A Great Civilization Self Destructs

“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome’s decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars …

Rome was conquered not by a barbarian invasion from without, but by barbarian multiplication within …

Moral decay contributed to the dissolution. The virile character that had been formed by arduous simplicities and a supporting faith relaxed in the sunshine of wealth and the freedom of unbelief; men had now, in the middle and upper classes, the means to yield to temptation, and only expediency to restrain them. Urban congestion multiplied contacts and frustrated surveillance; immigration brought together a hundred cultures whose differences rubbed them selves out into indifference. Moral and esthetic standards were lowered by the magnetism of the mass; and sex ran riot in freedom while political liberty decayed. …

The economic causes of Rome’s decline [were] … the precarious dependence upon provincial grains, and the collapse of the slave supply and the latifundia [i.e., the large estates]; the deterioration of transport and the perils of trade; the loss of provincial markets to provincial competition; the inability of Italian industry to export the equivalent of Italian imports, and the consequent drain of precious metals to the East; the destructive war between rich and poor; the rising cost of armies, doles, public works, an expanding bureaucracy, and a parasitic [royal] court; the depreciation of the currency; the discouragement of ability, and the absorption of investment capital by confiscatory taxation; the emigration of capital and labor, the strait jacket of serfdom placed upon agriculture, and of caste forced upon industry: all these conspired to sap the material base of Italian life, until at last the power of Rome was a political ghost surviving its economic death.

The political causes of decay were rooted in one fact — that increasing despotism destroyed the citizen’s civic sense and dried up statesmanship at its source.”

Will Durant

Caesar and Christ. pp. 665, 666, 667, 668

New York: Simon and Schuster, 1944