could beat back the barbarians was sufficiently shown in the careers of Stilicho and Aetius and Belisarius; but the extreme parsimony with which Justinian supported his great commander in Italy is some proof of the economic difficulty of keeping up, even in a period of prudent administration,[229] a paid force along the vast frontiers of what had been Hadrian's realm. Only as ruled by one central system, inspired by an ideal of European empire, and using the finance and force of the whole for the defence of any part, could that realm have been preserved; and when Diocletian, while holding mechanically by the ideal of empire, began the disintegration of its executive, he began the ending of the ideal. The creation of an eastern capital was now inevitable; and when once the halving of the Empire had become a matter of course, the west, hollow at the core, was fated to fall. We should thus not be finally wrong in saying that "the Roman idea" died out before the Western Empire could fall; provided only that we recognise the economic and other sociological causation of the process.
It remains to note, finally, that the process cannot possibly be explained by the theory that the Eastern Empire was successfully unified by Christianity, and that the Western remained divided by reason of the obstinate adherence of the Roman aristocracy to Paganism. The framer of this theory confutes it by affirming that in Greece "the popular element … by its alliance with Christianity, infused into society the energy which saved the Eastern Empire," while admitting that in Italy also the "great body of the [city] population" had embraced Christianity. Surely the popular Christian element ought to have saved Italy also if it were the saving force. Italy was essentially Christian in the age of Belisarius: if there was any special element of disunion it was the mutual hatred of Arians and Athanasians and other sects, which had abundantly existed also in the east, where it finally furthered the Saracen conquest of the Asiatic provinces and Egypt,[230] but as regarded the central part of the Empire was periodically got rid of by the suppression of all heresy.[231] Eastern unification, such as it was, had thus been the work, not of "Christianity," or of any sudden spirit of unity among the Greeks, but of the Imperial Government, which in the East had sufficient command of, and needed for its own sake to use, the resources that we have seen lost to Italy.[232] As for the established religion, it was the insoluble conflict of doctrine as to images that finally, in the reign of Leo the Iconoclast, arrayed the Papacy against the Christian Emperor, and completed the sunderance of Greek and Latin Christendom; while in the East the patriarch of Jerusalem became the minister of the Moslem conquerors in the seventh century, as did the patriarch of Constantinople in the fifteenth.
FOOTNOTES:
[160] The phrase of Professor Thorold Rogers, whose application of the principle, however, does not carry us far.
[161] Dr. Cunningham overlooks this form of gain-getting by war, when he says that the early Romans had no direct profit from it (Western Civilisation, i, 154), but mentions it later (p. 157). Prof. Ferrero likewise overlooks it when (Eng. tr. i, 4) he specifies "timber for shipbuilding and salt" as practically the whole of the exportable products of the early Romans. Once more, who consumed their cattle?
[162] Cp. Bury, History of the Later Roman Empire, i, 26, following Von Ihering.
[163] Macaulay, Lays of Ancient Rome, pref. to Virginia. Cp. Gibbon, Bohn ed. v, 80–81.
[164] Cp. Dureau de la Malle, Écon. polit. des Romains, vol. ii, liv. iv, ch. 9.
[165] Cp. Cicero, De Officiis, i, 42.
[166] Mommsen, B. i, ch. v. Eng. tr. i, 80.
[167] Pliny, Hist. Nat. xviii, 3
[168] E. Meyer (Geschichte des Alterthums, ii, 518), alleges a common misconception as to the ager publicus being made a subject of class strife; but does not make the matter at all clearer. Cp. Niebuhr, Lectures on the History of Rome, Eng. tr. 1-vol. ed. pp. 153–54, 407, 503.
[169] Shuckburgh, History of Rome, pp. 93, 94. Cp. Long, Decline of the Roman Republic, ch. xii, and Pelham, pp. 187–89, as to the frauds of the rich in the matter of the public lands.
[170] W.T. Arnold, Roman Provincial Administration, 1879, p. 26.
[171] Finlay, History of Greece, Tozer's ed. i, 39.
[172] When Julius Cæsar abolished the public revenue from the lands of Campania by dividing them among 20,000 colonists, the only Italian revenue left was the small duty on the sale of slaves (Cicero, Ep. ad Atticum, ii, 16).
[173] Ep. ad Atticum, iv, 15 (16).
[174] Cp. Niebuhr, Lectures on Roman History, Eng. tr. 1-vol. ed. pp. 227, 449; Gibbon, Bohn ed. iii, 404; v, 74–75.
[175] Orat. pro M. Fonteio, v. Cp. Long, in loc. (Orationes, 1855, ii, 167).
[176] Dr. Cunningham, preserving the conception of Rome as an entity with choice and volition, inclines to see a necessary self-protection in most Roman wars; yet his pages show clearly enough that the moneyed classes were the active power. He distinguishes (p. 161) "public neglect" (of conquered peoples) from "public oppression." But the public neglect was simply a matter of the control of the exploiting class, who were the effective "public" for foreign affairs. Compare his admissions as to their forcing of wars and their control of justice, pp. 163, 164.
[177] The fullest English account of the matter is given by Long, Decline of the Roman Republic, iv, 423–27, following Savigny. Cp. Plutarch's account of the doings of the publicani in Asia (Lucullus, cc. 7, 20). Lucullus gave deadly offence at Rome by his check on their extortions, as P. Rutilius Rufus had done before him (Pelham, Outlines of Roman History, 1893, pp. 198, 283; Ferrero, i, 183). The lowest rate of interest charged by the publicani seems to have been 12 per cent. (Niebuhr, Lectures, 1-vol. ed. p. 449). We shall find the same rates current in Renaissance Italy.
[178] Cp. R. Pöhlmann, Die Uebervölkerung der antiken Grossstädte, 1884, pp. 14–15, 29–30. Prof. Ferrero (Greatness and Decline of
