When Romans Stopped Wanting to Be Roman

By the middle of the 5th century, the leadership of the Roman Empire was actively killing the empire from within.

Of course, they probably would not have characterized it as such. They were the elite. They were smart. They knew what from what, and they most likely told themselves they were doing what was best to preserve the empire’s power (though really to preserve and grow their own personal wealth).

Lower down the socioeconomic ladder, the rest of the empire was increasingly filled with ennui (what the French know as a feeling of weariness, fatigued, discontent, etc.). The government was using most of its money to fund wars, meaning it had nothing to spend on services that improved the citizenry’s lives.

Salvian of Marseilles, a Christian priest in Gaul (modern-day southern France, which was part of the empire) witnessed the daily struggles of those fifth-century Romans he lived among and wrote this:

Many, even persons of good birth, who have enjoyed a liberal education, seek refuge with the enemy to escape death under the trials of the general persecution. They seek among the barbarians the Roman mercy, since they cannot endure the barbarous mercilessness they find among the Romans…

So you find men passing over everywhere, now to the Goths, now to the Bagaudae, or whatever other barbarians have established their power anywhere, and they do not repent of their expatriation, for they would rather live as free men, though in seeming captivity, than as captives in seeming liberty.

Hence the name of Roman citizen, once not only much valued but dearly bought, is now voluntarily repudiated and shunned, and is thought not merely valueless, but even almost abhorrent. What can be a greater proof of Roman injustice than that many worthy noblemen… have nevertheless been driven so far by the cruelty of Roman injustice that they no longer wish to be Romans?

The added emphasis is mine.

Salvian’s point was this: An empire excessively focused on wars and funding the military (not to mention, the excessively corrupt mandarins) while delivering only suffering to its citizens leads to a level of apathy among said citizenry that begets the downfall of the empire. People stop caring about being “Roman” and will gladly shack up with whoever is chipping away at the edges of the empire if those doing the chipping offer solace amid the pain.

In related news: At an Easter Lunch in the White House on Wednesday, Donnie Trump told his guests this:

I said to [Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought], ‘Don’t send any money for daycare because the United States can’t take care of daycare.’ That has to be up to a state. We can’t take care of daycare. We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people… We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of daycare. You got to let a state take care of daycare and they should pay for it, too. They should pay. They’ll have to raise their taxes, but they should pay for it. And we could lower our taxes a little bit to them to make up.

It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal level. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country. But all these little things, all these little scams that have taken place, you have to let states take care of them.

You smell that?

Smells, to me, like the republic is burning.

To be clear—and I say this all the time—I am not being overtly political here. At its core, this is a socioeconomic issue that threatens the integrity of the United States and its economy, and thus the primacy of the US dollar, the decline of which will annihilate American families unprepared for the tsunami of knock-on effects.

A nation that tosses aside the needs of its people to spend that money on waging war and building an ever-larger military… that nation ain’t long for this world.

When people begin to feel that the government doesn’t care about their needs, and that the government’s primary purpose is to tax the hoi polloi in order to kill people somewhere else in the world that have never done anything to hurt the hoi polloi… well, the hoi polloi sink ever deep into a state of ennui.

They begin to see government as a source of internal rot. Loyalty wanes. They grow weary of the state and their alienation drives them away.

At an extreme example, one could imagine a world in which the government is so disconnected from the people—yet still taking the peoples’ money for armaments—that Mexico is able to convince a good portion of southern Texas to become Mexican, where they will receive all the services Uncle Sam no longer provides.  

Or, one might imagine a scenario in which the citizenry of western Washington and Oregon, so completely over the lack of support they receive from their own federal government in terms of healthcare and other services, willingly embrace Canada and become something like Baja British Colombia.

I’m not predicting that, of course.

Then again, Romans of the day probably thought it impossible for Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, Franks and other barbarian tribes to chip away at the edges of the empire… and yet that is precisely what happened as the Western Roman Empire began to cleave apart.

Ennui toward the state saw Roman citizens shrug their shoulders and side with the invaders because the invaders offered them a better life.

Now, will Trump, his administration, and his lackeys in Congress follow through with any plans to stop funding crucial services Americans rely on? I doubt it. Though Congress is filled with a clown car of buffoons, some do exist who are smart and savvy and who immediately recognize that such a pursuit would be disastrous.

Still, you have to pay attention to these kinds of ideas when they emerge.

Maybe they do stick.

Maybe government does decide that it’s “not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.” Maybe the government’s focus does indeed shift primarily to the defense of the nation at the cost of pretty much everything else.

As Silvian wrote: “So the poor are despoiled, the widows sigh, the orphans are oppressed, until many of them… flee to our enemies that they may no longer suffer the oppression of public persecution. They doubtless seek Roman humanity among the barbarians, because they cannot bear barbarian inhumanity among the Romans.”