Hi Sun Tzu; Re: "The problem was this model was a Ponzi game on the social scale; It took a lot of slaves and servants to support the expanding upper class in the provinces. So more conquests were necessary (not unlike the need for new markets). At some point in time Rome could not expand anymore and could not support its elite around the empire. This in combination with the laziness and lack of belief in the republic was the beginning of the end."
I think that this is just wrong. First of all, there was no Ponzi game on the social scale. If you've got numbers that somehow show otherwise please do tell. Rome was unable to expand because they were militarily unable to conquer the regions beyond their border. Their inability to do this was due partly to supply line problems, partly to the health of the empires to the East, and partly due to the fierce nature of the natives of the Northern regions.
Rome's problem was that militarily, they were unable to garrison their borders. They had the same disadvantage that South Vietnam had (and Iraq has now), extremely long land borders that are very porous with unfriendly peoples on the other side of them. Rome was destroyed by barbarian armies that marched over those very long borders.
Their disinclination to fight their own wars had little to do with slavery or the demise of the Republic. For that matter, the Republic had just as much slavery as the Empire ever did. And the history of the Empire, from the demise of the Republic to the fall of the Empire, was that of a fairly steady increase in kind and gentle (and more modern) rule, as can be attested to by a close reading of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall".
The human species has never been hesitant to give its life in support of dictators. If it were the case that Republics had less trouble than dictatorships convincing their citizens to fight, Germany wouldn't have been able to easily rout most of Europe in 1940. The simple truth is that most humans just want to be on the winning side. Recently, the success of democracies has been due to their wealth, not their ability to convince their citizens to fight.
For that matter, the US military is currently having difficulty convincing its citizens to volunteer for a war that only kills about a thousand US soldiers per year. By contrast, the Soviet Union had volunteers demanding to fight against the Germans in a war that cost the Soviet Union, considerably smaller than the US is now, over a million dead soldiers (and more civilians) per year.
The Roman citizens were a good head shorter and proportionally weaker than the barbarians, apparently due to differences in the number of diseases and bad food they were exposed to in the crowded cities, and also perhaps to genetic differences. Their citizenry were converted to Christianity, at the time a relatively pacifist religion, before the barbarians and were consequently less inclined to fight. The early official Roman mistreatment of Christians was due to their inclination to refuse to fight.
Early on, the Romans had a significant technological advantage over the barbarians, but this advantage slowly melted away. Their loss of military advantage was due to the barbarians slowly catching up with them. There was nothing the Romans could have done to stop this from happening any more than there was anything the 1st world could have done in 1860 to prevent the the spread of the machine gun that eventually allowed the 3rd world to liberate itself from colony status. This is the repeated lesson of military history, there are no permanent technological military advantages, and on an otherwise even playing field, the more warlike nations win.
-- Carl
P.S. The large size of the barbarians gave rise to considerable fear in the Romans. For example:
"Victory in war does not depend entirely upon numbers or mere courage; only skill and discipline will insure it. We find that the Romans owed the conquest of the world to no other cause than continual military training, exact observance of discipline in their camps and unwearied cultivation of the other arts of war. Without these, what chance would the inconsiderable numbers of the Roman armies have had against the multitudes of the Gauls? Or with what success would their small size have been opposed to the prodigious stature of the Germans? The Spaniards surpassed us not only in numbers, but in physical strength. We were always inferior to the Africans in wealth and unequal to them in deception and stratagem. And the Greeks, indisputably, were far superior to us in skill in arts and all kinds of knowledge."
pvv.ntnu.no
As soon as the barbarians began producing military organization and technology equal to the Romans, the Roman empire was doomed. And humans being the great imitators that they are, this was inevitable. Rome delayed the day of reckoning by hiring barbarian as mercenaries, but the end was still inevitable.
Also see this link on giants in Western Europe: (Note that "giant" is largely in the eye of the beholder.)
stevequayle.com |
