The Barbarian Invasions

The Fall of Rome

“The Fall of Rome” isn’t a historical event as much as it is an indicator of what pet issue is on the mind of the right-winger who brings it up. “It was because of women”, “it was because of homosexuality”, “it was because of socialism”, and so on and so on. You don’t need me to tell you that the truth is more complicated. While pre-industrialized societies like Rome were similar to us in some surprising ways, for instance, we now know that the Romans had a tourist culture with trinkets almost like our refrigerator magnets; they are fundamentally different. The Industrial Revolution changed everything about how society is organized, how wealth is extracted, and how society can regenerate itself. That being said, Rome still does affect almost every facet of our lives, even if more in imagination than in fact.

The most compelling narrative of political collapse in Rome isn’t the Fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476, nor the Fall of the Eastern Empire in 1453. The most compelling is the fall of the Roman Republic. Before the printing press, the Late Roman Republic was the most documented civilization in human history, perhaps with the exception of China. Every educated person knows the characters of the Late Roman Republic. Caesar, Augustus, Cicero, Cleopatra, and Mark Antony. Does anyone know the characters of the late Empire? The embodiment of Barbarian savagery, Attilla the Hun is the most famous figure of that era. Very few know what happened in the fall of the Roman Empire because only dorks lament the fall of the red blob on a map around the Mediterranean. The fall of Rome is lamentable because of the fall of literacy, urbanization, and commerce, not just because red maps look cool. Therefore, in popular imagination, the fall of Rome isn’t the fall of the Rome of the 5th century, but the fall of Rome in the 1st and 2nd centuries to the barbarians of the 5th century. I know it’s trendy in modern history to reject the idea of decline wholesale and call it “transformation”, but historians just want attention; there was obviously a decline from the peak of Rome to the Early Medieval Era.

Quick sidenote: If you take nothing else from what I write, I want you to take this. Civilizations aren’t blobs on maps; they are defined by the people that are in them and how they are organized. Most of you are young men who love the idea of controlling space. We aren’t savages in loincloths. This style of thinking may be helpful in taking that hill over there, but now it’s only useful for some billionaire to support his politician. We say that women aren’t capable of understanding history and politics because they let their emotions get in the way, but map porn and hero worship are the male versions of letting your emotions get in the way.

The Idealized Roman Republic

Hemingway said that bankruptcy happens in two ways, “Gradually and then Suddenly”, and the same is true with Empires. Rome fell not only because of Attila the Hun, but also due to a transition in social organization that had been taking place over centuries. The basis of the early and middle Roman Republic was the Citizen Farmers. Men who would tend small plots of land, who would fight in the Roman Army, and participate in Roman Politics. This is where the idealized Roman Republic comes from. The archetype for this citizen was the Early Roman Counsel Cincunnatus, of Cincinnati fame, who came to lead Rome from his small farm twice to dutifully return to his farm afterwards. While there weren’t a million Cincunatus in Rome, this form of social organization gave Rome a leg up on its Italian and eventually Mediterranean rivals. The Romans were humiliated time and time again. The Gauls sacked Rome in 390 BC, Pyrrhus of Epirus, called “the Alexander of the West”, defeated the Romans numerous times, and most famously Hannibal Barca destroyed 3 Roman field armies in Italy itself, but the Romans were always able to regenerate their forces and defeat their enemies because they had a population of men personally invested in the perpetuation of Roman Power. However, with the effectiveness of Rome’s Citizen Farmer system came a contradiction. As Rome gained more territories through its military system, it acquired more resources, most important of which were slaves. The expansion into Southern Italy, Spain, and Northern Africa enabled Roman farms specializing in cash crops like olives and grapes to gain prominence, and the increased slave population allowed large landholders to outcompete and eventually dispossess the Citizen Farmers of Rome, replacing them with slave-worked latifundia.

The Late Republic

This is the context of the Late Roman Republic. Those famous figures, the Gracchi Brothers, Marius and Sulla, Cicero, Mark Antony, and the Caesars, all enter the narrative here. Though the “Conflict of the Orders”, Plebian and Patrician, had ostensibly been resolved with Plebeians gaining political enfranchisement, the overarching economic trends continued, which culminated in the more famous and more violent crises of the Late Republic.

The poor weren’t just going to take being marginalized; Romans weren’t Americans. Rather, their agitation was personified as Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus. Tiberius, the elder brother, was elected Tribune of the Plebs and agitated for the sizes of land holdings to be limited, and excess land to be redistributed to poor Romans. For this, he was executed by a senatorial mob, but his brother Gaius continued the work. Gaius had a more comprehensive and radical plan than his brother, advocating for land distribution and colonization of the poor onto conquered Roman lands. And most interestingly, he proposed extending Roman citizenship not only to old Latins, but also to the Italian allies of Rome. However, Gaius would share in the fate of his brother, though the manner of his death was less clear. So was he a proto-libtard? Not exactly, both of the Gracchi brothers didn’t advocate for the dismantlement of the Roman system of conquest; they advocated for more equitable distribution of its spoils. Not only was the distribution of land in Rome unjust, but it was also unsustainable. The Gracchi Brothers ultimately failed, but the problems they agitated against remained to be dealt with by the next two great figures of the Roman Republic, Marius and Sulla.

Edward Gibbon said of Marius that he “deserved to be styled the 3rd founder of Rome”. Modern Historians are doing their “well, actually” thing, as they always do to 18th and 19th-century scholarship, and minimizing his personal effect on Rome. Still, regardless of how much or little our society is willing to pin credit or blame on one man, what can’t be denied is that Marius is one of the more underappreciated figures of Roman History, if a figure from the Late Republic can be underappreciated. In varying degrees, Marius is credited with the standardization and professionalization of the Roman Army. Before Marius, the military was a civic duty undertaken by citizen farmers who bought and maintained their own equipment. While this had been effective for Rome, this system was not sustainable with the decreasing proportion of citizen farmers and increasing number of Urban Poor. Consequently, the military became not an extension of the land-owning citizenry of Rome, but an institution in itself with its own interests. The military was, for the urban poor, a means of social mobility and, eventually, their own land ownership. Much is made of the precedent that Sulla set when he marched on Rome against Marius, but Marius’s reformulation of the Roman military, his severing of the tie of property and military service, led to the conflict between Roman Civic and Military Authority. Sulla, frankly, is a boring character, and I don’t really care to talk about him; what matters is that he eventually triumphed and empowered the Roman Senatorial Elite. Watch a Dovahhatty video or something if you’re more interested, idk.

Anyway, in Sulla’s repression of the Populares faction of Roman Politics, Julius Caesar came to prominence. Julius Caesar, from a prestigious but poor family, had the family name to rise through the cursus honorum, yet he also had sympathy for the urban poor. So he joined the Populares faction of Rome, escaped Sulla’s proscriptions during his early career, and eventually grew to be one of the three most powerful men in Rome, along with Pompey, a prominent military general, who would conquer most of the Roman East, and Crassus, a wealthy man. The 1st Triumvirate isn’t that important for our purposes, except that its three members embodied the three forces that moved the Late Roman Republic: Military power (Pompey), wealth and land centralization (Crassus), and popular agitation (Caesar). Crassus died when he tried to invade Persia, and Caesar would go on to conquer Gaul, now France. We know the story from here: Caesar crosses the Rubicon, defeats Pompey, becomes dictator, then the Ides of March, and Sic semper tyrannis. Also, somewhere in that story, he cracks Cleopatra. This was in some sense a rematch of Sulla and Marius, and this time Marius’s disciple won, if only briefly. Augustus went on to win Rome, defeat his rivals, and become the first Roman Emperor. The Roman Empire was at the top a pact between the senate, composed mostly of wealthy aristocrats, and the military, mediated by the Emperor. The urban poor, while not given land directly, were satisfied with the grain dole and other provisions. This system, which Augustus set up, led to relative peace and stability for about 200 years, or as some call it, the “Pax Romana”, or “Roman Peace”.

Pax Romana

Augustus is perhaps more deserving of the “Great Man” title than his uncle. That he made the Empire out of the chaos of the Late Republic was emblematic of a genius that appears not only once a century, but only once a millennium. That being said, the Empire did not permanently resolve the issue of land being increasingly concentrated among latifundia owners. The system depended on the Roman Empire continually expanding, acquiring more territories and slaves, but Rome reached its natural limit at around 100 AD. To their south lay the deserts of the Sahara and Arabia, and to their east were the Persians, and who would live with Persians by choice (on a serious note, Persia had an established military aristocracy which Rome probably didn’t have the tools to absorb), and to the North were the forests of Germania. Each expansion would cost more than it brought to the empire. A series of plagues and the contradictions of the latifundia system led to the first existential crisis of the Empire, the 3rd-century crisis.

Late Rome

The 3rd Century Crisis is called by some historians “The Military Anarchy”. It describes the era in which Roman history had dropped the pretense of there being a separate military and civic authority (which in fact might’ve been dropped centuries prior). The 3rd Century crisis isn’t even close to as well documented as the Late Republic. Literally all we have is some anonymous fanfiction written by a coping pagan during the Christianization of Rome, so the characters are dubious and not really important. What matters is that it fell to Diocletian to pick up the pieces. What Diocletian picked up from the ruins of the 3rd-century empire was much different than what Augustus picked up from the Roman Republic. Rome wasn’t an expanding state, with numerous mobile and organized classes jockeying for their piece of the pie. Rome was a stagnant state, with a few landholders and generals who really mattered. Rome couldn’t rely on more booty from conquered provinces and a corps of local elites to administer the empire. Diocletian had an arguably more challenging task than Augustus’s of setting up a stagnating state, not a growing one. To accomplish this, Diocletian expanded and reorganized the Roman Army to be geared towards defending the Roman Borders. For this, he needed to expand and standardize taxation, which he did by revoking the military authority of tax collectors and standardizing the tax system. In the age of Roman Prosperity, the Romans could afford to be lazy, but in this age, they couldn’t. And most importantly for subsequent generations, Diocletian established the beginnings of European feudalism by tying occupation to heredity.

However, the system, in the West, did not last forever. Diocletian did not resolve the inequitable land distribution of the Roman Empire, and eventually, the Latifundia owners, now becoming proto-lords, acted in their interests instead of the Roman Empire’s interests. They became less willing to give up their farmhands to fight in Rome’s wars and to give their money to the central Roman state. This meant that the Roman Empire increasingly relied on alliance with Foederati, or barbarians, instead of on men recruited within its own system. Much is made of the Gothic sack of Rome, but what isn’t as well known is that Alaric the Goth was essentially a mercenary for the Romans for most of his career prior to the sack. Similarly, the Roman Chamberlain Aetius, who fought Attila the Hun in France and Italy, was raised as a Hunnic hostage. Roman military culture was becoming increasingly barbarian, almost solely because the Roman system could not provide the men necessary to fight their wars and defend their borders. In short, the barbarians weren’t a cause, but an effect of the rot that had festered in Rome for centuries. An effect they may have had, they may have been diluting the blood of Rome as well, but the blood of Rome had long before been tainted. Not a full libtard Historian here, but the “Barbarians” for the most part were fellow Christians who were well acquainted with the Roman State.

The fall of Rome was a fall, for sure. But the fall wasn’t the arbitrary point at which Rome went from “Roman” to “Barbarian” rule. It was a centuries-long process tied immutably to the expansion and land centralization of the Roman Empire. The last Western Roman Emperor, “Romulus Augustulus”, was the son of Orestes, who had formerly been in Attilla the Hun’s court. The Roman military couldn’t function without barbarian involvement. It was merely up to the Barbarians to decide when they were done with the whole thing.

The Fall of Rome Revisited

Viewed as individual parts, one may view Roman History as a rise, a peak, and a fall. And this dovetails well into our history. Most people view history in one of two ways. Either we’re asymptotically approaching an ever unreachable point, but always dutifully trying to get there, ie, the “More Perfect Union”, or there is an orgastic future awaiting us if we fight for it, ie, the end state of communism. If Pax Romana was a nearly flawless state of civilization, then all we have to do is recreate the conditions of that era, and then we’re set either to reach or approach a perfect world. However, viewed as a whole, it becomes clear that the seeds of Rome’s fall were planted with its rise. The wars that brought glory to Rome’s citizen soldiers and laid the groundwork for a Mediterranean empire also created a system of land distribution that would eventually be unsustainable to maintain the empire without continuous expansion.

So then, when was its peak? Thomas Jefferson idealized the Citizen Farmers of the early and middle Roman Republic and sought to replicate that social structure in America. Most libtards like myself with a passing interest in Roman History prefer the Late Republic. Here is a world we recognize, with class conflict, charismatic leaders, and human arrogance and folly. The tolerable cornball brigade prefers the Pax Romana. Though the decline became apparent towards its end, it was the peak of commerce and wealth in the Empire. I assume some dorks like Aurelian or something, but we don’t need to make fun of them anymore. Regardless of what you think, there was a peak somewhere between 500 BC and 200 AD. What Roman History best evidences is that civilizations experience peaks and valleys, but there isn’t a set formula for their development. Peaks are fleeting not only because humans are dumb, but because those very same forces that may have brought the peak of an empire could set it on the path of decline later.

2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th Romes

The only time a New Rome was constructed with complete credibility was when Constantine chose the spot of the old Greek city of Byzantium to build Constantinople. Upon this city was built the “Byzantine Empire”, which lasted 1000 years after the Roman Empire. 21st-century Historians, annoying as they can be, actually are doing humanity a great service by rehabilitating this entity. 19th-century history basically shoved all of the stereotypes of a decadent East and superstitious Christians into one entity. But the “Eastern Roman Empire” wasn’t a separate entity from the Roman Empire; it was a deliberate creation by Constantine to solidify the Roman East, which had by then become the commercial heart of the empire. It wasn’t merely a continuation of the Roman Empire but a reinvention and perpetuation of the Roman Empire, which in some form survived until 1453.

The long-term trend of the “Byzantine” Empire was territorial decline, but it was a peer, and often a hegemonic entity, as compared to both its Western and Eastern contemporaries, and is much more responsible for the “reawakening” of Western Europe, through its continued preservation and discourse with Classical Greece and Rome, than most Westerners would like to acknowledge. Other countries claimed to be the 3rd Rome, but frankly, that was just Aura farming. The Ottoman Empire had a comically long list of titles for its Sultan. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a historical incident where the Ottoman Empire sent a demand for submission to the Ukrainian Cossacks, the Sultan is named as “Sultan; son of Muhammad; brother of the sun and moon; grandson and viceroy of God; ruler of the kingdoms of Macedonia, Babylon, Jerusalem, Upper and Lower Egypt; emperor of emperors; sovereign of sovereigns; extraordinary knight, never defeated; steadfast guardian of the tomb of Jesus Christ; trustee chosen by God Himself; the hope and comfort of Muslims; confounder and great defender of Christians”. Caesar of Rome was just one of these titles. Turks on the internet are coons who want to be European, so they overplace the importance of it. Still, throughout most of the Ottoman Empire, even during its peak coon era, its Islamic Identity was much more critical than its supposed Roman identity. Russia is the other big “3rd Rome”, and unlike the Ottomans, it was a critical part of their identity. Catherine the Great even had designs to recreate the Byzantine Empire after defeating the Ottoman Empire. But again, this was an ephemeral thing which slowly dissipated throughout the 19th century, severed with the creation of the Soviet Union, and then reappropriated by our enemies, the dorks, because they think Russian girls are hot. The Modern Rome we are interested in as English Speakers is the United States.

The United States as Rome and its seminal Crisis

America was consciously modeled as a replication of, and a reaction against, Rome. As mentioned before, Thomas Jefferson admired the Citizen Farmer of Rome and sought to recreate a similar social structure of Yeoman Farmers in America. However, the founders warned against the centralization of power and the eventual culmination of military demagogy in the Roman Empire. Hamilton, on the other hand, was much less interested in the past than he was in the present. He wanted the United States to emulate Great Britain, the industrial and financial power of the world. For this, he wanted a central bank and a strong Federal Government. Hamilton himself lost, but unfortunately for Jefferson, America wasn’t in the Ancient world; they had to contend with the forces of the 19th century and adapt.

The first and only existential crisis of the American Republic, the Civil War, is often described as old vs new. The Confederacy represented the old Agrarian America, and the Union represented a new industrial America. The Confederacy sought to preserve what the founders had created, and the North wanted to create something new. The second part of this is true, but the first is dubious when considering the Civil War not only as brother against brother on the American continent, but within the context of a global economy. The South wasn’t Jefferson’s idea of self-sufficient, small, virtuous Yeoman farmers. By being plugged into the global economy, the same forces of land centralization affected the American South that affected the Roman Empire. The South's existence as a grand cotton kingdom with a planter aristocracy was only possible in the global economy of the 19th century; therefore, the South was an entity just as, if not more, transformative from the founders' vision than the North. Areas like this are where “Whig History” must be most firmly challenged. It isn’t just “progress isn’t a straight line, man” or something. It’s that economic expansion and integration often lead to the strengthening and enforcement of what we call “despotism”.

The North’s Triumph was briefly a synthesis of Jefferson and Hamilton’s ideals for America. Lincoln's idols were Henry Clay, an ideological descendant of Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson. And their visions for America came together not after the North’s triumph, but during the war. The North, and then the Nation, did become a centralized entity, whose growing population and economy would create several self-sufficient farmers in the West. However, the America recreated by the end of the Civil War would have little to do with what Hamilton and especially Jefferson envisioned.

The Second American Republic

Isn’t it kind of cute that France numbers its Republics? Like it’s doing Britain's job for it, by portraying itself as unstable as a foil to Britain's persistent Constitutional Monarchy. Currently, France is on the 5th iteration of its Republic, which was created in the aftermath of the Algerian War, which was almost a civil war, rather than a colonial war, but that’s a discussion for another day. For America’s sake, the Civil War is more of a rupture than the Algerian War for France, so it’s fair to periodize its aftermath as the 2nd American Republic.

The late 19th century in America was defined by Reconstruction and “The Gilded Age”. This was in short, America’s transition into industrial capitalism. As with most countries that industrialized before the 1950s, America experienced a decrease in living standards. With the horrid conditions in factories as compared to farms, the crowded tenements, and the rising inequality, American life expectancy shrank during most of the latter half of the 19th century.

The Gilded Age persists in the American consciousness, partially because it was one of the only periods where Americans could be anti-capitalist without being subject to a McCarthyist witchhunt or having to pay homage to whatever identity group leftists think is more important than capitalism. I know we must pay attention to marginalized voices. Still, I’ll give an example of how the desire to fight white male patriarchy or something hampers our ability to understand material forces at play. In the 19th century, Western railroad magnates hired many Chinese workers at lower pay than white workers. When this is lamented by white labor leaders such as Denis Kearney, Historians, many of whom would call themselves Marxist, often deride these ideations as racist without considering the substance of their complaints. Yes, Kearny was racist, but industrialists did bring Chinese Coolies to America to undercut American workers, and perhaps the fact that they would be racially discriminated against was part of the logic. Chinese workers would be more dependent on their employers because they would not have the means to go anywhere else for support. When journalists hold water for coolies, then, just as when they hold water for undocumented immigrants now, they are implicitly empowering industrialists, but just making it worse. Yes, labor aristocracy or something (I will never read Settlers), but if there is truly an international brotherhood of laborers, how exactly would playing into the hands of industrialists at the imperial core help them?

Immigration, Rome, and America

“Immigration” is one of the big causes of the fall of Rome in American right-wing fanfiction. Well, how true is it? Insofar as America can be similar to Rome, what is the analog of American immigrants to Rome? Well, it’s not really Barbarian invaders, it’s slaves. Immigrants don’t only come on their own accord, but are brought here for the financial interests of capitalists, which has been as true in the 19th century as it is now. Like how slaves were part of the displacement of Roman farmers, immigrants were but one part of the displacement of independent producers in America, which started not after the Hart-Cellar Act, but when America started industrializing. If there is an analog to the Barbarians, it would probably be H1b “model minorities”. However, they have been brought in because corporate interests trump the people in America, not out of resigned necessity in the case of the Romans. And as with the “barbarians” or “immigrants” in Rome. The immigrants in America are an effect, not a cause, of the rot in America. A positive effect for the most part, no one, and I mean no one, seriously wants America to be “founding stock” peckerwoods. We are all the better for there being Irish, Italians, Scotch-Irish, and yes, Jews and Indians in this country.

However, the best example from American history against the cultural impact of immigrants isn’t right-wing in nature. Rather, it is left-wing. After the Civil War, the North experienced an economic boom and took in millions of immigrants, primarily from poorer and more Catholic parts of Europe than before. Meanwhile, the South floundered economically, barely taking in any immigrants by comparison. This may have made the North stronger in the short term, but it also diluted the memory of the Civil War in the North. Every Southerner had an uncle who died or lost a limb; that couldn’t be said about the Italian immigrant who came in 1870. Consequently, the South subsequently won the peace, and wrote the story for the Civil War, which would persist in the American consciousness relatively recently. This is best exemplified by a Theo Von and Shane Gillis clip. Von, a Southerner, is shown a picture of William Sherman and instinctively despises him. He doesn’t even know why he hates him, but generation after generation Southerners have had this deep-seated seething about the North. Gillis, a northerner, bashfully tells him “he was cool” or something and then relents to Von’s rant. In the South, there is this seething remembrance of the Confederacy that the North simply doesn’t have about the Union. The North’s perspective eventually prevailed, largely because academia had become centralized, where everyone tends to align with the consensus. And, of course, the academic consensus is never going to be pro-slavery.

America’s growth from the country of Yeoman farmers, which Jefferson idealized, to an industrial superpower in some sense tracks with the growth of Rome from a country of citizen-farmers to the only power of the Mediterranean. And the centralization of resources seen during the Empire into Latifundia tracks with the centralization of resources that took place under the Gilded Age, which collapsed during the Great Depression, as it had in Rome during the 3rd century crisis, and was patched up, though not fully resolved, with the New Deal.

What Ought We Do?

In America, we find ourselves with declining literacy, health outcomes, and economic conditions. We have, in some sense, entered a New Gilded Age, except our new Robber Barons don’t even respect us enough to build libraries and schools. Andrew Carnegie founded Carnegie Mellon, Cornelius Vanderbilt founded Vanderbilt University, and JD Rockefeller founded The University of Chicago. I guess Musk’s Cybertruck-shaped body and Zuck’s Jiu-Jitsu PR videos are enough for us now. Pathetic, sorry people, we are, but that’s a discussion for another day. Still, even if we are in a losing fight, we should still fight.

First, we have to be libtards in some way. We can’t pin everything on immigrants or black people or gay people, or even white people. Whatever strife we are in isn’t even Musk or Zuck’s fault. They are products of a system that empowers them. I don’t think the AOC-Zohran DSA thing has that many wheels, though it’s probably the best existing concentration of young educated people who, at least conceptually, want to break the increasingly centralized form of wealth distribution we have now. I would say once Zohran’s mayoral term fails, which it will. He’s too much of an ideologue, and he doesn’t have the chops or the institutional know-how to outmaneuver organized Jewry in New York, which will be pestering the whole time he is in office. We may see something interesting come out of the ashes. But for now, I would say to you, read this. Whether you are in America or India, you should remember that the greatest battle of life is to conquer self. Maybe our time to build a better world will come, maybe it won’t, but in any case, you’ll be in a better place to change what you can if you are the best version of yourself possible.