The Decline of Rome

Picture a wall of brick and stone climbing nearly 40 feet into the sky — about as tall as a four-story building — wrapping twelve miles around the city of Rome. I have stood beside what survives of it, and even in ruins it rises far over your head. Emperor Aurelian raised that wall to keep foreign armies out, and Honorius later built it higher still. But the deadliest wall in the Roman world was never made of stone. It was made of words. To keep its own leaders from fleeing, the Roman government wrote 192 separate laws into a single chapter of its law code — 192 ways to trap a man inside his own town.

Key Terms

Crisis of the Third Century: A roughly fifty-year stretch of the AD 200s when 26 lawful rulers and more than 50 challengers fought their way onto the Roman throne, one after another.
Ricimer: A Roman commander who besieged the city of Rome in AD 472, had the emperor Anthemius beheaded, and put a ruler he could control on the throne instead.
Aurelian: The emperor who built a brick and stone wall nearly 40 feet tall, wrapping 12 miles around the city of Rome to keep foreign armies out.
Curiales: Local town leaders who organized markets, games, and tax collection, and were forced to cover any shortfall in their town’s tax bill from their own money.
Edict of Caracalla: An AD 212 decree that made every free resident of the empire a citizen, mainly to widen the pool of people who could be taxed.
Edict on Maximum Prices: Diocletian’s AD 301 law setting price ceilings on more than 1,200 goods and services, an attempt to freeze runaway prices that ultimately failed.
Plague of Cyprian: A disease outbreak so severe that, at its height, as many as 5,000 people died in the city of Rome every single day.
Vegetius: A military writer who recorded that Roman foot soldiers begged their emperor to let them stop wearing their heavy breastplates and helmets.
Battle of Adrianople: An AD 378 battle where between 10,000 and 20,000 of Rome’s best soldiers were cut down by Gothic arrows after fighting without their armor.
Valens: The Roman emperor who was killed in AD 378 when his army was destroyed by the Goths.
Alaric: A Visigothic king who led 40,000 men to the gates of Rome in AD 410 and broke through its defenses.
Sack of Rome: The AD 410 capture of the city of Rome by the Visigoths, the first time a foreign enemy had taken it in 800 years.
Foederati: Allied non-Roman troops who served in Rome’s army in exchange for land, grain, or gold.
Honorius: The emperor who raised Rome’s great defensive wall even higher than it already stood.
Odoacer: The general who removed the last western Roman emperor from power in AD 476 and sent him off with a pension instead of a punishment.
Romulus Augustulus: The boy who was the last emperor to rule Rome in the West before his throne was quietly taken away in AD 476.
Salvian of Marseilles: A writer who lived through Rome’s decline and recorded that poor Romans fled to live among the barbarians rather than face Roman tax collectors.
Ordered Liberty: The balance between freedom and control that lets people live safely without being crushed by either mob rule or a suffocating government.
The 192 Laws: A set of regulations the Roman government wrote into a single chapter of its law code, backed by a 30-pound silver fine, to stop town leaders from fleeing their posts in the night.
Purple-Dyed Silk: Under Diocletian’s price-control law, one pound of this costly cloth carried the exact same price tag as a full-grown male lion: 150,000 denarii.