Crucial Lessons From Ancient Rome: The Corruption of Family and Society During the late Roman Empire Left the Society Vulnerable.

Historians never tire of analyzing the fall of Rome. There were many causes, but an oft-neglected one is the corruption of the Roman family and the related population collapse that occurred in the centuries before the empire’s fall.

Rome’s original greatness depended in part on its commitment to family. A classic Roman virtue extolled in the quintessential Roman poem the “Aeneid,”—was “pietas” or “piety.” This term referred to deep devotedness to one’s family, particularly one’s parents, as well as gods and country. Early Romans valued marriage, fidelity, honor, and looked down on self-indulgence. Their successes must be attributed, at least partially, to these virtues.

In contrast, Rome’s decline occurred in parallel with its abandonment of these values. As Jerome Carcopino explained in “Daily Life in Ancient Rome,” divorces were rare in the time of the Roman republic, but happened constantly in the latter stages of the empire. An epidemic of divorces undermined the stability of the Roman family and tore apart the fabric of society. “In the city as at the court,” Carcopino wrote, “the ephemeral households of Rome were perpetually being disrupted, or rather were continually dissolving to recrystallize and dissolve again till age and death finally overtook them.”

The Roman poet Marcus Valerius Martialis (Martial) said divorces and remarriages were so frequent that marriage had little meaning, becoming practically a form of legal adultery or prostitution. The separations occurred on the frailest of pretexts, too: He’s old; she’s got some wrinkles; he’s sick; she forgot to wear her veil in public.

Shifting Attitudes

Late marriages and small families became the rule, and men satisfied their sexual instincts by homosexuality or by relations with slaves and prostitutes.”

Men weren’t the only ones running from responsibility, either. Carcopino relates that many Roman women avoided motherhood simply out of fear of losing their looks.

When couples did marry, they often had few, if any, children. “Whether because of voluntary birth control, or because of the impoverishment of the stock, many Roman marriages at the end of the first and the beginning of the second century were childless,” Carcopino noted. Roman couples made use of contraceptives and abortions. If that failed, they didn’t hesitate to kill their infants by abandoning them and exposing them to the elements.

The natural consequence of all this was, of course, low birth rates and population decline. The trend became alarming enough that the emperor Augustus tried to provide incentives for couples to have more children, but it was too late to reverse the problem.

As Romans chose not to reproduce, the population of Rome inevitably began to shrink. This process was accelerated by disease and invasion. Between the second and sixth centuries AD, Rome’s population went from a healthy 1 million to a mere 30,000.

Low Population, Big Problem

Dawson attributed Rome’s overall decline largely to low birth rates and the collapse of marriage:

“This aversion to marriage and the deliberate restriction of the family by the practice of infanticide and abortion was undoubtedly the main cause of the decline of ancient Greece, as Polybius pointed out in the second century B.C. And the same factors were equally powerful in the society of the [Roman] Empire, where the citizen class even in the provinces was extraordinarily sterile and was recruited not by natural increase, but by the constant introduction of alien elements, above all from the servile class. Thus the ancient world lost its roots alike in the family and in the land and became prematurely withered.”

Rome’s internal weakness—beginning with the weakness of its families—made it susceptible to eventual invasions.

What are the implications of all this for us? It takes just a little reflection to reveal the parallels between our current-day situation and the situation of the Romans in late antiquity. We share many traits with the Romans: an emphasis on sexual freedom outside of marriage, a tendency toward late marriages, a penchant for divorce, disdain for large families, and an inclination to use contraception and abortion. All this has placed us in the same situation of staring down a population collapse, the consequences of which we’re still coming to terms with.

It would be fatalistic and poor history to claim that modern Western civilization will follow the same path as the Romans simply because we share some similarities. Still, Rome’s story should be a cautionary tale. We need to relearn—and soon—what we and they forgot: The stability and success of a society begins with the stability and success of its families, which form its most basic unit.

Furthermore, a society that has lost its love of children and abandoned its understanding of the sacredness of marriage has become, in a sense, suicidal. Its days are numbered unless it changes course.

“Monogamous and indissoluble marriage has been the foundation of European society and has conditioned the whole development of our civilization,” Dawson wrote. We neglect this societal cornerstone at our peril.

The thing is, the entire idea that the Roman empire fell is a 17th and 18th century idea that is wrong.

Now that i got your attention ;) let me explain why.

“Rome” didn’t fall in 476 AD, the Roman empire continued in Constantinople until 1453. It wasn’t the “Byzantine empire “, it never called itself that nor did its contemporaries call it that. It was known as the Roman empire.

Only in the 17th century did northern European writers invent that name to put down the people in Constantinople, long after constantinople had fallen.

In 476 AD when the last “Western Roman” emperor was deposed, what did Odoacer, his deposed do? He sent the imperial robes and crown to Zeno, the emperor in Constantinople, with tye acknowledgement that Zeno was now the sole emperor.

The Ostrogoths, visigoths etc paid lip service that they were still vassals of the emperor. This was kind of like Japan before the Shogunate where different Lords ruled but claimed their vassalage to the powerless emperor.

Or China under the Zhou emperors.

To the ordinary citizen in a city like Lyons, or Cologne, or Milan, the empire didn’t fall in 476 AD. The language, local administration, religion, customs, culture etc remained the same. The taxes went to the Germanic Dux ie warlords. That it didn’t go further wasn’t the local man’s bother.

That is why the Roman’s got so p!$$ed off when Charlemagne was crowned Western Roman emperor. The Roman’s were like “did we say that was okay”??

Odiacer and his successors got Romanized, in culture, language, religion. They kept the administration as it was as it worked.

The first major disruption was the Julian plague that in the 6th century wiped out large chunks of city dwellers, thereby reducing culture, literacy etc.

The next hit was the Arab conquests that immediately ended the empire in north Africa, the Levant and Spain.

The final blow was the black death. After that the concept of Rome died slowly until 1453.

Family may have been corrupted in the 3rd century but then the empire Christianized. When Constantine legalized Christianity in 313 AD, it was already between 10% to 40% of society. After that its numbers exploded.

Christianity became state religion in 378 AD under Emperor Theodosius and family and society was not corrupted, rather the opposite.

The Germanic “barbarians” were hardly barbarian. They were foedorati, who had fought in Roman armies for centuries at that point. They spoke Latin and were not the shaggy barbarians of Augustus era.

The empire had had Spanish (Trajan, Hadrian), Dacian (Aurelian, Galerian, Max Thrax), Berber ie north African (Septimus Severan and his dynasfy), even Arab (Philip the Arab who was allegedly the first Christian emperor, Elgabalus etc), heck Theodosius II was half Germanic.

They didn’t create a pathway for the Goths or Suebians etc to become emperors in their own right, so the Germanic warlords decided to just take over.

I would note that the same happened in the 7th century in the Levant. Arab client states, the Lakhmanids and Ghassanids who were both Christian (but heretical Christian more Ebionite ie that Jesus was a prophet) fought fir Rome and for Persia in the 100 year war between those two superpowers. Rome and Persia mortally wounded each other and the Arabs just walked in and took over.

The Arabs couldn’t believe their luck and so over a century concocted Islam as a way to explain their divine providence.

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