Picking up on yesterday’s discussion of a military path to citizenship (on which I’ve received a huge amount of mail), let’s take up the question of the fall of Rome. Did Rome fall because it was forced to rely on barbarian troops, while Roman citizens refused to fight? Well, there may be something to this, but the full story is more complex.
A couple erudite Corner readers note that the Roman Empire’s army was divided between citizen legions and auxiliary cohorts recruited from non-citizens. Auxiliaries were rewarded with citizenship after service, and the incentive of citizenship not only served as an effective recruiting tool but also facilitated the integration of the provinces into the empire. In other words a military path to citizenship was an effective tool of cultural assimilation in ancient Rome. Retired citizen auxiliaries, according to these Corner readers, became Rome’s most patriotic boosters. According to one reader, many of the later Roman emperors were descendants of men who’d been Romanized in this way.
One reader claims that the “barbarization” of Rome’s army late in the empire was a function of population decimation (from plagues and famines), and involved mercenary units that remained effective and loyal until Rome lost the financial wherewithal to pay them. In any case, the earlier practice of combining citizen forces with trained “path to citizenship” auxiliaries seems a better analogy with the Boot-O’Hanlon proposal.
I haven’t confirmed our readers’ fascinating accounts of Roman history, but I have read a bit of one of two important new books on the fall of Rome, Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians. Heather’s account is fascinating, and surely adds much of use to the debate over Rome’s fall. Still, he seems to be trying a bit too hard to knock down the notion that Rome’s fall had something to do with Rome’s internal problems. There’s a mild streak of liberal political correctness running through Heather’s narrative, and I don’t entirely trust it. In any case, Heather does agree that Rome’s inability to raise an army was a key factor in its fall. But Heather attributes this to the empire’s inability to raise its already high taxes to pay for new recruits.
Here, by the way, is VDH’s review of Heather, and the other new book on Rome’s fall. And here’s the Telegraph on the same two books.
If our erudite Corner readers are right about the use of non-citizen auxiliaries at the height of Roman rule, it would seem to tell in favor of the Boot-O’Hanlon proposal, not against it. The use of barbarian mercenaries just before the empire’s fall seems more analogous to our payments of Afghan warlords.