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An Aspect of the Decline of Citizenship in the Later Roman Empire

Author(s): B. Wilkinson

Source: Phoenix, Vol. 1, Supplement to Volume One, (Spring, 1947), pp. 19-29

Published by: Classical Association of Canada

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1086104

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AN ASPECT OF THE DECLINE OF CITIZENSHIP IN THELATER ROMAN EMPIRE

B. WILKINSON

T HIS paper' contains little or nothing that is new. It is merely an

attempt to examine once more a very old problem, that of the decline

of citizenship in the Roman world. The main question discussed here is

whether the causes for this decline which we can sum up under the

categoryof

political,or those which we can most

conveniently designateas intellectual, were primary and fundamental. Of course there were

many other causes. The one put forward by Rostovtzeff may be quotedas an example. "The main phenomenon which underlies the process of

decline," he says, "is the gradual absorption of the educated classes bythe masses and the consequent simplification of all the functions of

political, social, economic, and intellectual life, which we call the

barbarization of the ancient world."2 The cause suggested by Professor

Rostovtzeff is sociological rather than political or intellectual. Perhaps

this indicates how arbitrary it is to define the problem as it has beendefined above. In the last analysis, it is probable, the cause of the

failure of any civilization can only be explained in terms of the whole.

Yet if any one cause is to be selected as fundamental, it is perhaps one

of the two which have been suggested. Political life, as it is reflected in

the forms of government and collective living, sums up and expressesthe most vital elements in any organized society. Intellectual life mightseem to be fundamental, in that the ultimate source of all action in a

societylies in what takes

placein the individual mind. To reach down

to this, would seem to touch the very foundations of the historical process;and a long line of historians seem to have acted on the assumption thatit did. Professor Cochrane, to whose important book Christianity andClassical Culture I have been deeply indebted, was of this company."What here confronts us," he wrote of the decline of the Empire, "is inthe last analysis a moral and intellectual failure, a failure of the Graeco-Roman mind." He accepted the two main alternatives suggested above,only to reject the former. No one but political liberals, he believed,

would explain the decay of Roman citizenship as being due fundamentallyto the failure of the forms of political life.

It is clear that the choice of either of these alternatives involves thewhole problem of causation in history. It involves both philosophy and

metaphysics, a discussion of which would here be out of place. Theattractiveness of Professor Cochrane's choice lies in the fact that it ex-

'A paperdelivered to the Ontario ClassicalAssociation on October5, 1946.2Socialand EconomicHistoryof the RomanEmpire,486.

19



THE PHOENIX

presses a view of human destiny as, in the last analysis, being decided byhuman thinking. It can be supported by the contention that, however

important political institutions are in determining decline or progress,they themselves originate, in the first instance, in what men think or

believe. Its danger lies in the assumption which sometimes lies behind

it, that men think and believe in a vacuum, uninfluenced by the kind of

world in which they live. The alternative involves great dangers of its

own, including that of determinism. Nevertheless, there are a good

many arguments in its favour, some of which are set forth, somewhat

dogmatically, in the paper below. But of course the paper is not intended

to do more thansuggest

that thequestion

of these two alternatives may

possibly still be regarded as open. It stresses the importance of the

political causes of the decline of Roman citizenship; but, somewhat

paradoxically, it must be insisted that the idea of the decline of the

Roman Empire as being, at bottom, the result of the failure of the Roman

political order, does not mean that the citizens of Rome were the helplessvictims of forces and circumstances over which they never had any control.

With what mixture of free will and determinism their destiny was com-

pounded, is a question that I will not even try to solve.

It has often been pointed out that the great and decisive failure of theRoman people was the consequence of their successes in the art of

political life. These gave the Roman people the strength to expand their

city state to the dominion over all of Italy and of the Mediterranean

world. The failure of the Roman people was the failure to adapt, not

their general methods of thinking so much as their particular form of

political institutions, to the needs and exigencies of the new situation.

The problem of why they failed to make the necessary intellectual effort

lies back in thehistory

of theRepublic.

As far as we areconcerned,

in the

period of the Empire, the Roman citizens already had a form of govern-ment which was not their conscious creation and which they were, for all

practical purposes, powerless to change. As far as the period of decline

which followed is concerned, all the phenomena of decadence can more

easily be attributed to this defective government than to any economic or

social weakness, or even to any weakness in scientific or philosophicalbeliefs. It may be argued that this only pushes the ultimate problem of

failure into an earlier period, and does not really solve it. That is true.

Nothing so ambitious as an absolute solution is attempted. All that issuggested is that, as far as the Roman Empire is concerned, the ultimate

failure was not the Graeco-Roman tradition, that is the scientific and

philosophical traditions of the Graeco-Roman world as these were in-

herited from the great classical writers. It was the Graeco-Roman

tradition modified, and it may be, distorted by the influence of the

political framework of the Empire. In brief, the idea of this paper is not

to solve the problem of historical evolution, but to suggest that, within

the limited period of the Roman Empire, the political cause of failure

20



1ECLINE OF CITIZENSHIP IN THE LATER ROMAN EMPIRE 21

seems to be deeper and more important even than the change that took

place in the evolution of the "mind."

The imperfect political organization of the Empire, it can be argued,affected not only its social and economic welfare, and its ability to

infuse the great mass of its new citizens with the old Roman virtues,but also the intellectual life of all the citizens of the Roman polity.What the Empire did, was to give its citizens law and order and secu-

rity, but to deny them self-government and the duty and opportunity of

working out their own salvation in the state. Slowly, and over a long

period, it destroyed the small and vital political units which had sustained

the individual and had given him confidence in his ability to influence his

environment, and it substituted a world order which was magnificent and

awe-inspiring but remote and far beyond control. The harm which this

did, in the long run, was not merely to his body, by the failure of the

Empire to solve the problem of healthy government, but even more im-

portant, to his mind by destroying his self-confidence and undermininghis belief in the power of his own reason. It was this which led, and byno very circuitous pathway, not only to the passivity of a subject-minded

people which was such a deep weakness in the later Empire, but also to a

decline of philosophy and science, the distant end of which was ignoranceand superstition. When the intellectual tradition of a community de-

clines in this way, no other aspect of its life can avoid falling into stag-nation. Poverty need never have troubled the later Empire had its

spirit been robust or its inventive science more developed. The Middle

Ages, even the High Middle Ages were poorer than Imperial Rome. So,for that matter, had been Greece at its best. The "Barbarization" of

Rome, it may well be argued, was due more to lack of spirit than to therise of the masses or infiltration from without. The failure of the Roman

aristocracy was, at bottom, the failure of the political framework of their

society, in which they had no part. They were the Aristos of the Ancien

Regime. Above all, it may be argued, what was wrong with the Graeco-

Roman mind was not the particular tenets of its philosophy but the atti-tude of dependency and surrender which it developed. This was indeed a

failure; but the direct and almost unmistakable cause of that failure layoutside the mind and outside the Graeco-Roman intellectual tradition, inthe conditions of political life.

The extension and enrichment of the Roman concept of citizenshipinto a vision of the universal brotherhood of man, it is usually agreed wasnot a simple development of ideas. It was the response to changing con-ditions. Terence, with his homo sum et nihil humani a me alienum puto,represented a meeting of Africa, Italy, and Greece. Cicero, talking of allmen having reason and all a capacity for virtue, reflected the unity of thewhole Mediterranean world on the eve of the great transition to Empire.Seneca, declaring that though the body might belong to a master themind is one's own and cannot be given to slavery, has moved a step for-



THE PHOENIX

ward in the gloom and terror of the debased Empire of Caligula and

Claudius and Nero, and shows that the logical consequence of the new

political order, the new universal Empire, on the outlook of men, is some-thing deeper and more significant than universalism. It is the withdraw-

ing inward, the turning from the market place, the replacing of the ancient

citizenship of Rome, not merely by extending it to become all-embracing,but by changing it to become something different in kind. All free men

had been put on the same plane by the Roman Empire. All men had

been made equal in mind and spirit. Caracalla even made all free men

citizens of the Empire in 212. But all men were alike in their powerless-ness to control or even greatly to affect their environment, and in their

need to withdraw within themselves for the happiness they sought.When St. Paul said "there can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be

neither bond nor free; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus," he was not only

reflecting the universalism of his age expressed in its noblest form, that of

a monotheistic religion with a sublime concept of the true brotherhood of

man; he was also expressing the other-worldliness in Christianity, a re-

jection of earthly conventions which was the same kind of withdrawal

from the market-place as that of Terence himself. The teachings of

Christ and of the Apostles are full of injunctions addressed to the extrem-ists who would refuse all obedience to Caesar in the name of God.

Asceticism was, as we shall see, one of the dominant features of early and

medieval Christianity, given its supreme practical expression in the vast

movement of Eastern monasticism. The consequences will be discussed

in a moment. Meanwhile it may be suggested, we have here all the

characteristic intellectual consequences suggested above of political order

in decline. Thinking in the later Empire took on a new complexionbecause men lived in a new world which was in some ways exhilarating,but in other ways oppressive and hostile. The substitution of the

universal Empire for the old city state was at once liberating and

enslaving. In commenting on Plotinus's assertion that the wise man will

attach no importance to the loss of his position or even of his fatherland,it has been said: "as the scaffold of the polis falls away, the individual

devotee is revealed in solitary communion with his God."3 In one sense

the new outlook was true and ennobling. It was also extremely dan-

gerous, for the individual can rarely, or never, stand solitary and unpro-

tected by his political order. He falls into a more complete subjectionthan he ever knew before. His dependence is not only political, it is also

intellectual. In this broadest sense the intellectual outlook of the later

Empire is surely to be regarded still, as it has often been regarded, as a

consequence, not a cause, of the extending, but at the same time declining,

political order of Rome.

This still seems to be the most probable inference to be drawn from

the parallel that existed between the decline of the political order and the

3C. N. Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture, 172.

22



DECLINE OF CITIZENSHIP IN THE LATER ROMAN EMPIRE 23

decline of the intellectual outlook under the Principate and Empire. Thedecline of political conditions in the later Empire does not need much

attention. As is fairly well established, the Imperial dictatorship bothsaved and, in the end destroyed, the polity of Rome. It probaLly pre-served the framework of Roman civilization for four centuries; but, it

made the failure of the Roman political order more complete and disas-

trous in the end. From the time when Cicero's head and ears were nailed

on the rostra in Rome, there was a dreadful inevitability in the nature

of the road which the rulers of Rome, good, bad and indifferent, traversed:

from Principate to the triumph of the army; from the triumph of the armyto the

protectionof the

conceptof the Oriental

Monarch;from active

citizenship to bureaucratic centralization; from a tradition of freedom to

Egyptian state-socialism and the rigid caste. It has been admitted that

this only pushes the problem of the decline of classical citizenship back a

few centuries, to the days of Marius or Scipio Africanus, or beyond. That

is true. But it does not alter the fundamental proposition with which we

are here concerned. That is, that the Roman Empire at its best and

highest was never anything better than an expression of political decline.

It had to end in the triumph of force and Oriental Monarchy, because

these provided the only means by which society could be sustained andprotected when the ideals and practices of the city state proved a failure;but Oriental Monarchy has never in all history been more than tempor-arily an instrument of progress. Saving a society from above, by cen-

tralized bureaucracy, has never been anything but a delusion. The onlyway history knows by which a society can be saved is by saving itself.

The development of the Graeco-Roman intellectual outlook, if not ofthe particular tenets of philosophy and science, was parallel and comple-

mentary.The service which the

Empirecontributed to the intellectual

outlook was very similar to that which it contributed to political life. Itsaved and it expanded; but ultimately it stifled and destroyed. It createdvast expansion in the science of law which sprang directly out of the vast

expansion of politics, and it enriched the legacy of mankind by widehorizons and philosophic concepts of human brotherhood and universal

peace. "Natural laws," say the Institutes of Justinian, "are divine and

ought to govern and correct all other forms of law, for they represent the

permanent principles of justice and humanity." Above all, the Empire

freed the spirit of man from the cramping limitations of classical pes-simism and materialism, as it freed men's bodies from the rigorous de-mands of political life in the ancient city state. This was the great con-tribution of Christianity. It emphasized the life of the spirit and it gaveto religion a warmth and passion which have ever since been of in-calculable value (in spite of their complement of bigotry and intolerance)in the service of mankind.

The mission of Christianity was, it is true, shared by other religionsof the Empire. In spite of a forbidding Stoic pantheism, "which pre-



THE PHOENIX

sented God and the universe, force and formless matter, as ultimately

issuing from the one substratum of the ethereal fire of Heraclitus, and in

the great cataclysm returning again to their source," there were greataffinities between Cynicism, Stoicism and Christianity. The writings of

Seneca, or of Marcus Aurelius, reach great heights of sincerity and deep

religious feeling. Even the Stoics, with their deep conviction of the

supremacy of man's reason, and the attainment of happiness through

sapientia, betrayed an attitude to the spirit which anticipated and paral-leled that of Christianity itself. "The vision of perfection recedes to an

infinite distance, and the glorious deliverance is reserved for an immortal

life of which the older Stoics did not often dream."4 The reason which is

so triumphant in Seneca is not human reason, but the divine reason in-

dwelling in each one of us, gravitating towards the divine world from

which it sprang. Happiness is not to be wrested from the capricious

goddess Fortuna by exertions in the market-place, but by pursuit of the

divine and universal laws of the mind. The watchwords of the happyman are self-knowledge, renunciation, resignation. The kingdom of

heaven is within. So with Neoplatonism. But what is true of Stoicism

and Neoplatonism is infinitely more true of Christianity itself, which

swept into its fold, by the majesty of the truth of its spiritual witness andby the passion of its experience, the noblest minds of this and some of the

noblest of every succeeding age.Yet this is only half the story. In this realm also, the Empire released

and expanded; but it also destroyed. It created spiritual nobility but it

weakened the springs of intellectual life. Perhaps the final curse which

afflicted the mind of the Roman citizen was lack of self-confidence. The

changing outlook of the generations from Seneca to St. Augustine may

very well be illustrated by Sir Samuel Dill's description of the changingStoic conception of God:

The conceptionof the unity and purity of the Divine One was the priceless conquestof Greek philosophy, and pre-eminentlyof Plato. It had been brought home to theRoman worldby the teachingof Stoicism. But thereis a new note in the monotheismof the first and second centuries of the Empire. God is no longer a mere intellectual

postulate, the necessarycrown and lord of a great cosmic system. He has become amoral necessity. His existence is demandedby the heart as well as by the intellect.Men craved no longer for a God to explain the universe, but to resolve the enigma oftheir ownlives; not a blindforce,movingon majesticallyand mercilesslyto "somefar-off

event," but an infinite father guiding in wisdom, cherishingin mercy, and finally re-ceiving his children to Himself.5

This dependence on the Infinite Father becomes, in Christianity andin the theology of St. Augustine, complete. God is the Arche or princi-pium of St. Augustine's being, thought and purpose. "From God," he

says, "we derive the beginning of existence, the principles of knowledge,the law of affection." Alongside the concept of the all-embracing God of

'Sir Samuel Dill, RomanSociety rom Nero to MarcusAurelius,309.'Ibid.

24




Christianity is the concept of salvation through grace. And alongside the

doctrine of grace is the doctrine of predestination. Of course St. Augus-

tine never propounded predestination in its popular connotation; indeedhe contends that so far from being incompatible with autonomous self-

determination, the prescience of the Almighty is its sole and sufficient

guarantee.6 But it may be argued that Professor Cochrane's dismissal

of those who see paradox in St. Augustine's assertions on this subject is a

little arbitrary. Gibbon's pronouncement that Augustine "boldly sounded

the dark abyss of grace, predestination, free will, and original sin; and the

rigid system of Christianity which he framed and restored, has been enter-

tained with public applause and secret reluctance by the Latin church,"

may still be regarded, perhaps, as containing a modicum of truth. When

it is asserted that "the doctrine of sin and grace marks, in its most acute

form, the breach between Classicism and Christianity,"7 no one would

dispute this assertion; but it is evident that many different conclusions

can be drawn from it. One conclusion is that with St. Augustine and

Augustinianism the Roman dependence on the supernatural for happinessand guidance is well-nigh complete.

A word more should be said on this Christian attitude of dependence,

for it is the crux of the matter. The triumph of Christian philosophy hasbeen regarded on the one hand as ending the decadence of the Graeco-Roman tradition; on the other as providing the essential matter out ofwhich the new civilization of the Middle Ages was to be built. It is diffi-cult to question either assumption without seeming to be hostile to the

whole Christian tradition which is the very last intention of this paper.But it seems necessary, from the strictly historical point of view, to regardthe triumph of Christianity in the Ancient World, however great its con-

tent of absolute truth, only as part of the general intellectual movementof the age. It triumphed not only because of its own virtues, but alsobecause of the circumstances of the time. It could not have triumphedunless its general outlook had been congenial to the citizens of the de-

clining Roman world. However new some of its doctrines, its funda-mental attitude had, as we have seen, a good deal in common with theother popular philosophies which it displaced. However vitalizing itsinfluence in the realm of the mind and the spirit, the fact remains that itdid not begin a new age of progress in Roman civilization as a whole.

Those who argue that the failure of Rome was at bottom a failure of theGraeco-Roman mind, should be able to point to a new resurgence of Romeafter St. Augustine, but the opposite is the case. The truth is, of course,that in 'pite of St. Ambrose, Christianity did not set out to, and did noteven wish to, save the Empire, intellectually or in any other way. It wasthe final, glorious expression of the other-worldliness which had long been

taking possession of the Roman world.

'The words are those of Professor Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture,481. Cf. 407. 7Ibid., 451.



THE PHOENIX

In one sense, therefore, it seems probable that we must conclude,

Christianity did not represent a transformation of the Empire, even of its

thinking. It was merely the supreme expression and consequence ofpolitical decline. It was the supreme example of the flight from the

market-place and the attitude of dependence created by the conditions

of life in Imperial Rome. Nor could the consequences of this be halted

by the intellectual genius of St. Augustine and other creators of Christian

philosophy. They themselves partook of it. What these consequences

might be is already, perhaps, foreshadowed by Tertullian. "What," he

asked, "had Athens to do with Jersualem, the Academy with the Church?

.... We have no need for curiosity since Jesus Christ, nor of inquiry since

the Evangel." Of course Tertullian was an extremist. Nothing of this

extremism appears in St. Augustine, whose reverence for Plato, it is said,was second only to his reverence for Holy Writ. Yet something of the

same general attitude inevitably does appear.It is admitted that St. Augustine associated himself with the Christian

"revolt against 'reason,"'8 but only, it is argued, to find a deeper truth in

the union of reason and faith. He would not, it is said, have been content

only with Tertullian's credo quia absurdum; but on the other hand, he

would not have refuted it. In the acceptance of the Christian revelationas the basis of his philosophy, he had to make large concessions to the

non-rational apprehension of truth: "the new starting point, not being

given ratiocinando, is inaccessible even to the most acute intelligence and

must, therefore, be accepted on 'faith.' " To the lack of such a starting

point Professor Cochrane attributes the deficiencies of classical specula-tion in its effort to investigate the problems of nature. To lack of such a

starting point many writers have attributed the intellectual progress of

modern times. The truthprobably

lies somewhere between these asser-

tions; but it is not easy to be certain that St. Augustine had the whole of it,or that his fierce castigation of his classical precursors merited all the

endorsement which it has sometimes received.

Perhaps it is fair to say that St. Augustine himself came very close to

that fortunate balance between the claims of the intellect and of the spiritwhich are the hall-mark of a happy and progressive age. His was the

greatest and finest effort of classical learning to come to terms with Chris-

tianity. But the heat of the struggle was still too great, the compulsion

of Christian asceticism was still too strong. Forever, in his mind, theearthly city was opposed to the city of God. Forever the story of human

evolution manifested itself as the fulfilment of God's purpose, largelyunaffected by the hopes and struggles of mankind. Not until more than

eight hundred years after his death was a newer and, as some would think,a finer balance, struck by St. Thomas Aquinas, a balance that led straightto the accomplishments and errors of our modern age.

In spite of St. Augustine's contempt for some of the thinking of his

8lbid., 400.

26




classical precursors, it seems probable that, in the deepest interpretation,he is to be regarded as expressing the same outlook as that of most of the

classical writers since Seneca. This is not to disparage the service whichhe and all the Christian teachers of the Empire rendered to humanity.Without their ideals of other-worldliness, it is questionable whether civili-

zation in Europe could ever have survived the political decline of Rome.

What has to be insisted upon is the fact that the triumph of Christianityin the Roman world could not, and did not, prevent a continuation of its

intellectual decline. The irrationalism which St. Augustine both pro-fessed and combatted continued to rise like a flood because it was the

product of political conditions which Christianity did nothing, and could,

by its very nature, do nothing to ameliorate. St. Augustine had no real

successors. It was Tertullian and not he.who really set the pattern of

the early Middle Ages. That age would not be an age of triumphantChristian speculation, based on the new logos. It would be an age of

growing darkness and superstition, when men were letting slip from their

grasp the classical legacy which they no longer really cared to understand.

It would be an age, not of philosophy but of miracle and hagiography;not of reason in the service of religion, but of mysticism and of reason

narrowed and confined, even though ennobled, in the contemplative life.Few great churchmen for some centuries after St. Augustine would be freefrom at least a suspicion of hostility towards philosophical speculation.Monasticism, with its asceticism and renunciation of the world would bethe highest ideal of the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries. There was

absolute logic in this triumph, for it expressed the almost complete failureof the vitality of political life and the true nobility of the ideals which hadbeen embraced to sustain and nourish men in their political bankruptcy.But it was not, any more than the Christian attitude of which such

monasticism formed a part, the beginning of a new period in history. Itwas simply a continuation of the ethos of the later Empire of Rome.

Thus the triumph of Christian philosophy in the late Roman Empiredoes not invalidate the general argument set out at the beginning of this

paper. At bottom even in the sphere of intellectual life, the Empiresaved only to destroy. Christianity provides no exception. It did notsave the intellectual life of the Empire; as pointed out above, it did notset out to save it. Each generation does, in any case, make its own inter-

pretation of the fundamental tenets of its Christian faith and these havevaried astonishingly in the course of history. That of the fifth centuryinevitably reflected the ethos of a declining political order. Christianitywas essentially, at that time but by no means in every generation, a

religion of escape. St. Augustine, just as his predecessors, reflected thefundamental cause of intellectual failure in the later Empire. It was nota failure of particular ideas or premises; at bottom it was a failure of intel-lectual confidence. And the cause of this failure must still be sought, itseems probable, in the conditions of political life.



THE PHOENIX

The consequences of this, for the student of the Middle Ages, indeed

for all students of history, are by no means unimportant. They affect all

our judgements. The Medieval revival, for example, is still too oftenregarded as merely the coming together of various ingredients drawn

from the Teutonic invaders, the Roman heritage and the Christian church.

Yet the truth that lies in this enumeration of ingredients should not be

allowed to obscure the fact that the real problem lies in the evaluation of

them. Such an enumeration can be as misleading as the over-simplifica-tion which represents the revival of culture in the Middle Ages as merelythe product of a process of assimilation, a simple relearning of the

knowledge of the past. The coming together of various ingredients was

important, but not nearly as important as the birth of a vigour and powerin the communities of the Middle Ages which enabled them both to

assimilate and to improve upon the heritage of the Graeco-Roman world.

The ultimate problem confronting historians of the Middle Ages is not

its resumption of knowledge but its resumption of progress. Most

historians talk learnedly of the one but they take the other for granted.Yet it is as baffling, as central, and as fundamental as the problem of

decline in the later history of Rome.

On the whole it seems likely that in both cases the relation of themain causes of progress and of decline, to each other, will be the same.

That is to say, for the purpose of the historian, the political will be the

fundamental cause. The true Middle Ages may be said to have begun,not when the barbarians burst into the Empire, not with the rise of the

Papacy or the beginnings of the Holy Roman Empire, and not with the

coming together of the various ingredients of the Medieval civilization

in the age of Charlemagne. They began with the emergence of feudalism

as the dominant pattern of political life in the Medieval world, by which

our ancestors learned how to substitute progress for decline. This is,of course, an over-simplification; but it is intended to emphasize one

main conclusion which seems to follow from all that has gone before.

That is, that political progress will as adequately explain all the main

features of civilization in the Medieval period as political decline will

explain the main features of the late Roman world. In particular, the

rebirth of political vigour will go far to explain the changing intellectual

attitude of the age. It will go far towards explaining the great rise in

men's confidence, indeed, over-confidence, in reason in the eleventh andtwelfth centuries; the new syntheses of knowledge which had to be

attempted by men like Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquihas; and the

way in which these led, through the Renaissance and Reformation to

the debates, difficulties and progress of modern times.

The underlying problem of the ultimate cause of progress in modern

civilization is, of course, no less debatable than that of the cause of failurein the late Roman Empire. It is, indeed, the same problem studied in

reverse. It is the supreme problem of the present as of the past. All that

28




can be said of it here, perhaps,is that modern historicalwritingon theMiddle Ages has destroyed for ever, it is to be hoped, the idea of the

Middle Ages as a period either of Romantic idealismor of stagnation.There is a commonagreement hat the periodwasoneof quiteremarkable

poverty, both material and intellectual,but also of astonishing progressand vigour. There, agreementso far has ended. Scholarsof this period,as of the later Roman Empire, can still be divided between those whofindthe answerto theirproblemof declineor progress n the intellectualtraditionsand thosewhoconsideras still morefundamental he conditionsof politicallife. Perhapsthe study of both periodsstill sufferstoo muchfrom an intellectualistic

interpretation,in which scholars attach too

much importanceto the powerof abstract ideas. It is possiblethat in

any society the art of living togetheris still moreimportantthan the artof speculation. Whether this is true or not, it does seem to be true thatthe problemof progress in the Middle Ages, and indeed, in the con-

temporaryworld,is largelyprejudgedby an acceptancewithoutquestionof the thesis that the ultimate causeof Rome'sfailure was the failure ofthe Graeco-Romanmind. That is why, until classicalhistorianshavearrived at an overwhelmingconsensusof opinionabout the problemof

decline in their own period, other historians will have to push theirstudies back, in spite of their meagreequipment,to try to formulatean

opinionof their own.

___an aspect of the decline of citizenship in the later roman empire humiliores slavery, serfdom) -...

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