Graduate Studies

in Roman History
suggested research
propositions
German overpopulation. When a woman is allowed to choose her sex
partners, the result is constant pregnancy because there is little rationality
involved. That happened amongst the German tribes whom the Roman
considered baby producing factories, and women were allowed to select
their own sexual partner for each encounter, and so they were constantly
pregnant. As a consequence German population became totally
unsupportable. They then became a hungry, marauding, desperate band
that ruined civilization in the Mediterranean.

Romans knew the German population was growing exponentially and thus
posed a large future threat in terms of military manpower. The Romans
considered the Germans “baby-making factories”. They realized that the
German women were having baby after baby after baby. The German
family system did not recognize a man and wife as a sexual partnership. I
think the woman was free to mate with whomever she wanted whenever
she was ready, so with multiple sex partners, she never failed to become
pregnant unless she herself were sterile. That of course led to a population
explosion. We found the same thing to have happened even in
contemporary America.

1
Rome collapsed by its own weight—a myth. Germanic authors, from
Germany, England, etc., would like the world to believe that the Roman
Empire fell because of mismanagement and its own dead weight. That of
course is simply an attempt to save face, because the truth is that the
German barbarians wrecked the Roman Empire, which could have
survived otherwise, if not for savage German destruction of Roman
infrastructure, people and institutions and the imposition of their dead hand
upon the Roman Empire, by way of their ignorance, fatuity, and their
militant illiteracy. The Germans did not respect writing and learning from
books. They thought it would weaken their military strength by making
sissies of their men. The fall of the Roman Empire can be put down to one
cause: the barbarian invasions.

Rome’s self-defense could have been better. Romans could have

prevented those invasions with three strokes: one, by a full scale assault on
Germany, and pacifying it. After all they had subdued Gaul, which is a
bigger area. Another tact would have been to have ignored northern
Europe altogether. Going into Gaul was a mistake. It was merely
something to feed Julius Caesar’s ego. Many Romans protested about it at
the time. The whole nuisance of defending Gaul drained Roman
resources. Thirdly, the Romans could have put more energy into
technological advances in warfare. From the beginning of the Roman
Empire to the end, they were still fighting with knives and arrows. Those
were weapons that could be easily replicated by the Germans.

Biological weapons had been used, even by the barbarians at that point.
Those barbarians, probably the Scythians, coming out of Central Asian,
used to put human feces and human blood mixed with snake poison on
their arrows.

A truncated Rome would have been more defensible. Rome perhaps could
have retained southern Gaul, that is, the Mediterranean coast, Lyon,
Marseilles and Bordeaux, especially, and the approaches to the Pyrenees
to protect Spain—what is now Toulouse.

I think the Romans should have withdrawn their armies from Gaul by 300-
350 at the latest because the Germans were coming from all sides, In fact,
by 406 the Romans did move the Rhine army into Italy to protect the
homeland from the Ostrogoths who were approaching from the east, but it
2
was too late. The Ostrogoths penetrated Italy and went all the way to
Rome eventually. The Italians should have made the Italian peninsula a
fortress, just as the eastern Greeks did with Constantinople.

German reasons for moving south and west. What was the German
motivation for attacking the Roman Empire? For one thing, the German
lands were of poor quality. During the end of the previous ice age the edge
of the retreating ice was a well-watered area, probably covered with grass
and without trees. That attracted animals and was probably an agricultural
paradise. Once the ice had completely retreated, what were left were just
sand and bogs and encroaching sea level. Submerged lands around the
coasts were rebounding after the weight of the glaciers was gone. That
created marshy coastal areas. A place like Denmark lost a lot of land to the
sea, and people were pretty desperate to get out of there. I think a lot of
them went to England. The Angles were from Frisia, an area that today is
protected by dykes from the ocean’s encroachment.

The number of Germans at the end of the Empire? I’ve seen figures like 5-
6 millions, perhaps more. The Germans were spread out over a huge area,
compared to where they are confined now. They were all the way to Kiev.
Apparently the Huns so terrorized they fled almost all the way to the Rhine.
I think evidence of massive inundation of the coastal areas on the northern
European coast was the plenitude of amber along the beaches on the
North Sea. I think that represents the remains of huge flooded forests.
The forests themselves couldn’t have been very old, since the ice age had
barely ended at that point. Maybe it had ended just 1,000 years before.

Germans were drawn to the better climate in the south. Also the weather is
just much better in the south: sunny, bright. Germans have always been
drawn to the south to find relief from the utter dreariness of their weather.

Germans did not know how to perpetuate the Roman system of wealth
creation. Then, of course, there were the riches of the Roman Empire,
developed through its vast commerce and to a certain extent through
predations on other countries. I don’t think the Germans realized that that
wealth was produced by systematized industry—much as Martin Luther
naively thought the wealth of Renaissance Italy was produced by the sale
of indulgences. The Roman wealth was not an easily accessible,
inexhaustible, mountain of loot. The Germans realized that once they had
wrecked the Roman system, they had destroyed the golden goose.
3
Roman cities were an industrial and trade powerhouses, until wrecked by
German overlords. German and British historians, in their desperate
attempts to defame the Italians who created the Roman Empire, give the
Italians no credit for having created a commercial network throughout
Europe that was the basis of their prosperity. No mention is made of the
industries in places like Rome that undoubtedly employed hundreds of
thousands. My belief is that the products of a place like Rome were luxury
products that relied on Roman technology and craftsmanship and
distribution system, which was the most advanced in the world and not
surpassed for a thousand years.

Undoubtedly when one bought perfume, glassware, tableware, silver

vessels, medications, cosmetics, fine wine, prepared foods of various sorts,
weaponry, art, books, paper, inks, chemicals, precious and semi-precious
stones and jewelry, textiles and fashion, including leather and silk, and
services such as education, engineering, one sought them in Italy. All
those things were produced in Italy and then distributed around the
Mediterranean and then to Gaul. I think those businesses were still going
strong as the Germans attacked and would have survived and advanced
had the German been held back. One can see that there is a clear link
between the Roman Empire and the Renaissance. Some industries
managed to stay alive in Italy, and Italy retained its position as the
European center of those industries, for example glass, as maintained in
Venice. Italy maintained its status as a center of education also.

How did the outlaying areas pay for imports from Rome? With food, for
one thing and slaves. The North Africans and Egypt didn’t send their wheat
to Rome gratis.

I think the de-urbanization of the Roman world at the end of the Empire
was the result of a sudden collapse of demand for luxury goods. That was
undoubtedly a cycle, but some event created a huge and sustained
collapse.

The cost of protecting the frontier was the true origin of all high taxes. The
British and Germans writers would like us to believe that the Roman
taxation system and reduction in population caused the abandonment of
farms and that was the root cause of the collapse of the Empire. I am
ready to believe that there was a huge pandemic brought from Asia via the
4
Middle East, reducing the taxpaying population. I am almost ready to
believe that taxes were fairly high. But one has to look at the root of that. It
was the expense of maintaining the armies to protect the frontier.

I suspect that populations of Italians declined in Europe very substantially,

and they were replaced by people with very little loyalty to the Roman
system, a lot of Greeks from Syria, and others from all over the
Mediterranean, can be found in Gaul acting as traders. They were
probably not too interested in local affairs, community loyalty, or community
pride. One can see the abandonment of civic pride toward the end of the
Empire. That to me represents a fundamental shift in the predominant
culture. I think the urban centers were undermined by those foreign traders
who were out to get as much as they could for their own foreign
communities, and they opted out of the Roman system to their advantage.
There is a history of various ethnic communities using a strategy of opting
out in order to take advantage of the communities where they lived. By
opting out they are not obligated to compete for status within the general
community, and that saves them a lot of money. Secondly, ironically they
are often more trusted than members of general local community because
they are not subject to community rivalries, and, because they have a
commercial obsession. People trust them to make profit or to conduct
themselves in a businesslike way so as to maintain their commercial
reputation. Those people tended to be rather clannish, and they used their
close clan connections to support themselves and spread the risk within
their community, and also to monopolize various segments of the economy
where possible by secretly collaborating and focusing all their resources on
destroying competitors in certain target sectors. Whereas a Roman might
be open to various ethnic groups as collaborators in a commercial
enterprise, a Greek, for example, might work only with Greeks.

One thing one notices at the end of the Roman Empire is a great deal more
selfishness and a lack of cooperation. I think commercial culture does that
to people, especially when there participants in the commercial culture who
are outsiders and who don’t have the community interest in mind. That
may have made any kind of unified defense of the Roman Empire quite
impossible, with people preying upon each other and concealing their
wealth.

Romance languages survived because Germans relied on the church for

literacy. Greek was the official government language at the end of the
5
Empire. Was that the influence of Constantinople or had that always been
true? The reason for the later predominance of Latin was that it was the
church’s language, though it derived from Vulgar Latin. Northern France
was dominated by Germans after the empire's collapse. Charlemagne
spoke German as his native tongue, as late as the 9th century.

Was Christianity at odds with the Roman system? That brings up the
question of the role of the Christians in the spoliation of the Roman Empire
from within. I somewhat have my doubts that Christianity was powerful.
After all, the huge swathes of Christian territories given up to the Muslims
showed that they could hardly wait to get the Romans and their institutions
out of the Middle East and Egypt, even though they owed almost
everything they had in the way of end markets to the Romans. Also there
may have been some confusion over who was Christian and who was
Jewish. I think the Romans often confused the two religions themselves.

Apparently there was vandalism by religionists on an enormous scale in

Egypt toward the end of the Roman Empire. I don’t know if that was
Christian or Jewish. The Jews had a history of rioting in Alexandria. I don’t
think the Middle Eastern Christians were very fanatical because, as I say,
they just lied down in front of the Muslims. I suspect strongly that
Christians destroyed a lot of statuary all over at the end of the Empire from
500 on.

Destruction of classical art was done for all sorts of reasons, including fun
and profit, after the end of the Empire. Romans were very fond of statues
and had a ready workforce for making them, who did beautiful work. My
guess is that statuary was fairly cheap. I think if you look group like the
Laocoon, my guess is that there were a lot of superb copies of it in Rome.
We have just one extant. I think the reason we have the one is that it was
considered a bother to move, and may have gotten broken in initial
attempts to move it. Commissioning a new one would have been simpler.
And so the Laocoon remained down in the cellars of the baths of Titus
which were built over the top of Nero’s palace. I think that anyone doing
proper investigations would find that statutes that have been recovered
from Roman times were found face down and had been thrown down by
someone. They could have toppled in earthquakes, but I doubt that.

Citizens of Rome in medieval times were tore down things associated with
the Roman Empire for fun and profit. One can refer to the damage done
6
for fun by Persians in Egypt. Baking granite statues and then dousing them
with cold water, which caused the stone to crack and slough off, was an
“amusing” way to deface the very solid statues. In the Roman Forum a
temple of Faustus had been converted into a church, using the cella. The
colonnade remained in front, and still stands yet bears the marks of an
attempt by someone to pull the columns down. Was that simply to
desecrate or an attempt to scavenge the marble? We do know that some
of the Roman Forii were used as quarries in medieval times and later. Was
that after they had been destroyed by vandalism or earthquakes or were
they simply torn down in the process of scavenging them for building
materials? We do that in the Forum of Trajan that the scavenging for
building materials did go on, and that even the huge travertine foundation
blocks were dug up and taken off the site. All that said, certain Roman
monuments were allowed to remain. About one-third or one-half of the
Coliseum collapsed because it had been stupidly built upon a gravely river
channel and so was unstable. It likely collapsed during an earthquake.
The building technology used by Romans at the Coliseum was not good
and not up to modern standards. They did a very poor job of investigating
the soil’s stability there. I think if the Coliseum were to be reconstructed
today, the technology for the foundations would be much different than that
used by the Romans. Foundations would be based not on spread footings
but pilings that would attempt to go through that layer of gravel to a more
solid substrate. Also remaining are the Pantheon, and the columns of
Trajan and Hadrian. The many huge temples around Rome were utterly
destroyed. There was a giant temple on the Quirinal, I think dedicated to
Osiris by Caligula, on a huge plinth. There is no trace of it now. Equally,
the Temple to Capitoline Jupiter, is gone completely.

Germans demolished much of the ancient city of Rome. The Germans are
probably to blame for the destruction of the ancient city of Rome. German
historians claim that the attack by Alaric on Rome in 410 did not result in a
lot of physical damage; that they merely looted gems and precious metals.
But it is my belief that they burned and smashed a great deal. As witness
to that I would point to the presence of partially melted Roman coins of
about that same time, melted into the marble steps of what had been the
central market place of the Roman Forum, the Basilica Aemilia. The
Germans undoubtedly burned that place down—probably by igniting the
temporary wooden stalls of peddlers that had been put up on the steps.
One reason to burn buildings is to extract as many metals as possible from

7
the ashes and also to reveal valuables that may have hidden inside the
building somewhere.

The Vandals, about 40 years later, came from north Africa to Rome,
desperate for metals, especially copper with which to make bronze for
weapons, and stripped as much as they could out of the city. What
damage they did, I do not know the extent, but it was probably quite
devastating. They probably stripped roofs, the most notable is the stripping
of the copper tiles off the roof of the Pantheon. They may have dug out
copper clamps holding up columns and that sort of thing. As per their
reputation, they showed no decency whatsoever in their greed.

Germanic historians tried to save face by blaming Roman shortcomings for

the collapse. The British historians, Jones, Dill, and Gibbons, claim that the
Roman tax levels so impoverished the peasantry that they gladly gave up
ownership of land and accepted offers from large landholders who could
afford their own paramilitary. Depredations on the peasants’ wealth and
persons, in terms of corvee work, and the requirement to supply in kind
supplies for the military were also irksome to the peasants. Something else
could have been going on at this time. It could have been a rationalization
of the whole agricultural business. I do believe there were the beginnings
of some mechanization in the Roman world and later ages, namely the
horse-drawn thresher.

The same authors claim there was a lack of initiative among the Romans.
Rome petered out because the rewards for keeping up the Roman system
seemed slim to the majority of the population, namely the farmers. Those
writers, especially Dill, overlook what was happening in the big cities.
There was industrialization there; there was the systematic organization of
goods and services. Those writers would like to cast the Roman Empire as
much more primitive than it was, so that the German depredations would
seem less consequential. The truth is, the Germans at that time, had
simply nothing positive to offer civilization.

I don’t think peasants are known for being a fountainhead of initiative.

Their lives are drudgerous but not hard, usually. After all, they don’t work
during the winter, and that’s a long time in the northern hemisphere. In
pointing to the lack of technological innovation in the Roman Empire, which
I admit is a severe weakness: those blaming Rome for its own downfall
would say that, due to the slave system, the Romans were addicted to
8
personal comfort and personal service, and that left them with no
motivation to automate. That may be true in part. I would contrast that with
British upper classes when apartment life and automation of kitchen and
cleaning services reduced the need for staff. The telephone—huge
savings on messengers, the automobile—huge savings on stables staff,
etc. Those upper class households had no nostalgia for the hordes of
servants/slaves that had erstwhile manned their residential establishments.
Without the hordes of staff they had privacy for once, and a much reduced
level of personnel administration. The London apartment block presented
security not just from footpads and burglars, but also from thieving staff.

What was the character of the German infiltration of Roman lands? I am

curious as to the nature of the German conquest of Gaul and Spain. Was it
a gradual infiltration or was it hordes descending? I suppose the advance
guard were military men, and in their van settlers. What happened to the
Romans and the Celts who were on the land? Did they leave, were they
evicted, were they turned into slaves, or were their lands simply divided
between themselves and the Germans? I don’t imagine the Germans were
too keen to live in the cities, so cities may have retained their prior ethnic
and culture complexion. It would be interesting to know what medieval
Cologne consisted of ethnically. Were there any remains of the Italians or
Celts? What happened to the Celtic population of Gaul? DNA studies
suggest that the entire top half of the France is a mixture of German and
Celtic, the central, highland regions remain Celtic. Along the west coast
there are large pockets of an Iberno-Italian population. The Celts liked
areas of high precipitation for their cattle herds, and would locate in upland
areas where there was the most precipitation. The Celts were never driven
into the mountains. That was already their natural habitat.

Germans turned Europe into subsistence farms. The Germans had a

socially very destructive tradition of splitting up inheritance among
offspring. They didn’t recognize primogeniture. That led to gross
inefficiencies of scale in terms of farming and other things, and to the
general impoverishment of the country because there was no accumulation
of capital that could have been used to either mechanize or find economies
of scale. The Romans, on the other hand, I believe, recognized
primogeniture, which allowed estates to maintain their size if not grow. I
would say that that anti-primogeniture mentality of the Germans was one of
their most disastrous contributions to western culture. It lead to a
subsistence existence for most people. It may have been that there were
9
some anti-primogeniture laws in the late Roman Empire that were very
destructive in terms of the preservation of capital and creating a trend
toward subsistence existence.

Who closed the schools, probably the Germans. Scholars, since there is
nothing to research since virtually there are no extent records, suggest that
there was a gross decline in literacy toward the end of the Empire. That
probably had to do with a decline in schools. Why the schools declined, I
do not know. Perhaps there wasn’t enough money to support them,
perhaps the whole population had become countrified and had merely
subsistence goals. In mid-6th century Gregory of Tours is famous for
writing a simplistic treatise (History of the Franks), unworthy of a literate
Roman. He blamed the simplistic style on a need to communicate with an
ill-educated population, but the fault may lay in his own education.

Perhaps there was a general decline in the publishing business, so one

could not get texts. One should note that Romans were poor record
keepers. I think they relied on their memories for day-to-day business. I
think the number of libraries were quite scant. Obviously without copying,
the extent literature would disappear through deterioration from use. I don’t
know how durable papyrus is. It would interesting to explore the
changeover from papyrus to vellum. After all, vellum must be quite
expensive to prepare, and also is very heavy. So a book made on vellum
would be very hard to move around. Perhaps the craft of papermaking
went into decline. I think a lot of crafts went into decline because the
system of training declined. One would think that the sources of Egyptian
papyrus may have been blocked somehow. But perhaps it was simply a
collapse of the trade system.

What was the effect of the advent of the anopheles mosquito? We may talk
a lot about the decline of the Italian empire, but in fact it could be
something unimaginable, such as the advent of the anopheles mosquito
and malaria. It don’t know what time it makes its appearance, but it may
have been during the Roman Empire. That would be highly devastating to
rural areas. People in areas where malaria is endemic can linger on but
their vitality is very badly sapped.

Just as a side note, the Pontic Marshes south of Rome were notorious for
their mosquitoes. In the Middle Ages and until Mussolini drained them in
the 20th century, the Romans didn’t settle there, either because it was too
10
marshy or the mosquitoes. At the coast there is a tumulus of sand that
blocks drainage from the mountains to the east. The water pools up
instead. The Romans built a road across the marsh on a raised road bed,
and to its side they built a canal to drain off water from the road. The
anopheles mosquito feeds at night, so travelers would be safe as long as
they completed their journey across during daylight. I don’t know how long
it takes to go through that area but I presume they would try to go through
pell-mell so as not to be caught at night.

My guess is that quite a bit of Europe, the Balkans especially, was filled
with shallow ponds, and was very swampy and difficult to farm. Land
reclamation would have required many generations of draining works.
Mosquitoes may have been a real scourge in those areas too. It is no
wonder that people were very slow to graft themselves onto those areas.
The Romans were quite good drainage engineers. They drained Yorkshire
in England and made it farmable.

Was Byzantium truly a continuation of the Roman Empire without Western

Europe? The Roman Empire may be said to have continued in the form of
the Eastern Empire based in Constantinople. They styled themselves
“Rome”. I don’t know how much of the Italianate culture was embodied by
the east. It was obviously filled with Greeks. It is a bit strange that
Constantinople became the new Rome when Alexandria was the premier
Greek city in the world for many, many centuries. Perhaps Constantinople
had the supreme military importance of defending the Balkans from Gothic
intrusion.

I believe that with the advent of the Muslim empire, the Eastern Empire
shriveled very fast, and in the end could hardly have been defended.
Perhaps Greece, the Balkans, Thrace, Constantinople, plus the Aegean
islands could have been saved from the Muslims if the eastern orthodox
peoples hadn’t been so averse to reunifying with the Latin church under the
pope. As it was, the breakdown of reunification talks in the 15th century
brought about a European-wide refusal to assist Constantinople against the
Turks, and the city had to surrender itself. The Greeks lost everything in
the name of self-assertion. They did maintain their own separate brand of
Christianity. I hope that was sufficient consolation for them.

I think at one time, with the decline of the West, the Greek Orthodox church
really thought it was going to carry the banner of Christianity, and the West
11
would never be in any position to render it any assistance whatsoever.
That mind frame perpetuated itself in the face of reality. In fact even by the
12th century, Europeans, egged-on by Venice, were able to loot
Constantinople and could have kept it if they wanted to defend their
possession. I think what was more valuable to the Europeans was the
island of Cyprus, which gave them access to the Middle East. After all, the
peninsula of Turkey is not a very valuable piece of real estate. It’s all
mountains and very dry. There are a few deltas that are farmable. And
besides, the local population then was very destructive of the soils, with
their goat herds eating away any vegetation that could have retained the
top soil. A lot of wooded slopes were denuded in that fashion. I guess the
wood was cut down for use in construction and fuel. Grass and shrubs
followed but were destroyed. After the goats had eaten that vegetation the
soil simply washed away. It is no wonder that some deltas have extended
so far into the Mediterranean with all the Turkish topsoil being washed out
into the sea.

The Balkans weren’t an especially good prize either. I think they were very,
very swampy. If one looks at an aerial photo of northern Canada one can
probably get a good idea of the uneven, boggy, pond-filled terrain there left
by glaciation. Thrace may have been a good piece of property, and may
have been sufficient to support Constantinople's urban population.

Of course Constantinople conducted a trans-Black Sea commerce. I’m not

sure how many commercial products were available around the Black Sea.
My guess is that the peoples who lived around the Black Sea were not very
sophisticated and lived a subsistence existence. I doubt that Crimea, for
example, was the bread basket it is today.

German terror along the borders caused a breakdown of law and order.
The Germans must have terrorized the border populations quite strongly
because the Romans began moving out of the frontier areas and
abandoning their villas, cities and forts in northern France and Belgium
especially, as early as the 4th century. A breakdown of law and order,
especially in the rural countryside, was a new barrier to the trading that was
a cornerstone of the whole Roman system. I imagine that Italy was the
world’s greatest exporter. The Romans are accused of appropriating
wealth from other countries, but I do believe that the Italians developed
industrial processes and an enormity of products and services that made it
far and away the engine of wealth in the Mediterranean.
12
I don’t know whether the plague of marauders was a new thing or not.
English writers would like us to think it was symptomatic of the cultural
breakdown of the Roman Empire. I think it was symptomatic of a
breakdown caused by anti-primogeniture, in which allotments of land
became so small as to be worthless, and perhaps overpopulated. We do
see communities building walls in the 4th century in such a panic that even
civic monuments would be used as elements of the walls.

Prosperity gave peasants the tools for marauding. In regard to brigandage,

sometimes it is technological advances or advances in prosperity that bring
about that brigandage and not poverty. One of the primary assets of the
brigand was the horse, and obviously a horse requires some investment. A
raiding party would probably consist of quite a few horses. Apparently the
Roman authorities tried to stamp out the brigandage by forbidding peasants
to have horses. I don’t know how common horse ownership was among
peasants. I think the traditional farm animal was the ox. Horses were used
for rapid transportation, not movement of heavy objects.

On the topic of horses: the Romans imported horses, I do believe, mainly

from Spain and Gaul, where there were tablelands that provided grazing.
Of course the Celts preferred to be herders rather than farmers.

The Roman trading system ran out precious metals for currency. One thing
that a trade-based economy requires is a currency system, since barter is
not always possible over a long distance. It may have been that the
Roman trade system expanded to the extent that eventually it ran out of
metallic currency. I guess there were no attempts to substitute fiat money.
That could have been accomplished with a minimum amount of metal,
though it may have been quite prone to counterfeiting. I guess that’s
another area where Roman lack of technology prevented it from expanding
and consolidating.

Depopulation of urban centers a cause of the Roman Empire’s collapse. I

suppose if one wanted to identify the cause of the death of the Roman
Empire one would have to point to the dwindling populations of urban
centers. There are images of urban areas that had once held a dense
building matrix being leveled and collapsing, and Celts building their
traditional round straw huts.

13
The Roman administrative system was improving and not becoming more
corrupt. The Germanic writers like Dill would like you to believe that the
Roman administrative system had changed and become so corrupt that it
ceased to be able to control the rich. The rich siphoned off all the wealth of
the Empire and left most of it bankrupt. I don’t see that. I think the process
of consolidation and economy of scale was one of economic efficiency. It
has nothing to do with oligarchic systems of government.

Roman military not up to protecting the borders. The military challenge the
Romans faced was how to beat back a horde of savages. The Romans
didn’t have the equipment to do that, and apparently they didn’t have the
tactics either. The gun, especially the machine gun, or the bomb, or
catapult would have helped. Apparently the Germans were very lightly
armed and in terms of military forces not very numerous, but by sheer
aggression could overcome defenses. That doesn’t say much for Roman
military technology, especially communications.

Roman totalitarianism not a sign of decay but of economic rationalization. It

is said that the Roman state become more and more totalitarian. I don’t
see that. I think it always had been. Dill says that permissions for all sorts
of things were suddenly required from the state. One could not change
one’s profession, and membership in a guild was mandatorily inherited.
One could not sell one’s land. One could not change the family business,
for example if you were a grain marketer, you could not become something
else. Whether the constraints on freedom were really that bad, I do not
know. It may have been an attempt by the government to rationalize the
economic system.

Gaul: a sinkhole for Roman energies and wealth. I do believe that the
Romans put a lot of energy into Gaul, and that it was just a sink hole of
their efforts. I think the local people did very, very little with the
improvements, infrastructure, roads, bridges, towns, that the Romans built.
It may be true that the Italians refused to emigrate to Gaul. After all, it is
cold, and may not have had any of the Mediterranean types of produce that
the Italians liked, olives, figs, heavy red wines, and so on.

I think the Romans could have preserved the vital parts of their empire,
Italy, Sicily, perhaps Pannonia, Egypt and northern Africa, by abandoning
Gaul. Italy is naturally fortified from northern Europe by mountains.
Romans should have focused their defensive attentions there. Had the
14
Romans not been tied up in Gaul they could have protected northern Africa
and Spain from the Vandals. I know the Roman settlements in Gaul were
widespread, because one reads about Roman villas even in Belgium, but I
think the real nucleus of Roman Gaul was in Bordeaux and Lyon in
particular. Northern Gaul may have been used simply as a place to billet
troops, and the local population forced to maintain them. The Italian
strategy was to force the border battles as far away from Italy as possible.
I think that was a poor strategy since the border area along the Rhine was
so huge, it took a gigantic force to man it, and those forces left with idle
time developed rivalries, and one eventually saw Roman troops being used
to fight other Roman troops in support of various contenders for the
imperial throne. The defense of Italy proper would not have required those
huge masses of troops.

Why were Western Europeans not better acquainted with the literature of
the ancient world, before the Renaissance? The catholic church is to be
thanked for saving anything literary from Roman times and thus preserving
some evidence of Roman culture. Had it not been for the church there
could have been nothing left. Constantinople remained until about 1430. I
don’t understand why it would not have been a safe repository of all the
knowledge of the ancient world. Why is it that the Europeans had to
depend on Muslim libraries for a lot of ancient texts? What happened?
Was there an anti-intellectual movement at some time in the Eastern
Roman Empire that caused those books to be destroyed? What happened
to them? Why weren’t they accessible to the West? Why should so many
ancient texts be rediscovered only during the Renaissance? Of course the
Italians lost the ability to speak Greek at a certain point, and undoubtedly
the Constantinople libraries would have all been in Greek. The last fluent
Western European speaker of both the Greek and Latin was probably an
Irish monk savagely killed in a Viking raid in the 10th century.

The great service of monasteries to civilization. It would be interesting to

know what the growing popularity of monasticism had on the available
manpower. I know that in some countries, even today, upwards of 50% of
all males are monks—whether cloistered or not, I do not know—Bhutan
and Tibet, I think. Before the Viking invasions militarized the Irish, one third
of the male population were monks. One cannot say that the monasteries
rendered the able bodied population inert, non-economic entities, because
the monasteries did participate in the local economies. Often they were the
economic phalanx of an area, and served as the nucleus of new urban
15
centers. Munich is an example par excellence. It took the selflessness and
organization of a monastery to drain the boggy lands of which Europe was
filled. Local suzerains would often give that trash land to monasteries in
hopes that they would improve it. I think Bishop Ambrose of Milan is one of
those people who has to be credited with saving what could be saved of
Roman literature because he set his monks about to copy and preserve
what was left of Roman libraries. St. Benedict also promoted such
preservation. Although Ambrose is one of the great figures of catholic
religion he had secular and pagan texts copied as well.

Mongolian and other Asian steppe hordes terrorized the Germans into
becoming pillagers and migrants. For the collapse of the Roman Empire
some blame the Mongolian hordes who were so destructive in world
history, definitely the scourge of humanity, whose main weapon was terror.
When attacking a town, they would first set an example of their potential
savagery by burning of all buildings and destroying all the capital goods,
and all crops and stored foodstuffs, and then torture its residents. One of
those barbaric group's, Scythians or Huns, favorite terror device was to tie
up the owner of a property, set fire to his property, and then drag the man,
facing his property, with a horse until his flesh was worn away. I’m
surprised they didn’t also practice cannibalism. The Chinese dealt with
Hunnish peoples by relentless genocide.

The Germans were sufficiently terrorized by the Huns that they moved in
mass toward the West. It is too bad that the Romans had not hit upon
terror to get the Germans to move away from their borders. In world
history, civil centers have always been easy prey to savage attack. One
primary exception has been Constantinople, whose walls and technical
innovations helped save it until the close of the middle ages. The people of
Constantinople even employed flame throwers (“Greek fire”) to save
themselves in a sea battle with the Muslims, who in their greed had
decided to seize and convert the Greek Roman Empire in the 9th century.
Those savage attackers usually have nothing to lose by risking their lives.
They have no property to protect. They are accustomed to a very low
standard of living, and they receive a great deal of practice, especially
horseback riding, by their transient lifestyle.

Was genocide of the Germans and the Parthians the only hope for
preserving the Empire? I think Pompeii the Great proved that when dealing
with the piracy problem in the Mediterranean that the only answer to
16
savage deprivations was to go into the base areas or breeding grounds of
the pirates and massacre all life until pirates changed their professions.
Now, for the Romans that later would have meant the genocide of a couple
groups, the Germans and the Parthians. The emperor Trajan, who was
probably the most powerful emperor of all time, the one with the most
military resources available to him, did contemplate the annihilation of the
human population of Parthia. He became distracted and then died before
he could do anything. I think he died of malaria. He apparently died near
Basra in Iraq, which is a swampy area.

Romans did not have a consumer base large enough to promote an

industrial revolution. The Roman system of slavery was not very
productive, and the real point of it was to prevent large segments of the
population from competing for consumption. In those days consumable
materials were scarce, and it was critical to limit major consumers to the
upper class. There may have been the beginnings of an industrial
revolution which would have allowed even slaves to consume, though they
would be allowed only to consume cheaply-made industrial junk.

Roman ascetic traditions made economic decline bearable. One thing

about the Romans that may have made them prey to deprivation is that
they could always fall back on an ascetic, stoic lifestyle in which they
stopped consuming, and more or less just subsisted. That may have
caused them to put up less of a battle than they should have, to protect
their property. It may be that during the huge economic downturns caused
by plagues and malaria, that rather than find some sort of mechanical
substitute for labor, as was done in 19th century Europe, the Romans
simply did with less. There are other cultures like that. I think the modern
Japanese are a good example. When faced with declining economy
because of poor competitiveness, rather than change their culture they
simply do with less and then things get worse.

Slaves a deterrent to technological advancement. We have a modern

example of slavery retarding mechanization in the American plantation.
Slave owners found they could usually train some slaves to work
machinery, however the result was quite a bit of capital loss through
incompetence and deliberate sabotage by the slaves. After all, the slaves
were not the direct beneficiaries of the machinery. They didn’t care. If
anything, the machinery merely quickened the pace of work. So the
plantation owners had to be extremely vigilant; and I do not believe they

17
would allow slaves to operate expensive steam-powered cotton processing
machinery by themselves, without some costly supervision.

The Roman view of the future and their attempts to prepare for it. I think
that in our day and age we have become too obsessed by the future and
afraid. Although we have no idea what is coming, we attempt to prepare for
it. I do believe that the Roman world view was rather static, and there was
not a lot of pressure to change. However, I would think that increasing
population would be a motivation for change. As we know, because of
disease, there may not have been a large increase in population. In fact a
large decrease in population may have been the real situation. We know
the Romans tried to organize the government in a centralized fashion,
which suggests that they wanted better planning. We have found that, in an
industrial revolution, tools often lead the way to technological
improvements and an increase in knowledge; witness the microscope, the
air pump, and the still for separating chemicals. In the last centuries of the
Roman Empire such inventions may have been starting to appear. I recall
reading about a water-wheel powered marble slicer and, as I mentioned
before, an animal-powered mechanical reaper. If documents survived we
might find substantial improvements in the mechanization of weaving,
technological improvements in building materials, in glassware, and
pottery.

I think there did come a point when the transmission of knowledge did slow
down. One can see that in art. Obviously the skills and knowledge were
not being passed down as is apparent in the decline in the quality of artistic
productions. Is that because of a lack of patronage or a lack of studios or
egotistical rivalries in which great artists refused to pass on their craft
secrets? The arch of Constantine is often seen as exemplary of the decline
of the ability of Rome to product artistic products, since the arch
incorporated pieces from other arches and did not involve much original
work. There could be an innocent explanation for that. Perhaps they had
no time to design or fabricate an arch from scratch. It was obviously built
for the visit of Constantine—perhaps on short notice. But the suggestion
remains that they simply did not have the craftsmen. Considering the size
of Rome and its tradition of craftsmanship that is really hard to believe.
There were many professions that were considered a slave’s profession,
and I believe art was probably one of them. If the number of slaves
declined or if access to craftsmen trained in areas with long artistic

18
traditions like Greece were not available as slaves, then perhaps the
bottom would fall out of that whole field of art and decoration.

One thing about the arch of Constantine that is rather shocking is that it
contains figures of Dacians that were taken off of the Arch of Vespasian.
Hacking those figures off existing monuments is rather hard to believe
unless the existing monuments were already crumbling. Perhaps, like
many other cultures, the Romans liked new. But if they were going to hack
one of those figures off, why didn’t they just tear the whole Arch of
Vespasian down? Yet it is still there, sans its sculpture.

The Gauls never liked urban life, so without Italians the Gallic towns
disintegrated. When we see town life decline in Gaul as early as the middle
of the 4th century, especially in the north, one has to suspect that perhaps
the Gauls themselves did not care much for town life, and without the
Romans there to provide jobs and administrative expertise, perhaps the
Gauls just passed into the countryside.

Rome fell from the East, not the West. I really think there is far too much
focus on Gaul as the epicenter of the fall of the Roman Empire. After all, it
wasn’t into Gaul that the first German incursions occurred, it was from the
East. However, it should be admitted that the Vandals went through Gaul
and thence to Spain and the African littoral, the loss of which was
devastating to Italy, which had become reliant on it as a granary, having
turned most of its farmland into intensive agriculture: the production of
meat, wine and olive oil.

Germans did not impose their language on major parts of the Roman
Empire. The Germans, despite their destruction of the Roman Empire, held
fantasies about Rome. They would have like to have preserved it and
created a Germania out of it, a Roman Empire in which the Germans held
power, but which functioned more or less as it was already. The Germans’
dead hand killed off the empire, however, since the Germans were almost
universally illiterate and had a crude writing system that was used for
inscriptions, and which probably was unknown and unused even by the
German military and intellectual leadership as a mode of communication. I
think that if the Parthians had taken over the Roman Empire instead of the
Germans, many features of the Roman Empire which prevail today, such
as Latin languages, would have been wiped out because Germans but not
the Parthians had a great deal of respect for Rome. In fact it was probably
19
the German Franks, and not the Romans, who imposed Latin on Gaul. The
Franks needed an administrative system and to operate it needed a
functioning writing system known to many and so they adopted the
language of the church. The formal Latin of the liturgy and official church
documents was derived from Vulgar Latin, and so was widely understood.
Even by the 4th century the Romans themselves were coming to depend
on the administrative system of the church to help administer the secular
empire, and used bishops as magistrates in territories.

I suspect that the Gauls, what was left of them, spoke a Celtic language at
the time. The Gaulic language and Latin descended from the same
branch of Indo-European and may even have been somewhat mutually
intelligible at the time. The Germans, themselves, were in no hurry to learn
Latin or proto-French. Charlemagne, in the 9th century, was still speaking
German as a native tongue, though I think he knew some Latin.

Romans promoted their culture all too well. The Romans have themselves
to blame, in part, for the German infatuation with the Roman Empire and
the German desire to expropriate its institutions, because the Romans
really did hype their culture. They really knew how to make themselves
look good. That was true throughout the Empire. The Roman temple in
Baalbek, Syria, is certainly a good example of the Romans' ability to awe
the local population with a spectacle of heroic proportions.

Peasants in Roman lands had no reason to think their lives would improve
under the Germans. The Germanic apologists for the German invasions
would claim that many Romans, especially the peasantry, welcomed
takeover by the Germans because it freed them from the Roman
totalitarian controls of the Roman Government. I doubt that’s true. The
Germans were probably not good at governing and were rather anarchistic.
It’s no wonder that trade, upkeep of the infrastructure, and civil order all
collapsed under the hand of the Germans. Even education collapsed
completely, so there is the strange phenomenon of monks copying Latin
manuscripts letter-for-letter, having no idea what the words meant.

A snobbery among Roman elites did not destroy Roman commercial life.
The Germanic authors would also make us feel that the Roman social
elites scorned commercial types of people: importers, building contractors,
commercial farmers, etc. I doubt that was true. Some of their tombs were
in prestigious places near the Roman walls (I am thinking of the tomb of the
20
baker outside the Claudian gate), were built by commercial types and
seems to have no shame about how they had made their money. Other
Germanic writers would make us believe that the Roman Empire, as a vast
trading and industrial complex, collapsed because of insufficient workers.
Epidemics may have cut down the population. Poor sanitation in the cities
may have bred cholera, typhus, yellow fever endemics and may have
caused people to flee urban centers. I doubt that because the author
Sidonius, who was a bishop who had spent his life in Gaul, doesn’t mention
anything about that regarding Lyon or Bordeaux.

Administrative sinecures were not the basis of demoralizing taxes upon

agricultural producers. Another supposed reason for a collapse of the
laboring class may have been that the administrative complex had grown
so large and was providing sinecures for people who were not productive.
Peasants and the small property owners were taxed heavily to pay for that
idleness. I really don’t buy that argument. I think that is just a gross
speculation that cannot be proven. I suppose that with modern
archeological soil cores it would be easy enough to tell whether large
expanses of land had returned to forest toward the end of the Roman
Empire. I don’t know what the basis of Celtic agriculture was. I think it was
just pasturage, as was true in Ireland and Wales. The actual amount of
land under cultivation in Gaul may have been quite small. The Italian
peninsula was planted with orchards, grasslands, or vineyards. The amount
of population required to maintain the agricultural system may not have
been great.

Much more data is needed to make sound conclusions about the economic
basis of the Roman Empire. The height of Roman prosperity may have
paralleled a period of excellent agricultural climate lasting for several
hundred years. The great wheat growing area of France today is southwest
of Paris, around Orleans. Do we ever hear about that area from ancient
sources? What were they growing there? That is a vital piece of
information which none of the books I have read supplied. That area may
have been inhabited by non-Celts, either a pre-Celtic population like the
Basques or the same population indigenous to the Iberian peninsula, who
were agriculturalists. I will have to admit that a lot of my sources are quite
old. But on the other hand, the 19th century was much closer to the
Roman world than we are. After all, Latin was a core of education in those
days, and people read everything written in Latin, and were far better
versed in the information contained in those documents than we are today.
21
They lived more or less, mentally anyway, in the Roman world. With the
dying off of that generation of Latin scholars we have witnessed the second
death of the Roman Empire. It’s too bad, however, that the Germanic
writers, Mommsen, Dill, Jones, Gibbons and others had such a cultural
face-saving agenda in wanting to prove that the Roman Empire had
collapsed on its own and not from the dead hand of the Germans.

Celts of Gaul. It is my guess that if the pattern in England is any clue, the
Celts were not tillers of the soil and they relied pasturage, often tied to hilly
landscapes, especially near fairly high peaks because that is where rain is
trapped, which facilitates the growth of grass. I think the Celts were
mountain people, and they were in Wales and Scotland by preference,
rather than having been chased there by the Anglo-Saxons. Ireland is not
mountainous, but all the same is one of the wettest places on earth. I think
the English found that Ireland was wholly unsuitable for tillage crops and so
worthless, which is the reason their plantation in Cork failed, Cork of course
having some of the worst boggy soil in all of Ireland. There is one tillage
crop that does manage to thrive in that horrible water-logged, peaty soil,
and that is the potato, the hardiest starch-producing crop on earth, really a
miracle plant. (The potato did not arrive in Ireland until the late 16th
century.) Otherwise the soil was good only for pasturage. In Gaul I imagine
the situation was quite similar. The Gauls were arraigned around hilly
areas where the rain could be entrapped or that had the advantage of
frequent rainfall all year around or that lent itself to transhumance. In the
south there may have been a very small Celtic population because it was
too dry for animal raising. The Greeks settled there, notably in Marseilles.
They didn’t subsist off the land, however, they subsisted off the sea. It is
possible that the Romans and the Italians who ventured into northern Gaul
were some of the first to till the soil in an extensive and organized manner.
The Germans when they invaded Gaul may have found mostly pasturage
and some Roman farms. I don’t know whether the Germans used slash
and burn agriculture? I suspect they did. They may have learned from
Romans how to fertilize the ground or to rotate crops.

Italian agriculture not subsistence but commercial. The Italians in Italy

preferred intensive agriculture: stock raising, vineyards and olive growing.
They could not have transferred the latter two to northern Europe. I don’t
know how much knowledge the Romans had in regard to tillage. The
Romans relied quite heavily on grain from Egypt. The Egyptian soil was
renewed annually by the Nile, which brought up silt and so does not require
22
deep plowing, fertilizing or crop rotation, the kind of things that we know are
vital for settled agriculture nowadays. We know the Romans favorite crops
required very shallow plowing because their root systems were so deep,
notably the olive and the grape. I think the olive fed a huge proportion of
the Roman population. Bread may not have sustained even half the
population. Where there were a lot of slaves, the slaves’ typical meal
consisted of the pulp of olives after pressing, plus some other stuff in a kind
of compote. Fresh olives are very bitter, apparently, so they must have
been treated in some way, maybe they were heavily salted, mixed with
lime, and fermented. They may have also been mixed with dried salted
tuna fish from Spain. Occasionally they may have received something
more substantial. Obviously they needed a somewhat mixed diet, and may
have subsisted on meat scraps from the main house. I suspect that the
human body can develop in a state of persistent malnutrition, but will be
stunted and not last past age 35 or so.

Much potential Italian cropland was swampy. The Italian peninsula had
some potentially very fertile areas but they were extremely swampy, the Po
Valley for example, and the Pontic Marshes. Both have been drained and
made productive. Draining the Pontic Marshes could have been done
during Roman times. The work would have to have been done during the
dead of winter after the advent of malaria there. I’m not quite sure the
Romans understood the nature of the water-logging problem in the Pontic
Marsh area, nor did they understand the source of the malaria that made
the place dangerous, and may not have been able to foresee that it would
be impossible to work during the warm months in that area. One
Renaissance Pope, Sixtus V, I think, died of malaria after inspecting the
Pontic Marshes for such a drainage program.

The introduction of non-Romans into commercial enterprises reduced

traditional civic pride. A lot of trade in the Roman Empire was conducted
by Greeks and foreigners, non-Italians, and I think they introduced a strong
note of selfishness, so civic pride simply could not survive them. In its
place arose an every man for himself mentality. People no longer took
pride in serving for free in the municipal government, and as a result the
civic power may have devolved into the hands of a few bureaucratic
despots. The Roman Empire may have been the victim of its own
commercial success rather than a slowly dwindling collapsing structure.
The history of capitalism is filled with booms and busts since each man is
out for himself, and I think the Roman Empire simply suffered one bust too
23
many. As I say, I think the shortage of metallic currency and the collapse
of civic pride weakened the Empire.

The internationalization of Roman culture caused some of the things that

are very recognizably Roman, like civic pride and the heroism of
architectural monuments, to become lost. Instead, power was transferred
to far distant central authorities who were not steeped in the Roman
traditions of civic pride.

Christianity: influences were both good and bad vis-à-vis the longevity of
the Roman Empire. Christianity may have been one of the divisive
influences on urban life. I am not about to make any strong argument on
that question. It could be possible that the Christians spurned wealth
because they had an other-worldly orientation. The Italians in the post-
Roman world either regained or retained a keen sense of material avarice
and by the Renaissance controlled the entire monetary system of Europe.
The Venetians, as pious as they were in terms of church building and
ceremonials, were commercially extremely astute, so I could not say that
Christianity rules out materialism by any means. I think the Roman
government had very little use for Christianity until Romans discovered that
monotheistic Zarathustrianism deeply inspired the Parthians and so was a
great motivator and unifier of their population and made them militarily
formidable. I think Constantine saw monotheism created a fanaticism
among the Parthian troops, and he thought, “Well, my Christianity will
perform the same magic for me,” and that is why he adopted it. He could
improve military outcomes by turning battles into crusades. I think the
Muslims used the same trick, which they undoubtedly learned from the
Persians, and they managed to unify some very disparate peoples, and
some peoples who were by nature very anarchistic, like the Bedouins. I
would say that Christianity infused a new strength into the Roman Empire,
and it was only through Christianity that elements of the Roman Empire
survive into the modern day. I think the catholic church is an example of a
Roman institution par excellence; mixing Greek rationality with Roman
practicality, plus a sense of pride, stoic universalism and devotion to duty,
and a military-like hierarchy and a sense of grandeur. I remember the
famous investor Warren Buffet citing the catholic church as the utter master
of efficient distribution of charity.

Christianity propagated a certain amount of asceticism, because it tried to

distinguish itself from Roman religion. That is especially true in the case of
24
St. Augustine. Christians tried to distance themselves from the whole idea
of propitiating feckless gods. And that developed into a sort of anti-
Pelagianism, in which there was no association made between acts of
charity on earth and one’s chances of salvation, because God needed no
propitiation since he was loving and nurturing. As a Roman institution the
catholic church today meets Pelagianism halfway.

Although possibly corrupt, the Roman army was still strong, though
eventually overwhelmed by the sheer number of Germans. Some argument
might be made that the Roman army had become an overgrown, greedy,
corrupt institution whose posts were treated more or less like sinecures,
bleeding the Roman economy dry. Sometimes the military can serve as a
catalyst for technical innovations, employment and stimulation of economic
activity. I think it would have survived if the German hordes had not
smashed it to pieces.

Alcohol addiction one of the drivers of German migration south. Perhaps

the Germans were suffering from a food shortage, because of change in
the climate, crop diseases, exhaustion of the soil fertility, or overpopulation.
Through their contacts with the Romans they had gotten the idea that
Spain and North Africa had almost unlimited grain resources, and they
dreamed of getting ships and going there, which they ultimately did
successfully. They tried first from Italy and were not successful, but they
were successful in departing for Northern Africa from Spain. It seems
improbable, but it is just the thing that could be the truth, that Germans at
that point brewed beer and were very, very fond of it. They didn’t have
enough resources in German to supply the beer they need. When they
heard that Spain and North Africa were filled with grain, their first thought
was all the beer they could brew. That sort of motivation for mob action is
not unheard of. I believe that during the Terror in the French Revolution
drunks were lured from Marseille to Northern France with the promise of all
the wine they wanted to drink. In fact, the wine cellars were one of the first
properties of the wealthy to be plundered. Regarding alcohol in human life,
there wasn’t much entertainment available, and people relied very heavily
on alcohol to pass the time. It had a way of numbing the mind and allowing
it to descend into a sort of catatonia. It should also be remarked that in low
doses, alcohol has a stimulating effect that enhances alertness, much like
caffeine.

25
The Germans’ impossible dream of maintaining the Roman Empire under
their own heavy hand. The German-Roman empire envisioned by the
Ostrogoths would have been called Gothia, as envisioned by Alaric, and
would have retained all the grandeur of Rome. The Germans had no
tradition of city life, and distained living in the Roman cities they had
captured. They preferred to live out in the country. Sometimes they would
tear down the city walls, however, so that no Roman attack could be
sprung from behind them. In the Visogothic areas, the cities remained
Roman. They had their own administration and they paid their taxes
separately from the countryside. I don’t believe there were many cities in
Gaul, so I don’t think the same situation existed there. There were quite a
few cities in Spain, however, and they have preserved their structures.
However, I did read that the Italians had started to move out of Gaul by the
4th century. They may have retained some land ownership there for the
export industry, but it was not a popular place to live, apparently. There
were some thoroughly Roman cities there that had been created some by
Augustus for retired veterans. The Northern European writers would like us
to think that the mobs that descended on the Roman Empire weren’t
composed of just Germans but composed of rural classes in general that
were enticed to join those mobs by the promise of plunder. How they were
armed and provisioned, I have no idea. What would their arms consist of—
hoes and rakes? One large class of property that the Germans would have
been able to take over wholesale without too much struggle were the
imperial estates where the landlord was absent.

Much land wasted in the Empire. Land ownership can be a source of pride
in and of itself without producing anything. If you go to places like South
America you can see that in operation: huge ranches with the land very
little improved, simply existing so that the owner can stand on his porch
and view his property as far as he can see, from horizon to horizon. I
suspect there was some of that going on in Gaul and in Spain. The
Alemanni tribes were known for clearing land of human habitation for
hundreds of miles simply for the pride of ownership, and perhaps as a
cordon sanitaire.

The effect of that on the society at large was to limit the basis for
employment, with those gigantic ranches that could be managed by a
handful of cow hands. Likewise some crops like grapes and olives may not
have been very labor intensive, requiring droves of workers only at harvest.

26
Some empires have managed to beat back barbarians. I would like to know
of some instances where barbarians have attempted to take over a country
or an empire and have been beaten back. I suppose China might offer
some examples of that. It is probable that China had been fending off the
predecessors of the Huns, the Xiongnu, before the Hunnish raids into
Europe.

The number of German migrants into Gaul was not large. The partition of
dark ages German into France and Germany conceivably was the product
of a Gallic uprising against Germany suzerainty. But Germans did not
believe in primogeniture, which would have reduced their population
growth. The population of Gaul in Roman times was about 3 million. How
many German colonists moved into that area, I do not know. DNA maps
now show German blood lines mixed with Celtic throughout the north of
France. There are no pockets of Celtic blood left in the northern half of
France. Apparently a force of about 10,000 Germans were able to conquer
all of Gaul.

Slave population used for many unproductive services. I think it would be

unfair to count slaves among the productive elements of the Roman
Empire. They had some potential in that direction, but I suspect that a lot
of slaves were used as gardeners, for hair dressing, for baths, facials,
fashion-clothes making, and domestic tasks intended to impress the public
such as constant cleaning and polishing. Slaves may or may not have
been the basis of the Roman industrial economy. Free urban dwellers may
have performed that function with little slave inputs.

German culture and lifestyle not a good thing for Europe at the time.
Perhaps there were some Romans who liked to think of the Germans as
noble savages. The Romans found the Germans to be quite chaste and
prudish, especially when compared to the Romans. The Romans used to
laugh at the Germans when they came to the public baths because the
Germans were so shy about undressing in public. Germans tended to stick
to their marriage vows, though pro-creation was a community activity.
They also had unstinting loyalty to those to whom they had pledged
themselves. But that probably led to rivalries and thence to anarchy, as
undoubtedly feuds broke out constantly. When one looks at the dark ages
descending on Europe with the advent of German suzerainty, it is quite
obvious that the noble savage was not a good thing for civilization. Some
Germans might say, “Well, look at Europe now, how advanced it is
27
compared to other parts of the world, Africa, Asia the Middle East. Despite
the Germans, things have turned out pretty well for Europe.”

Without the barbarity of the German hordes, the Industrial Revolution and
advances in medical technology would have come perhaps 500 or 1000
years earlier. After all, the 18th century was much more akin to the Roman
Empire than it is to the 20th century. Medicine is a good example.
Medicine had hardly advanced beyond Galen in the 18th century. The
glorious 19th Century, which was so productive of inventions and
advancement of human knowledge, could have occurred in the 9th century
instead. Which is to say technological advancements can come on very
rapidly given an appropriate environment.

Advances in codifying the legal system was symptomatic of the growth of

commerce and as such offers evidence that the Empire was developing
and not contracting as the Germans prepared to destroy it. As a cultural
downside, however, rampant commercialism may have reduced the repute
of the liberal arts. Land owning was the highest status occupation among
the Romans. Teaching was still considered a slave’s occupation.

Was the Western Roman Empire less militarized after its collapse? It would
be interesting to know whether after the fall of the Roman Empire, the
number of men in arms increased or decreased, after all there was no
border to maintain. Various German tribes were well know for forming
raiding parties. The Vandals are the best example, with their outrageous
attack on Rome of about 450, in which they stripped the city of metals and
undoubtedly tore apart the physical fabric of the city.

Did a pauper class help the Germans physically destroy the Roman
Empire? A sophisticated commercial system, including a legal system, and
technological advancement of production, obviously favor those with higher
I.Q. It may have been that as the Roman Empire became more
sophisticated that it left a certain class of incompetents as helpless
paupers. Those people may have welcomed the Germans. In Italy
Theodoric forbade the Roman colonii, that is, the serfs, from joining the
Gothic army because he wanted them on the land producing food. I don’t
know what those serfs thought they would get from the Goths. Perhaps
they had some exaggerated notion that their failure to prosper financially
was something not integral with themselves but imposed upon them by the
greed of more aggressive opportunists.
28
Massacre was a Hunnish strategy that left areas depopulated. Apparently
the Huns’ strategy to overthrow a government was to aim at the heart of the
oligarchy’s wealth, i.e., their farm laborers. When they came into an area
they would either kill all the peasants or destroy their crops so they world
starve to death. The Huns failed. I think that strategy probably failed
because the real power in the Empire was in the cities and their vast trade
networks.

The size of the German invasion is unknown. Here are some more differing
population figures: the Visigoths were said to be about 20,000 strong when
they conquered a Roman Gallic population of about 10 million. The
Vandal-lead horde of 15,000 captured the 3 million Romans in North
African.

The end.

29