Part V—Fate of the Roman Nation

Rome was founded near the western shore of central Italy during the mid-700’s BCE, and it began as a federation of three tribes.  The Romans were a mixture of Nordic, Mediterranean, and Alpine sub-racial strains and, therefore, were for the most part a “Nordkind” people. Having compatible cultures and thought processes, they gradually merged into a single Roman nation.  They even developed the doctrine that their nation-state or “civitas” was composed of kindred peoples descended from common ancestors, as in an early Greek polis.

In 508 BCE, the Roman aristocracy overthrew their king and established a respublica or republic.  Officially, this system was to promote the public good, and during the next few generations, changes were made to provide for political representation for all citizen classes.  As a result, the Roman Constitution, called the “Twelve Tables, provided for a system of checks and balances reminiscent of those promulgated centuries later in North America.

However, being such a small nation-state, Rome’s chief political concern was defense.  And in about 390 BCE, the Romans’ worst fears were realized when a Celtic people invaded from northwest Italy and occupied Rome for several months before being expelled.  This dramatic experience led Roman leaders to seek security through expansion of borders.  Subsequently, by 290 BCE, central Italy was annexed, and the compatible Latin-speaking peoples there were granted Roman citizenship.  Then by 270 BCE, Rome won control over the entire Italian Peninsula.

From 264 to 146 BCE, Rome fought a succession of three wars against the Carthaginian Empire, after which it gained control over the lands along the entire western Mediterranean Sea.  Especially after the second of these “Punic Wars,” ending in 201 BCE, some Romans gained unprecedented wealth.  Motivated by egoistic greed, they imported large numbers of slaves from the newly-conquered provinces and imported slave-grown grain directly into Italy.  Consequently, such competition drove small Italian farmers out of business, and thousands of dispossessed Italian farmers and farm workers flocked into Rome.  Gradually, most of these uprooted non-Roman migrants lost the cultural virtues of their ancestors, and they came to comprise an undisciplined rabble (Durant III, 76–77, 111).  In an effort to keep Rome’s poor masses pacified, in 123 BCE the “Corn Law’ was passed establishing a regular monthly “dole” of grain to them (Ibid, 116).  Moreover, even before this period, the superrich were financing costly gladiatorial games in which the crude masses watched condemned criminals and professional gladiators fight to the death (Ibid, 82).  The historical writer, Will Durant, summarized this and later periods in Rome (III, 81):

Immigration, the absorption of conquered peoples, the influx, emancipation, and enfranchisement of slaves, were already beginning the ethnic changes that by Nero’s time would make Rome the New York of antiquity, half native and half everything.

In 146 BCE, the year in which Rome completed its conquest of Carthage, it also took Macedon and Greece.  Henceforth, many Greeks migrated into Rome, and they included those who expounded the Levantine philosophies of Epicureanism and Stoicism.  Within another century, Rome had taken Egypt and the Levant, that is, the eastern coastal lands of the Mediterranean Sea.  The result was a further cultural and demographic assault on Rome.  Durant described the effect of these latest eastward expansions East (III, 94):

In the wake of soldiers returning with Eastern spoils, ideas, and myths came a flood of Greek and Asiatic captives, slaves, refugees, traders, travelers, athletes, artists, actors, musicians, teachers, and lecturers; and men in their migrations carry along their gods.

For many years during this era, there lived in Rome a Greek historian named Polybius (ca 208–125 BCE).  Polybius witnessed these transformations in the Roman nation, and his observations are summarized by Lidia Mazzolani (1972, 23):

Polybius pointed to the Romans’ outstanding qualities as the decisive factors for their success, yet he doubted that these qualities could survive the rise of new classes and amalgamation with new races.  … A close-meshed [cultural] net had held the republic together, but it had to be stretched to fit Rome’s new empire.  Its mesh had been pulled so taut that in many places it was already ripped apart.

Meanwhile, superrich political oligarchs, such as Julius Caesar and Gnaeus Pompey, advocated the assimilation of non-Italians into Roman society.  The Senate’s great orator Cicero originally disagreed with this notion, but (probably fearing the oligarch’s wrath) even he came to endorse it (Mazzolani 1967, 41–42).

In this increasingly diverse multiethnic and multicultural morass, the cultural glue that supported patriotism continued to give way to self-seeking individualism.  Roman citizens increasingly sold their votes to the highest bidders and avoided military service (Durant, III, 90, 111).  In 102 BCE the military draft of citizens ended, and non-citizens were allowed to join the army in return for citizenship.  Gradually, soldiers came to have more loyalty to their generals than to Rome itself (Grant 1974, 19). Civil wars arose between contending political elites with each leading one portion of the army against another.  In one such conflict in 45 BCE, Julius Caesar defeated Pompey, but in 44 BCE Caesar was assassinated before he could manipulate his support from the diverse mob to make himself a king.  His death then sparked the republic’s last civil war in which his grandnephew and adopted heir, Octavius Caesar emerged as the supreme power.  The top military title of “imperator” was made exclusively his, thus prompting later Westerners to refer to these new monarchs as “emperors.”

Under this new system, most government organs remained so as to support the myth that the republic still existed. However, Octavius’ handpicked Senate went so far as to proclaim him “Augustus,” that is, as having divine sanctity.  Octavius (that is, “Caesar Augustus”) was a competent administrator during his long reign from 30 BCE to 14 CE, but he was followed by a succession of lesser men.  Meanwhile, during each generation, the number of true Romans declined until they became a minority in their own homeland.  A succession of competent administrators from 96 to 180 CE (Nerva to Marcus Aurelius) kept the empire together and even caused some further imperial expansion.  However, large numbers of Levantine migrants continued flowing in from West Asia and Egypt, and masses of Germanic tribesmen were allowed into the empire’s western provinces as refugees.  All the while, the low birthrates among true Romans caused them to continue dwindling into obscurity. The traditional culture was being replaced with new cultural concepts, religions, and realities including Levantine-style absolute despotism and growing incompetence.   In Durant’s words (III, 666):

The population of Italy had long since been mingled with Oriental [i.e., Levantine] strains….  The rapidly breeding Germans could not understand the Classic culture, did not accept it, did not transmit it; the rapidly breeding [Levantines] were mostly of a mind to destroy that culture; the Romans, possessing it, sacrificed it to the comforts of sterility.  Rome was conquered not by barbarian invasions from without, but by barbarian multiplication within.

An often-overlooked aspect of this unfolding tragedy was the devastation caused by disease.   As described by Frederick Cartwright (Disease and History, 1972, 18): “By her contacts with distant lands and peoples, Rome opened her gates to pestilence.”  The first great epidemic began in 79 CE and killed tens of thousands in Italy.  Then starting in 125 CE, the “plague of Orosius” caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands in North Africa, and it spread to Italy “where so many died that whole villages and towns were abandoned and fell to ruin” (Ibid 19).  From 164 to 180, the “plague of Antonius”—which began on “the eastern borders of the empire”—caused massive deaths in Italy and elsewhere.  Next, beginning in 250 CE, there was the sixteen-year “plague of Cyprian.”

The plague took the form of a true pandemic, spreading from Egypt in the south to Scotland in the north … [with} the deaths of infected persons outnumbering those who survived….  Thousands fled the countryside to overcrowd cities and so cause fresh outbreaks; wide areas of farmland throughout Italy reverted to waste….  Throughout the next three centuries … there were recurrent outbreaks of a similar plague (Ibid 20–21).

As tragic as these plagues were, the effects of cultural and genetic replacement were even more devastating.  By the 300’s CE, the dominant language in the empire’s eastern half was Greek.  Nevertheless, this vast eastern zone ceased being a part of Classical culture and became Levantine in population and outlook.  That is, it had become a colonized extension of Levantine West Asia.  Throughout the empire since 212 CE (Reform of Caracalla), all free born imperial subjects were born Roman citizens.  And gradually German mercenaries became the realm’s top generals.  Meanwhile, the empire’s western half became a confusion of Classical, Celtic, and Germanic cultures.  Germanic migrants (who were mostly “Roman” citizens since 212) came to comprise the majority in the western “Roman” army (Brown 1963, 302–305).

By the 400’s CE, the entire so-called “Roman Army” in the west consisted of nothing more than entire Germanic tribes under their native chieftains.  These supposed guardians were not usually concerned with protecting the western empire from outside invaders. Instead, they transformed this portion of the realm into a vast protection racket.  That is, in return for tribute from the western cities, they refrained from pillaging Roman settlements.  Subsequently, the western provinces sank into barbarism as their so-called “Roman Army” failed to resist the famed military invasions from the more recently-arrived Germanic Goths and Vandals (Ibid, 303–305).  As Lawrence Brown observed (Ibid, 304): “In a sense, the German barbarians never conquered the western provinces.  These were given to them.”

In summary, the Romans, led by their wealthiest elites, betrayed their own cultural and genetic heritage by creating a multicultural and multiethnic empire.  That unnatural (anti-Asha) entity gradually and inevitably rendered its short-sited creators extinct.  The empire devoured its parents.

References:

Brown, Lawrence R.  1963.  The Might of the West.  New York: Ivan Obolensky, Inc.

Cartwright, Frederick F.  1972.  Disease and History.  London.

Durant, Will. The Story of Civilization.  1944.  Vol. III. “Caesar and Christ.”  New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc.

Grant, Michael.  1974.  The Army of the Caesars.  New York: M. Evans & Company, Inc.

Mazzolani, Lidia Storoni.  1972.  Empire Without End.  New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Javanovich.

_________.  1967. The Idea of the City in Roman Thought.  London: Hollis and Carter.