target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_e45bffda-0507-5520-ab83-f06f0f020f29">[206] The purely piratical plunder carried on by governors under the Republic was now, no doubt, in large measure restricted. But, to say nothing of the state of character and intellect, the economic evisceration was proceeding steadily alike under good emperors and bad, and the Stoic jurists did but frame good laws for a worm-eaten society. So long as the seat of empire remained at Rome, drawing the tribute thither, the imperial system would give an air of solidity to Italian life; but when the Roman population itself grew cosmopolitanised in all its classes, taking in all the races of the Empire, the provinces were in the terms of the case as Roman as the capital; and there was no special reason, save the principle of concentration, why the later emperors should reside there. Where of old the provincial governors had extorted from their subjects fortunes for themselves, to be spent in Rome like the public tribute, they would now tend to act as permanent dwellers in their districts.[207] Once the palace was set up elsewhere, the accessories of administration inevitably followed; and the transference of official and other population would partly balance the restriction of food supply caused by the deflection of Egyptian corn-tribute to Constantinople—a loss that had to be made good by a drain on Libya and Carthage.[208] But when under Valentinian and Valens the Empire came to be definitely divided, the western section, whose main source of revenue was the African province, speedily fell into financial straits. Valentinian had on his hands in the ten years of his reign three costly wars—one to recover Britain, one to repel the Alemanni from Gaul, one to recover Africa from Firmus; and it was apparently the drain on revenue thus set up, aggravated by an African famine,[209] that drove Gratian on his accession to the step of confiscating the revenues of the pagan cults.[210] So great was the State's need that even the pagan Eugenius could not restore the pagan revenues. Thenceforth the financial decay headed the military; and we shall perhaps not be wrong in saying that the growth of medieval Italy, the new and better-rooted life which was to make possible the Renaissance, obscurely began when Italy, stripped of Gaul and Spain and Africa, and cut off from the East, which held Egypt, was deprived of its unearned income, and the populace had in part to turn for fresh life to agriculture and industry. The flight of the propertied families at each successive sack of Rome by Goth and Vandal must have left freedom to many, and room for new enterprise to the more capable, though in some districts there seems to have been absolute depopulation. And while Italy thus fell upon a wholesomer poverty,[211] the provinces would be less impoverished.
Some of the ruin, indeed, has not been remedied to this day. Part of the curse of conquest was the extension of the malarious area of Italian soil, always considerable. The three temples to the Goddess Fever in Rome were the recognition of a standing scourge, made active by every overflow of the Tiber; and pestilent areas were common throughout the land. But when the great plain of Latium was well peopled, the feverous area was in constant process of reduction by agriculture and drainage; and the inhabitants had become in large part immune to infection.[212] In the early, the "Social" and the later civil wars it was devastated and depopulated to such an extent that Pliny[213] could enumerate fifty-three utterly eliminated stocks or "peoples," and could cite the record of thirty-three towns which had stood where now were the Pontine marshes.[214] As early as 340 B.C. the land round Rome was counted unhealthy, so that veterans were loth to settle on it;[215] but population went back instead of forward. It is thus true that the malaria of the Campagna and other districts was an ancient trouble;[216] but it was the perpetual march of conquest, for ever sending forth to more attractive soils the stocks who might have re-peopled and recovered it, that made that and so much more of Italy fixedly pestilential down to modern times. Thus the paralysis of Italian production by conquest was a twofold process, direct and indirect.
In ancient as in later times, doubtless, attempts were made to bring back to human habitation the stricken deserts that stained Italy like a leprosy. Thus Cæsar sought early to repeople Campania from the idle populace of Rome.[217] But to maintain steady cultivation in unhealthy regions there was needed an immune stock, and that was reproducible only by the old way of savage, self-preserving persistence on the part of hardy and primitive rustics working their own land. The new imported stocks, slave or free, wilted away before the scourge of fever; and the "principle of population," weakened in the spring, failed to surmount the resistance of Nature. Under the early Empire the labour needed for the culture of the Campagna had to be brought in annually from distant districts; and when the invading Goths in the fifth century devastated the whole area there was no energy left to recover it.
[The theories once current as to ancient knowledge of prophylactics in the shape of perfumes and the habitual use of woollen clothing may be dismissed as fanciful. The rational conclusion is that the early races developed a relative immunity, which was possessed neither by the eastern stocks imported in the period of conquest nor by the later invading Teutons. It is noteworthy, however, that at all times the dwellers in the tainted areas learned something of the necessary hygiene. See Dureau de la Malle, as cited. His investigation is interesting as showing how, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, long before Pasteur, biology had reached the perception that fevers come of an organic infection. It was doubtless such knowledge that led the Romans to burn their dead.]
There remains the question, What is the precise economic statement of the final collapse? It is easy to figure that in terms of (a) increasing barbarian enterprise, stimulated by the personal experience of the many barbarians who served the Empire, and of (b) increasing moral weakness on the part of the whole administrative system. And doubtless this change in the balance of military energy was decisive. When utter weaklings sat by heredity in the imperial chair, at best contemptuously tolerated by their alien officers, the end was necessarily near. The most incurable disease of empire was just empire; ages of parasitism had made the Roman ruling class incapable of energetic action; and the autocracy had long withheld from citizens the use of arms. But the long subsistence of the Eastern Empire as contrasted with the Western proves that not only had the barbarians an easier task against Italy in terms of its easiness of invasion, but the defence was there relatively weaker in terms of lack of resources. This lack has been wholly or partly explained by quite a number of writers[218] as a result of a failure in the whole supply of the precious metals—a proposition which may be understood of either a falling-off in the yield of the mines or a general withdrawal of bullion from the Empire. It is difficult to see how either explanation can stand. There was already an immense amount of bullion in the Empire, and a general withdrawal could take place only by way of export to the barbarian east in return for commodities.[219] But the eastern provinces of the Empire were still in themselves abundantly productive, and after the fall of Rome they continued to exhibit industrial solvency. No doubt the plunder of Rome by Alaric (409–10) greatly crippled the west, and the loss of Gaul and Spain was worse; but while the Empire retained Africa it had a source of real revenue. The beginning of the end, or rather the virtual end, came with the conquest of the African province by the Vandals (430–40). In 455 came the sack of Rome by the Vandals, whereafter there remains only a shadow of the Roman Empire, till Odoaker, dismissing Augustulus, makes himself king of Italy.
As for the falling-off in the yield of the Spanish mines, to which some writers seem to attribute the whole collapse, it could only mean that the Roman Government at length realised what had been as true before and has been as true since, that all gold-mining, save in the case of the richest
