The Fall of the Roman Empire (16 page)

The reverse sides of the coins, too, are often devoted to the person of the monarch, in his various capacities. Many of these designs (when the Western and Eastern allies were sufficiently friendly) display him enthroned beside his Constantinopolitan colleague, sometimes with specific allusion to the alleged Harmony between them. Moreover, the same inscription is sometimes accompanied by seated personifications of Rome and Constantinople themselves. The Empress Flaccilla, the wife of Theodosius I, is acclaimed in terms of this Harmony, because she has given birth to the heirs to both thrones. An earlier heir, Gratian, on his accession to the purple, is called 'the Glory of the New Age'. The constant, inappropriate use of the word 'Glory' is a novel, strident, feature of the time.

It had always been customary for the government to seek demonstrations of solidarity by organizing loyalty vows to the Emperor, especially as each five-year period of his reign drew to a close; and the coins meticulously continue to record these ceremonies. But above all, the references are to the ruler's supposed military triumphs. Although the habit of celebrating specific victories by explicit numismatic allusions has ceased, there are innumerable and incessant tributes, in general terms, to his victorious grandeur. Often - indeed, right up to the very last year of the Empire - these allusions are accompanied by a winged female figure of a type that had formerly stood for the pagan goddess Victory, but could now be interpreted instead as a Christian angel. There are also many representations of the Emperor wearing his military uniform.

These designs reveal a ferocity and brutality which had never been displayed with such emphasis until now. One ruler after another is shown as 'Triumphant over the Barbarian Nations', setting his foot on a cringing captive - who is sometimes replaced by a human-headed serpent, denoting the powers of evil. On coins inscribed 'the Glory of the Romans', Valentinian I is seen dragging a war prisoner along the ground by his hair.

There is also an obsessive increase in references to the Roman state - which the government was at such pains to preserve, at whatever cost to individuals. For example the coinage lavishly celebrates the Glory of the State and its Salvation and Security, Happiness and Peace. Valentinian I is the State's Restorer, and its Revival is illustrated by a scene in which Emperors are depicted raising the kneeling figure of Rome to her feet. Victor, son of the usurper Magnus Maximus, declares that he and his father were 'Born for the Good of the State'.

Unconquered, Eternal Rome is lyrically proclaimed. Moreover, even in the latest days of Imperial shrinkage, it is quite common to find the Empire equated with nothing less than the whole world itself, of which the 'Glory' and 'Salvation' are hailed on the coins. The latter conception (SALVSMVNDI), under the transient Emperor Olybrius (472), is represented by a cross; and this device, or a Christian monogram, is also seen in the grasp of Victory or an Emperor, and appears as the apex of military standards.

Such standards appear frequently, since the coinage never for a moment allows the population to forget the vital role of the soldiery. In addition to the constant eulogies of the Emperors as generals and conquerors, the Courage of the Army is emphatically honoured. The paramount needs of defence are symbolized by the picture of a fortified camp or city gate, defined by Magnus Maximus as the 'Hope of the Romans'. Nothing, of course, is said of the blacker side of the picture, since one rightly expects the messages on the coinage, like other propaganda, to concentrate on heartening uplift. Nevertheless, what is remarkable about the later Imperial issues is the unusually accentuated, indeed total, dissociation of their designs and inscriptions from what was really going on - from the truth.

To say this raises the general question of what the authorities were trying to achieve through these types and slogans. It is not quite satisfactory just to dismiss them all as lies. When, for example, the mint invokes the concept of the Security of the State at a time when security was non-existent, to suppose that the government was merely trying to deceive the population by telling them they were secure, when they were not, would be too simple an inference.

It was more a matter of
aspirations.
The administration wanted to tell the people that it regarded national security as its major concern, and that it was doing its best to revive this security and make it come true once again. There was ample precedent for this sort of hopeful thinking on the coins. For example, the Emperor Otho, during the Empire-wide civil wars of AD 69, had inscribed his coinage 'the Peace of the World', without surely expecting anyone to believe that this was actually the situation at the time.

But Otho's coinage also hints to us what was really wrong with these much later monetary slogans and designs that we are considering here. For the reason why his 'Peace of the World' so forcibly strikes the eye is that, at the time of its issue -
even
viewed as an aspiration for the future prospects of his regime - it was so totally divorced from reality that it became merely ridiculous: unlike the more customary numismatic publicity of the same period. Sometimes it had just dealt with plain facts, or, at worst, facts that were only slightly slanted. And when it published aspirations rather than facts, they had been of reasonable appearance, or carefully calculated to seem reasonable, and calculated also to strike some answering chord in the minds of the public, on the grounds that they would possibly or even probably be fulfilled.

In the later Empire, however, all that was changed. The message of the coinage was now as remote from reality as it was possible for it it be, utterly and obviously incapable of fulfilment. A new and appalling gulf had opened up between the credibility of the government on the one hand, and the hearts and minds of the people on the other. One instance has already been quoted: security. It was nonsensical even to talk about the 'Security of the State' when there were invaders in the fields and at the door, and when no-one had even the faintest hope that they could ever be ejected. And there are many other examples too.

Possibly there was some point in referring to the Concord between the Western and Eastern Empires - even when everyone knew they were in a state of cold war - because there was a certain chance of this situation ending. But the unceasingly reiterated term 'Glory' was singularly out of place. And even more misplaced and anachronistic was the imperialism that showed captive barbarians being dragged along by the hair. Indeed, many of the Emperors whom the coins display as military conquerors were well known never to have taken the field at all, and scarcely to have stirred outside the palace apartments of Ravenna.

The 'Victory' to which appeal was constantly made did not exist, and there was no possibility, even in the most sanguine view, that the Western regime would ever give the concept any real substance, much less that it would justify these fatuous identifications of the Empire with the entire world. To speak of the Safety or Salvation of the State, or to claim in an edict, like Valentinian in, that he was 'providing for the peace and tranquillity of the provinces', was merely inane and counterproductive at a time when their inhabitants were both invaded and taxed almost out of existence.

To talk of national Restoration, Reconstruction and Revival seemed equally beside the point, because it was so totally out of keeping with any detectable likelihood. And there was a breathtaking inapplicability, not to say impudence, about the 'Unconquered, Eternal Rome' of Priscus Attalus, the puppet of Alaric the Visigoth whose current contribution to Eternal Rome was to capture the city and loot it.

In these circumstances it is difficult to agree with Harold Mattingly's view that slogans of this kind offered 'bright encouragement'. True, a very large proportion of the coins were now gold, so that it was the upper class, more often than not, which had them in its hands, and not the destitute poor who would have found this sort of publicity particularly ludicrous.

Yet, although the sufferings of the rich were negligible in comparison, their superior knowledge made them all the more able to appreciate just what nonsense all such messages were. As for the rest of the population, if they had the good fortune to have any gold coins in their hands at all, and if they retained any inclination or leisure to look at them, they were so distracted and harassed that they must merely have found this sanctimonious, unfounded uplift an additional irritation - and proof, if further proof was needed, that the emperors at Ravenna were so hopelessly cut off from the thoughts and feelings and needs of their subjects that any nationwide movement of recovery was out of the question.

IV

THE PARTNERSHIPS THAT FAILED

8

Ally against Ally

Another very relevant and destructive disunity which helped to destroy the Roman Empire was of a political and geographical nature. For that Empire, disastrously as it turned out, was divided into two halves, each under a separate ruler - one in the West and one in the East.

The idea that Rome's Empire was too large to be ruled and defended by a single man was nothing new. Already in the second century, Marcus Aurelius had elevated a co-Emperor to share his power. A hundred years later, Valerian had divided the provinces on a geographical basis between himself and his son Gallienus, to whom he allotted the West. Next, Diocletian (284-305), while undertaking an elaborate reorganization of the Imperial system, gave the Western regions to a colleague, establishing his own Eastern residence at Nicomedia (Izmit) in Asia Minor. Constantine the Great reunited the Empire, governing it from his new capital at Constantinople. Then it was divided again between his sons, and subsequently for a brief period was reunited once more, from 353 to 364.

It was in the latter year that Valentinian I was hailed Emperor by the army. Immediately afterwards, the soldiers demanded that he should appoint a colleague to share his power. For whenever there was only a single Emperor, the troops felt that the risk of his death, and of consequent chaos, was too great, and indeed the death of the last monarch, Jovian, had resulted, like

similar moments of transition throughout the past centuries, in a perilous emergency.

Valentinian I, in his inaugural address to the troops, expressed agreement that a joint Emperor should be nominated: 'That, in order to meet all chances, necessity requires the choice of a colleague with equal powers, after much complex deliberation I am impelled neither to doubt nor to dispute! For I myself, too, am profoundly apprehensive of the masses of cares and varied changes of circumstance that lie ahead.'

He was thinking in particular of pressing external threats on many sectors of the frontier; and there were dangers of internal revolts as well. So he immediately raised his brother Valens to an equal share in the Empire. Valens was not the best man for the job, but in view of their blood relationship he was the man who could best be trusted. Granting him the Eastern provinces as his sphere, Valentinian himself took the West, because although this was the less wealthy of the two halves of the Empire its frontiers were in the greater peril. He chose, like some of his predecessors, to reside not at Rome but nearer to the danger zone at Mediolanum (Milan).

The domination of the Mediterranean by one single power, which had lasted for so many centuries, was now at an end. Henceforward, the Western realm consisted of the whole of Roman Europe except the Black Sea coast and its immediate hinterland. It also possessed North Africa as far as Tripolitania -the western part of modern Libya - inclusive. The remaining part of Libya fell to the Eastern Empire, which also comprised the European Black Sea fringe (extending down to the capital Constantinople) and Egypt, and the Asiatic territories that now belong to Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Israel.

All the court services were duplicated at each of the two capitals; and we shall speak henceforward of Western and Eastern 'Empires'. But contemporaries did not do so, for ancients were convinced that there could be only a single Roman Empire. Admittedly it had two separate sovereigns, but they were both endowed with full legislative powers and a mutually interchangeable coinage. Thus the two states, officially speaking, were ruled by Emperors not
of,
but
in,
'the parts of the West and East'.

Nevertheless, this theory of unity became increasingly fictitious. The harmonious alliance between Valentinian I and Valens was celebrated on their initial coinages, which displayed and acclaimed them together. But after Valentinian's death in 375, signs of a rift soon began to appear. For example, his son Gratian failed to come to the help of Valens, when the latter was about to fight the fatal battle of Adrianople against the Visigoths. Where the blame for this failure of cooperation lay is not quite clear, though Gratian's principal German general was suspected of sabotage.

However this may be, Gratian, after he had appointed Theodosius i to succeed Valens, very soon granted his new Eastern colleague a major concession which was to have serious effects in the years to come. For it was probably now that he ceded to Theodosius most of the former Western possessions in the Balkan peninsula. Henceforth, the frontier between the Western and Eastern Empires, while remaining unchanged in North Africa, ran in Europe from Belgrade due south to the Adriatic, where Albania is today.

In spite of overlappings, it was broadly true that the Western Empire spoke Latin and possessed a Latin culture, whereas the culture and language in the East were Greek. The difference between Latin West and Greek East was plain, longstanding and fundamental - and highly divisive. Roman and Greek had never got on very well, not surprisingly since one was the conqueror and the other the conquered. If, far back in 31 BC, Antony and Cleopatra had won the battle of Actium, and their enemy Octavian (Augustus) had lost, matters might have turned out differently. For Cleopatra was a Greek and Antony was pro-Greek, and had they been victorious, they might well have inaugurated, under Roman overlordship, a regime aiming at partnership between the two cultures. But Augustus, who defeated them, believed that the Romans should maintain political supremacy over the Greeks - the supremacy which his admirer Virgil openly proclaimed.