PART 2:
>Following the example of Trajan, many subsequent rulers had come
>from humble homes in the provinces, but lacked his sagacity, and
>treated the empire as a vast pool of loot free for the taking by
>him and his fellow legionaires.
>
>The charge that the empire fell because of the depravity of Rome
>was bullshit; although the ruling classes were, as Gibbon shows,
>pretty dissippated, judging the culture by them, is like judging
>american culture reading Hollywood scandal rags.
Read the chapter referred to above.
>Soil core pollen analysis of rural Italy shows a switch from the
>yeoman style of agriculture, which produced lots of staples like
>wheat, and was replaced with landed estates worked by slaves and
>run for the best possible quarterly return on investment.
>
>The land no longer had family farms;  so, it no longer had family
>farmer sons, which were typically fed and trained well to provide
>a stong worker to provide for his father's retirement.  Rather, a
>slave produced slave boys who were fed as little as possible, and
>grew up runty.  But: when the legion sent recruiting officers out
>to sign up new soldiers, what they found was a few fat rich boys,
>and hundreds of runty slaves.
>
>By the time of Claudius, the Praetorian guard wasn't recruited in
>Italy any more, but mostly Germany- hence the term 'Kaiser'; and-
>it had no affinity to Rome or Italy, and acted accordingly.
>
>These landed estates didn't grow wheat, but switched to Falernian
>grapes for a popular wine the rich senators liked.  Wheat was not
>cool and trendy, and made much less money with slave labor.
>
>So: they didn't grow their own food, nor their own soldiers.  The
>wonder is, that it lasted as long as it did.  At the heart of the
>problem was slavery- no slavery, no landed estates.  Christianity
>sanctioned slavery.  Stoicism did not- too ethically challenging.
Yeah,  but I'll bet some of this stuff isn't from Gibbon.
A modern liberal view is that from the  century  of  the  Augustan
emperors, Rome found slaves more and more expensive to conquer and
return  to  market.   By  the  end of the first century, inflation
became a huge problem.  The state  was  forced  to  indemnify  the
patricians  against  ruin, because of the difficulties of securing
an adequate supply of slaves.  As a result, the  Senate  gradually
changed  slave  law  to encourage reproduction.  Slaves were given
the new right of marriage in exchange for  the  legal  obligation,
applicable  to  them  and  all their heirs, to remain fixed to the
land.  Although this transformation had been  going  on  gradually
from  the early period, it came to a 'revolutionary' climax during
the reign of Diocletian, who revolutionised  the  tax  system  and
marriage  laws  more  or  less  to correspond with what historians
found most typical of feudal law during the Medieval  period.   Of
course, the new marriage laws meant that marriage was now extended
to  millions  of  slaves instead of the few exceptional cases with
which the Empire period began.  The Roman administration could not
cope with the volume of contracts.  And here is where Christianity
stepped into the breach with the successor reign  of  Constantine.
This  is  the  reason  why  marriage  became  the  exclusive legal
preserve of the Church for more than a thousand years until modern
states seized that jurisdiction from the Church.   Of  course  the
right  of  divorce  is  a fairly recent development.  The original
coloni of Diocletian's time and through the age of the  foundation
of  Christianity  had  no  right of divorce, because divorce would
mean that a man or woman would no longer be  fixed  to  the  land.
Divorce  ran contrary to the whole rationale behind changing slave
law to make it unnecessary  to  bring  slaves  to  market  through
conquest, thus solving the inflation problem.
This  is  one  modern  explanation.   There  are many others.  But
modern historians don't blame Christianity quite  the  way  Gibbon
did.   Modern  views tend to see the Roman Empire gradually coming
apart through internal economic causes, which forced a change from
slavery to feudalism.  And Christianity  sort  of  fit  into  that
mould  and  had  the  organisation  by  the 4th century to make it
possible.
Bob
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