coinage in the Roman World (London 1987), which I don’t have to hand so can’t cite page numbers, sorry, but there’s lots more recent, such as Sylviane Estiot, "The Later Third Century" in William E. Metcalf (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Coinage (Oxford 2012), pp. 538–560.

5. Procopius, History of the Wars, Books VI (continued) and VII, ed. & transl. H. B. Dewing, Loeb Classical Library 173 (Cambridge MA 1968), V.1.

6. That writer and his work being James Joseph O’Donnell, The Ruin of the Roman Empire: The Emperor Who Brought it Down, the Barbarians Who Could Have Saved It (New York City NY 2008); but for a more recent, nuanced and quite unexpected treatment of the Ostrogothic régime, try Jonathan J. Arnold, "Theoderic’s Invincible Mustache" in Journal of Late Antiquity Vol. 6 (Baltimore MD 2013), pp. 152–183, DOI: 10.1353/jla.2013.0007!

7. Why the West fell and the East didn’t is of course hardly a new question, but posing it does force us to consider only explanations for the West’s fall which can accommodate it, an obvious idea but one which still struck me as novel when I first read Chris Wickham, "The Other Transition: from the ancient world to feudalism" in Wickham, Land and Power: studies in Italian and European social history, 400–1200 (London 1994), pp. 7–42, where see pp. 26-29 and 36-40. As evidence that it’s not just me that didn’t get that straight away, one could compare Stephen Williams and Gerard Friell, The Rome that Did Not Fall: The Survival of the East in the Fifth Century (London 1999) with Christopher Kelly, Attila the Hun: Barbarian Terror and the Fall of the Roman Empire (London 2008), reading pretty much the same material from entirely the other direction.

8. On the actual Roman dole, see for short Paul Erdkamp, "The food supply of the capital" in Paul Erdkamp (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Rome, Cambridge Companions to the Ancient World (Cambridge 2013), pp. 262–277, DOI: 10.1017/CCO9781139025973.019, and for long, Boudewijn Sirks, Food for Rome: The Legal Structure of the Transportation and Processing of Supplies for the Imperial Distributions in Rome and Constantinople (Amsterdam 1991).

9. E. g. Peter Heather, "The Late Roman Art of Client Management: Imperial Defence in the Fourth Century West" in Walter Pohl, Ian Wood & Helmut Reimitz (edd.), The Transformation of Frontiers from Late Antiquity to the Carolingians, The Transformation of the Roman World 10 (Leiden 2001), pp. 15–68.

10. E. g. Guy Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376-568, Cambridge Medieval Textbooks (Cambridge 2007).

11. See Peter Ghosh, "The conception of Gibbon’s History" in Roland Quinault & Rosamond McKitterick (edd.), Edward Gibbon and Empire (Cambridge 1996), pp. 271–316, DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511599491.014, or indeed Stephen Paul Foster, Melancholy Duty: The Hume-Gibbon Attack on Christianity, International Archives of the History of Ideas / Archives internationales d’histoire des idées 154 (Heidelberg 1997).